:dubious:
Was that intended as an explanation for xnylder’s question?
I think Superman’s secret identity works, in general, because no one thinks he is hiding anything. Post-Crisis, there were other super-heroes before him, most of whom were masked, so a tradition was established. By not masking himself, he led the public to assume that this gorgeous demi-god was simply on duty 24-7. This works particularly well because he’s much more active than, say, Batman. If you go to Google News on DC-Earth and search for “Superman,” there’s undoubtedly ten thousand separate hits chronicling a hundred different exploits each night. People assume that, when he’s not fighting super-villains in Metropolis, he’s dealing with volcanoes or earthquakes or plagues in Africa or Asia or South America.
As for why those close to him don’t know – well, who at the Planet really know him in both identities? Lois is supposed to have had a mental block; Perry, it is often hinted, knows but keeps it to himself. As for Jimmy–well, I got nothing.
I think your Riker complaint is story-external. But I’ll counter with another TNG one: why in the name of Yertel the Fertile Turtle does ANYONE willingly ship out on a galaxy-class starship WITH THEIR CHILDREN?
It’s not just putting on a pair of glasses. It’s also posture, hairstyle, tone of voice, word choice, and a thousand other little details.
That said, what happened to Mace Windu after he flew out the window? Surely he had enough Force-ability left to soften his landing.
I always figured he was speaking French, but his Universal Translator was stuck on “Winston Churchill.”
Here’s one: if The Jackal hated Spider-Man for Gwen Stacy’s death, why did he keep making MORE of them instead of just trying to kill the original?
Sometimes they don’t. They were running a ship with an unshielded reactor in one episode.
They couldn’t get it together enough in the film to shoot River. :rolleyes:
Perhaps they are organized like a feral dog pack and quit eating each other long enough to do the bidding of the leader.
The Event must be approached from the perspective of a variant on the “Many Worlds” theory, which incorporates a force that causes the number of possible universes to tend toward minimum.
At each decision point–each time an event with multiple possible outcomes occurs–the universe splits. Down the timestream from each coin flip are two universes, one for heads and one for tails. However, given an unlimited number of universes, it is inevitable that eventually two or more universes will converge instead–random events and choices will lead to multiple universes entering the same state at the same time. In fact, this may happen frequently, usually between universes that have just diverged. In these cases, the Convergence Force causes the universes to merge, forming an amalgam; since this usually happens on a very small scale, the side effects are negligible.
In the Event, however, the differences between two universes were on a macro scale. There were two differences. One was the existence of the Occupant; the other was the existence of Room 10 of Motel Sunshine. As long as the two were separate, they kept the universes from converging. When the two overlapped, however, the Convergence Force was sufficient to “squeeze” them out of reality, leaving an amalgam-universe in which neither existed. They could not actually be destroyed however, and remained attached to the amalgam, but not a part of it. Had the Occupant not had free will, that would have been the end of it. When he left the Room and dropped off the Key, however, he started the chain of events that led to the occurrences in the miniseries.
(Whew. Glad to get that off my chest. 
)
In the Sci-Fi Channel series The Invisible Man, Darien Fawkes uses a substance referred to as “quicksilver” to become invisible. It’s established that quicksilver sublimes rapidly, causing his quicksilver sheath to have a low (sub-zero) surface temperature. It doesn’t give him frostbite because quicksilver is also an effective thermal insulator, allowing the layer next to his skin to remain warm (especially since he has to continually secrete more quicksilver at body temperature).
In the episode “The Catevari”, he uses quicksilver to freeze a patch of skin on his boss’s face to prevent the absorption/progress of a deadly contact poison. He does this by holding his hand near/against the man’s face and secreting quicksilver onto it. How can this work? The same insulative properties that protect Darien should prevent it.
His healing factor only fixes the hardware. Memories are a software problem.
Why the heck does a community of 40,000 or so survivors in Battlestar Galactica continue to employ so many reporters?
The reporters are all a special, low-level Cylon sleeper agent, denied access to the resurrection dealie and each superficially unique. They exist soley to foment discontent.
How come Wonder Woman, Starfire, or Aquaman has never just hauled off and beat the holy crap out of Batman. He’s earned it at least twelve billion times.
Because he’s prepared.
Why doesn’t Starbuck look really ugly after the boxing match?
Those Colonial women are built pretty tough. For them, a pummeling in the ring is like a weekend at the spa for Earth women.
But tell me. Why didn’t the Starfleet landing party personnel in Kirk’s time have those little subepidemal transponders permanently implanted?
Because they keep setting off the detectors at the airport every time they fly out of SFO.
If Superman had that machine that could cause people to swap in and out of Kandor, why didn’t he just get a bunch of “volunteers” to swap in, providing the Universe with a myriad Supermen/Superwomen? For that matter, did he ever take the opportunity while in Kandor to get his Kryptonian ashes hauled?
Because they weren’t wimps.
Men were men in the 60’s and didn’t need some magical way for their mommies to find them.
Why doesn’t Jack Bauer’s cell phone run out of juice? Why is he always within a service area?
Was that the tiny city in a bottle he kept in his Fortress of Stuffitude? Because that was the only part of the Superman mythos I liked as a kid. Well, that and the Bizarros.
Because if it did and he weren’t, MILLIONS WOULD DIE!!!
How come we never actually see a Womp Rat?
No fan-wanking necessary. The Kandorians chose to remain in Kandor rather than be enlarged to normal size and have super-powers on Earth.
Selfish bastiches, the lot of them.
In reality, they’re really very gentle passive, domesticated creatures. Much like puppies. So when Luke stated how many Womp rats he womped, what he’s really saying is that he and his friends like torturing pets of his fellow Tatooinians. It helped turn Luke from a carefree adolecent into the hardened twisted monster that could help plan the deaths of millions on a spacestation not just once, but twice.
But here’s what I’ve always wondered. The last episode of Star Trek: TNG had a spacial anomoly that went backwards in time and got bigger the further into the past you travelled. We saw that progression through four different time periods. But in the “future” one Picard shows up at the origin of the spacial anomaly and there’s nothing there. Then he comes back LATER and it appears! Someone must not have been paying attention to let that major gaff go through, don’t you agree?
Q hid the anomoly, just to jerk Picard around a little.
On the 1960s ‘Batman’ TV show, how did Barbara Gordon, who worked as a librarian, manage to afford a swanky one-bedroom apartment with not only a balcony, but a secret superhero lair, complete with a turntable wall and a private auto lift to an exit/entrance ramp concealed as a brick wall? And who built it for her? Do you think if the turntable wall ever got stuck she called the ‘bat-super’? (I mean Bruce Wayne was a millionaire & llved in a remote estate, but elaborate superhero lairs on a librarian’s salary?)
I think she got a grant from the Library of Congress.
Why did just about every alien ever encountered by Kirk speak perfect English?
Cassette tapes (this was, after all, the sixties) of Federation Basic: A Beginner’s Guide were distributed across the Enterprise pojected course by Unitarian missionaries.
Who took the firearms away from Nikita and Michael when they came back from a mission? Why didn’t they just blow Operations away?
I think he landed on a commercial airline on the way down to battle some type of legless reptiles.
Why is it that Obi Wan tells Luke “Your father wanted you to have this” instead of “I chopped your dad’s arms and legs off, left him burning in lava and stole this lightsaber from him - here you take it.”?