# Where does your ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ stop? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 5, 2021, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746 "2021-07-05T14:46:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2021, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/202 "2021-07-26T17:06:06Z")
> [@Horatius](#): > > The debate is that the [Robertson](https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/hardware/robertson-screwdriver-history/) is better than the Philips! No, Torx is better! ---
**Author:** ![BrickBat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac91a4/32.png) [@BrickBat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrickBat)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2021, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/203 "2021-07-26T17:41:42Z")
Yeah, I gotta go with Torx. I never stripped one of those. ---
**Author:** ![GreysonCarlisle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2021, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/204 "2021-07-26T18:49:43Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > There comes a point in many police dramas where the writers suddenly begin to make all of the regular actors either victims, suspects, or actual perpetrators in various crimes. Agreed. Too soap-opera-ey. But… > [@solost](#): > > One of the more over the top Bond-style villiians was on the show ‘Bones’. A super smart computer hacker turned serial killer was making the gang at the lab run around in circles in a multi-episode arc, and taunting Bones and her FBI guy partner Booth. One part of that arc in Bones was exactly what you (minor7flat5) mentioned, and it was handled beautifully, IMO. One of the lab’s PhDs–the most lovable one, maybe–turned out to have been aiding the hacker-turned-serial-killer. I did not see that coming, and it was almost as much a gut-punch to me as it seemed to be for the characters. It was set up well, it logically followed what had been happening, and it wasn’t necessarily out of character. They even followed up on it now and again as the series progressed. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2021, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/205 "2021-07-26T20:17:24Z")
> [@Horatius](#): > > No one will debate that a straight slot is better than a Philips. The debate is that the [Robertson](https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/hardware/robertson-screwdriver-history/) is better than the Philips! Neither beats an A-hole. [![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp14jarnTP0) ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2021, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/206 "2021-10-03T00:20:25Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Yeah, impossible solutions to mysteries suck. One I especially hate is the _Monk_ episode with a significant amount of missing gold where the solution was that the guy melted the gold, blended the molten gold with ink, then used the resulting still liquid still ink to write gibberish in diaries for decades. _What_? Rewatching _Psych_, I just noticed a similarly stupid one. Someone was smuggling cocaine by mixing it into molten glass to make (completely clear) panes of glass, shipping it, then melting the glass to recover the cocaine. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2021, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/207 "2021-10-03T08:09:58Z")
> [@HelenGawn](#): > > And of course, the all-time king of ridiculous travel times is _24._ I always wanted them to do an episode where everyone just sat in traffic yelling into their phones. This is the only thing about _ **24** _ that troubles you?!? 😲 Jack “I Need a Hacksaw” Bauer is stabbed in the gut (but manages to sew up the wound himself), shot in the chest with a Kalashnikov (but he’s wearing a flak jacket, thank God!), has Chloe shoot him in the shoulder with a 9 mm at point-blank range to fool the cops coming to arrest him, manages to escape and wander the streets of New York carrying an arsenal in a duffel bag on his back, hose down a sting of occupied automobiles with an assault rifle, and still foil the villains after going more than a day on one cup of coffee without eating anything or taking a whiz and a dump. Even more amazingly, his cell phone(s) never lose either power or their connections. My disbelief ceased to be suspended long before episode 12, when a key member of CTU was revealed to be a traitor and/or sleeper agent! ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2021, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/208 "2021-10-03T22:20:12Z")
I won’t suspend my disbelief if the notion that Satan, demons, and Hell are real is being treated seriously. In a farce like _The Good Place_, fine. When Kayla encouraged me to watch _Hereditary_ and _Ready or Not_, I was just pissed. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/209 "2021-10-04T04:00:56Z")
Hereditary is a really creepy movie, much like Midsommar. Both kind of jumped the shark for me when they got into the supernatural stuff. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/210 "2021-10-04T04:36:00Z")
its a work on a plot point a plot point from the 70s/80s in movies and books that was if you wash a pair of jeans and a bunch of coke together just right and can rewash them the same way you can get the coke back out … ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/211 "2021-10-04T04:41:08Z")
