# Watching 10.5- I'm so...ashamed. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 3, 2004, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225 "2004-05-03T02:48:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Astroboy14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/df705f/32.png) [@Astroboy14](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astroboy14)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 8:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/81 "2004-05-04T08:12:46Z")
> [@Walloon](#): > > Is you smarter, or dumber, than Shirley MacLaine? That is a good question. One I hope to have answered during my post-life debrief! 😉 (in my defense, I did google that spelling of her name to check before I posted the above post… peered quickly at the [results](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Shirley+Mcclane&btnG=Google+Search), and decided that I had it right… such is life.) ---
**Author:** ![Astroboy14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/df705f/32.png) [@Astroboy14](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astroboy14)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/82 "2004-05-04T08:14:32Z")
And now that I think of it, **Walloon** , I should have just said “Whoosh!” and pretended that I MEANT to spell the name wrong! Dammit! :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/83 "2004-05-04T08:27:28Z")
> [@Astroboy14](#): > > And I swear to God I heard one of the “scientists,” in a helicopter, upon discovering a river that was flowing in the wrong direction and being asked what could possibly cause such a thing, suggest _ **magnetism** _ as a possible cause!!! YES! YES! I heard that too! I was absolutely dying. “What could cause something like that?” “Magnetic pull, perhaps?” HAHAHAHA!! And can _anyone_ explain why they couldn’t get two, three, or even five teams to go out and plant the nukes, instead of having the one team with the FEMA guy do them one after another??? I mean, time _is_ an issue here, right? ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 10:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/84 "2004-05-04T10:02:59Z")
I’m sure that, at some point in my life, I must have seen a worse movie. Whatever it might have been doesn’t come to mind right now. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 10:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/85 "2004-05-04T10:41:16Z")
“Hey Earl- It says here in this di-rectors manual that when you have the dramatic action scene you turn the sound off, hit the slo-mo, and play music as people run around like chickens with their heads cut off.” “Sounds good, Vern. Let’s do it.” I’d like to know which geology school teaches that water is magnetic. And isn’t it comforting to know that if you find yourself in a tent city of millions of people, that you can very easily find your family not once but twice after searching for five minutes. And that the nice folks at FEMA will have a hard copy record of who is there when you get there. Also, when a massive quake strikes, you will by instinct know where to run. ---
**Author:** ![whiterabbit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/cab0a1/32.png) [@whiterabbit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whiterabbit)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/86 "2004-05-04T12:06:35Z")
I wish I could discuss this with the somewhat opinionated professor I took freshman geology from (and as somebody who has only had freshman geology, I think I still know more about it than that supposed grad student) since his response to my telling him my family was in New Orleans was “That city shouldn’t be there!” Couldn’t argue with him on that one either, if you’re looking at it from a geologic standpoint. I was right about the girl and her parents, huh? They didn’t actually show a second wedding or anything, but they sure did hint that was coming! And brat suddenly wasn’t! I WAS RIGHT! Magnetic water. Sounds like a health-food scam. This was so full of crap I can’t even start listing them all, and I refuse to watch it again so I can. I threw a pillow at the TV twice. If this had been a book I’d have thrown it across the room two chapters in. [Spock]PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN!!![/Spock] ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/87 "2004-05-04T12:23:22Z")
> [@pilot141](#): > > “Marshal law”??? Who is this Marshal guy and why is he now in charge of the country? Good Og, at this point _10.5_ had sunk to high-school project levels. That would be the late E.G. Marshall, who used to play the President in this sort of thing. Presumably because he needed the money. This was undoubtably the single worst disaster movie I have ever seen. It makes **The Giant Spider Invasion** look brilliant! ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Tiger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Mama\_Tiger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Tiger)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/88 "2004-05-04T12:28:14Z")
What’s perhaps most awful is how many of us _watched_ this piece of dreck! It truly was cringeworthy. Definitely well worth wasting four hours of my life on. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![av8rmike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/edb3f5/32.png) [@av8rmike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/av8rmike)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/89 "2004-05-04T12:45:30Z")
> [@Mama Tiger](#): > > What’s perhaps most awful is how many of us watched this piece of dreck! It probably doesn’t matter, unless we’re all Nielsen families. 😉 I _was_ right, there was a TV movie, back in 1990, called [“The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake”](http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0099137). At least that movie had Joanna Kerns, Dan Lauria, and Joe Spano. Also, there was [Earthquke](http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0071455) in 1974, with Charleton Heston _and_ of course, George Kennedy. So I hate to be a buzzkill, but I’m forced to wonder: Who keeps making these movies, and why?? Are they trying to get people to move out of the L.A. area? ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/90 "2004-05-04T13:04:35Z")
By the way- exactly what was causing all those injuries in the relocation camp? The earthquake hadn’t hit Southern California yet, but the injuries were coming in faster than on M_A_S\*H. ---
