You’d never be accused of being soft on crime.
If a female villain needs to be physically taken down and arrested, this will be done by the female police officer on the case.
What was the deal with that radio station?
Anytime anyone (especially the hero) realizes there’s a bomb nearby and it’s going to explode, it goes off within seconds.
The lesson is obvious: don’t realize there’s a bomb about to explode.
Fortunately for the cop though, every bomb always has a big red digital readout that clearly shows how much time is left before it goes off. If the bad guy was really smart, they’d use a fake timer that showed more time left than the actual detonation time.
It’s not a big problem. Just cut the blue wire. Wait… no, don’t cut the blue wire, cut the red wire…oops no… never cut the red wire…
And all the wires would be the same color, and not red or blue.
I should add being near a bomb when it explodes is perfectly safe – no risk of burst eardrums or getting impaled by shrapnel (I’m amazed at how much splintered wood flies around without hitting anyone).
I think that would be a bad idea.
Whoever is building the bomb probably wants to know which wire is which. If he hooks things up wrong, he could blow up. Colored wires can help with that.
On the other hand, colored wires don’t really help the guy who’s trying to disarm the bomb. He can tell the wires apart; that doesn’t mean he knows which one to cut.
And the best bomb-disarming scene was in Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
I liked the scene in Elementary when Sherlock and Joan found a huge remotely triggered bomb in their brownstone. Joan’s freaking out (she’d already seen the results of a similar bomb going off) and while she;s wondering what to do, Sherlock calmly walks up and tears the cell phone off. Can’t detonate it if it can’t get the signal.
I don’t know anything about bomb building, but I know a little basic electronics. It seems to me that regardless of how many wires in how many colors there are, if you cut the one from the positive terminal of the battery, that should do it.
I was in high school in the mid-1960s in an upper middle class suburb. The assumption was that everyone was going to college so everyone took typing.
All bombs have 3 basic parts, an initiator, a detonator and an explosive charge. It needs all three to go boom. Separate one part from the other two and it won’t go boom. Everything else is basically Hollywood. They rarely show a bomb that has a realistic anti-tamper booby trap. They mostly fall back on the Hollywood trope of cutting the correct wire.
When I was in college, one of the requirements for a Journalism degree (beyond that of the ordinary BA/BS sequences) was a minimum typing proficiency of 20 words per minute.
Shorthand was pretty stupid.
To expand on this, there are two basic things you want your bomb to do:
Explode when you want it to
Not explode when you don’t want it to.
Any anti-tamper mechanisms hinder both of these goals. Nothing is as embarrassing as your bomb not going off (that’s what she said!) when you want it to, and making a mistake wiring your anti-tamper triggers can end your mad bomber career real quick.
There’s always the scene in Sherlock where Holmes simply
hits the off switch.
Like Felix Leiter in Goldfinger.
Bond villains will make a bomb that can blow up the earth but they’ll always have a big red self-destruct button right out in the open in their headquarters. No wires, secret code or key, just hit the button and everything blows up with just enough time to escape before everything crashes down.
They also keep shit like cannisters of rocket fuel and the controls for their easy-to-overload nuclear reactor in plain view, right in the middle of their command center. And they never, ever seem to be guarded.