Yes, but you don’t wash jeans at 3,000°F. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/212 "2021-10-04T11:44:00Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > > [@minor7flat5](#): > > > > Tangent… only recently did I begin to consider the fact that our “spaceship Earth” is moving at a tremendous rate, and if one were to go back in time, one must also go back in location to not appear somewhere millions of miles away from home. > > > > > Now whenever I think of time travel stories this bothers me. It would be pretty cool if some writer worked the details of that particular problem into their time travel. > > The problem is that yes, we’re moving, but there’s no such thing as absolute position, so for something to travel in time and ‘remain stationary’ is impossible. There’s another problem. Time travel. ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/213 "2021-10-04T12:29:41Z")
I write off the moving earth problem for time travel as inertia. Similar to how if you’re on an airplane, and you jump up, you don’t immediately slam into the back of the plane. (If not inertia specifically, something similar. Time travel is make believe anyway; not much of a jump to toss “temporal inertia” in there.) ---
**Author:** ![Unintentionally\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unintentionally_blank/32/5418_2.png) [@Unintentionally\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unintentionally_Blank)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/214 "2021-10-04T12:47:33Z")
Sci-Fi science written by people that aren’t sciencey…or at least don’t do their homework for the sake of plot. Wife is watching a Katee Sackhoff series (Another Life) and they land on a new planet…and everyone’s running around without their helmets on…except one guy…until they make fun of him enough that he takes his off. Then they start eating the local flora, but, you know, they have to test it first…so they rub it on their skin…then their lips…then chow down. But it tastes bad. Then Katee gets stoned walkin’ in a forest. All of this stuff is Prometheus levels of ‘bad science written by writers that don’t know science’. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/215 "2021-10-04T13:00:12Z")
> [@Unintentionally\_Blank](#): > > Then they start eating the local flora, but, you know, they have to test it first…so they rub it on their skin…then their lips…then chow down. But it tastes bad. They got that out of one of those Special Forces survival manuals that have been republished as coffee table books, but it’s only really useful advice in a situation where you are marooned and starving to death (because tasting/rubbing/eating things to try to determine if they are toxic is horribly unreliable) - I’ve lost count of the number of people who have cited it as advice on my videos when I talk about deadly mushrooms or whatever. ---
**Author:** ![Unintentionally\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unintentionally_blank/32/5418_2.png) [@Unintentionally\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unintentionally_Blank)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/216 "2021-10-04T13:01:55Z")
Well…the alien world DID look a lot like Vancouver. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/217 "2021-10-04T13:04:06Z")
All the Marvel and DC movies are based on the original comics, which were surrealistic to say the very least. The fact is that most of it is utter fantasy with absolutely no basis in science. If one can’t suspend disbelief, one has as big problem. ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/218 "2021-10-04T13:10:18Z")
I forget who it was–Roy Thomas, maybe–who said, “The basic message of Marvel Comics in the '60s was: radiation is good for you.” ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/219 "2021-10-04T13:44:37Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > They got that out of one of those Special Forces survival manuals that have been republished as coffee table books, but it’s only really useful advice in a situation where you are marooned and starving to death (because tasting/rubbing/eating things to try to determine if they are toxic is horribly unreliable) - I’ve lost count of the number of people who have cited it as advice on my videos when I talk about deadly mushrooms or whatever. I read about this survival tactic in a novel, but I believe it was more geared toward green plants, and the advice was to wait a couple days in between each rubbing /tasting /eating step, so if done right it would take an entire week to vet a plant for edibility. Mushrooms are in a class of their own-- I don’t think a poisonous mushroom will cause a skin rash or other negative effect with just rubbing or tasting against the tongue, and eating at least some varieties of poisonous mushrooms I believe don’t cause any negative reactions for a day or more. Also, deadly mushrooms don’t necessarily taste bad-- I’ve heard that people who ate certain varieties of deadly mushrooms described them as quite delicious before they keeled over. I have no idea how early man figured out which mushrooms were good to eat and which weren’t – it must have been mushroom roulette. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/220 "2021-10-04T13:51:08Z")
Trouble is, in a survival situation, green plants and mushrooms are more or less useless as they contain very scant energy and protein. Fruit, seeds, starchy roots, meat, fish, shellfish, insects have enough nutrition in them to sustain life. Green stuff is useful for vitamin C I suppose. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746/221 "2021-10-04T13:55:37Z")
> [@solost](#): > > I have no idea how early man figured out which mushrooms were good to eat and which weren’t – it must have been mushroom roulette. I suspect a lot of it involved feeding mushrooms to their least favorite dog. If the dog doesn’t keel over in a few days, you try it again with your least favorite relative. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-does-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief-stop/945746.md?page=12)