**Author:** ![Snooooopy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee7513/32.png) [@Snooooopy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snooooopy)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/91 "2004-05-04T13:31:34Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > By the way- exactly what was causing all those injuries in the relocation camp? The earthquake hadn’t hit Southern California yet, but the injuries were coming in faster than on M_A_S\*H. Maybe Hawkeye’s gin still blew up? ---
**Author:** ![DeVena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dec6dc/32.png) [@DeVena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeVena)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/92 "2004-05-04T13:37:44Z")
What started me yelling at the TV was the bit about putting the nukes where the tectonic plates conjoin. Conjoin? As in stick together and become one? Plates slide around and sometimes hang up (causing earthquakes) but don’t combine. And my husband has been through many earthquakes, including a 8.8 quake in the Philippines. During the opera-for-no-reason part, he just laughed and laughed. He explained that you don’t run during a big earthquake. You can’t. It’s like running on jello. It’s like trying to walk through an airplane during heavy turbulence. You get tossed around but you can’t keep your feet long enough to run anywhere. And if you’re already outside, where the heck are you running to? So, it ends all smiley happy look-we-came-within-inches-of-death, but why didn’t they show the tsunami taking out Hawaii? Or the earthquakes continueing around the pacific rim. Did these people ever pay attention in science class? ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/93 "2004-05-04T14:16:44Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I actually enjoyed The Core, Armageddon and Volcano, in an MST3K sort of way. It was clearly the well-researched scientific accuracy in these 3 movies that inspired the producers of _10.5_. Especially in the scenes where they had to lower nuclear bombs to a depth of _exactly_ 342 feet in order to split the asteroi-- er, I mean, in order to start the outer core rotati-- er, I mean, in order to keep the Earth from shaking apart. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/94 "2004-05-04T14:20:03Z")
Has anyone mentioned the refugee camps in Barstow? _Barstow?_ “Get more tents!” Like there are that many tents in the country. Who is feeding these people? Where are you piping all of their poop? (No, wait. I know the answer to that one - Hollywood, where it is recycled into MFTVMovie scripts.) If they spent more than $26.57 on this turkey, I’d be very surprised. ---
**Author:** ![jsc1953](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/5daacb/32.png) [@jsc1953](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jsc1953)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/95 "2004-05-04T15:24:11Z")
Dammit! I wanted to be the first one to point out “marshal law”. But I’ll post my joke anyway…“marshal law” is what Matt Dillon provided on \*Gunsmoke. Martial \* law might be what the writers had in mind. Where have all the copy editors gone? I missed all of part 1, and Tivo’d the last hour of part 2, so I haven’t experienced the full goodness. But I did get to love the real-time Richter scale, and the nausea-inducing cut/zoom/pan/cuts. But you gotta love this: we get the cliched two-simultaneous-key arming-the-nuke sequence…and then they say “ok, turning remote detonation over to you…” So much for security. And then the Remote Detonator Person goes off to take a nap. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b5ac83/32.png) [@The\_Mad\_Hermit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Mad_Hermit)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/96 "2004-05-04T16:40:42Z")
Beside all the other nitpicks… The fissure opens in LA, right? Then it continues to open traveling inland for a hundred miles or so. It pulls apart for a distance that can be seen from space; I estimate it at about 30-50 miles. 1. How could anybody outrun a fissure that travels 100 miles in a matter of seconds? 2. The forces unleashed by such an event should have leveled the camp in one gigantic wave. 3. The interior of the fissure was black- insinuating great depth. Something 30 miles wide and that deep should have opened the crust up to the molten mantle. 4. Where did all the material in the fissure go to? 5. The ocean filled the fissure in a matter of minutes. How did the water travel that fast, and why wasn’t it preceded by an air pressure wave? The wave would flatten anything the quake didn’t. 6. As someone mentioned, the water should have been muddy and full of debris and bodies. Why was it sea-green and relatively unpolluted? 7. There was not enough time to evacuate the whole metro area. Why do they consider it a victory, when almost everyone in Southern California died? Or should have? I know it’s silly to go on, but I’m not a professional writer or a physicist, and these inconsistencies appall me. The network suit who greenlighted this project should be on the unemployment line. ---
**Author:** ![jsc1953](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/5daacb/32.png) [@jsc1953](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jsc1953)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/97 "2004-05-04T17:03:40Z")
> [@Duckster](#): > > "This earth-shattering four-hour miniseries stars Emmy and Golden Globe winner Kim Delaney (NYPD Blue) as Dr. Samantha Hill, an \*\*intellectual \*\*earthquake expert … As opposed to all those emotion-driven, anti-intellectual illiterate Rambo-esque earthquake experts out there. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/98 "2004-05-04T18:46:37Z")
Holy shit, this was a clunker! Where did they dredge up these has-beens? I’m embarrassed to say that the guy who wrote this piece of dreck is from my hometown. I only saw the end of the first half, since it was opposite The Sopranos and Deadwood, but laughed my ass off. The we decided to watch the second half just for the laughs, but the camera work, the plot and the acting were just so excruciatingly bad that I ended up falling asleep after about 15 minutes. Bridges needs to change his first name to “Bleaute”. Christ, he looks like John Ritter after a pizza and beer binge. What a waste of airtime. I feel like I should sue the network for the depreciation to my TV. ---
**Author:** ![seriousart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@seriousart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/seriousart)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/99 "2004-05-04T19:25:30Z")
Am I the only one that kept waiting for John Sneider’s adopted kid to show up, fly around the world and turn back time to stop the earthquake? ---
**Author:** ![AuGratin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e95f7d/32.png) [@AuGratin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuGratin)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2004, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225/100 "2004-05-04T19:29:12Z")
Two things that had me yelling at the screen the first night: Space Needle is two words. Two words! What the hell is the Spaceneedle? I wonder if they did that because of the fuss the people in charge of the real Space Needle kicked up, or because they’re morons. I’m tending toward the morons explanation . . . The news reports from Seattle saying that “the monorail system had collapsed” – for the love of Og, the monorail is a quarter of a mile long! This counts as a system? or as newsworthy? What would have been cool would have been to see our waterfront double-decker highway pancake, thereby saving us the billions of dollars it’s going to take to tear it down. I guess it’s not enough of a landmark to make the news, so instead we get a catastrophic quarter-mile monorail. :rolleyes: \ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/watching-10-5-im-so-ashamed/243225.md?page=6)