Well, when I said ‘green plants’ I meant including seeds, fruit, roots and such. I meant plant material in general as opposed to mushrooms, but I didn’t explain myself well.
I believe it was in an episode of The World at War that a former Japanese soldier gave this piece of advice about surviving in the jungle: Watch the monkeys. You’re reasonably safe if you eat what they eat.
Man, that show. I think I bailed after the episode where the crew contracts a virus that causes their nervous system to be physically ejected from their body, but I should have seen the writing on the wall in the first episode, where they have to change course to avoid a “cloud” of dark matter. They can’t fly through the cloud… because it’s dark inside… and they might hit something…
Despite its suspect politics, I liked the show 24 a lot. But as a former L.A. resident who lost months out of my life sitting in stalled freeway traffic, the “getting from Glendale to Venice in a few minutes” transition scenes drove me up the wall. I think the movie Falling Down had that issue as well, and Michael Douglas was on foot for that one, walking from Pasadena to Santa Monica by way of downtown within one workday.
That must have happened early in the episode I saw the end of…and then I left it for my wife to watch alone.
My willing suspension of disbelief ends when too many unrealistic things happen, especially during or after a fight scene.
Guy gets knocked out for several minutes, if not hours, then wakes up and goes on with whatever he was doing. Maybe he says he has a headache. Yeah, no–if you’re out that long, there’s a damn good chance that you’ll never wake up again, and you definitely need to be in the hospital.
But maybe the guy was knocked out when someone broke a bottle over his head. Which can happen, but it’s almost always the skull that shatters, not the bottle.
But okay, maybe the guy’s used to it. I mean, he’s been similarly knocked out nine other times this season/book (four of them with bottles broken over his head). Second Impact Syndrome isn’t all that big a deal, right?
I’ve been watching Smallville for the first time this year (pandemic viewing), and maybe patterns and repeated tropes are just much more obvious when you’re marathoning a show rather than watching an episode a week over several years but: the number of times Lex Luthor gets shot would have rendered his body into one giant wound by the end of season 7. Or count how often Lana or Chloe get knocked unconscious, brain damage for sure. Hilariously, the size of the interior sets for the Smallville Medical Center mean that Lana always winds up in the exact same room/bed the two or three times a season she’s hospitalized.
Also on the show, the Kent farm is usually portrayed as being in a fair bit of financial risk, so I have no idea how they pay their insurance premiums considering how often their truck is smashed to pieces while being flipped across the county. I know Clark can super-speed repairs to the barn and house, but their lumber budget must be through the roof (so to speak).
Anyway, all of this stuff takes me right out of the show. As does the same group of people walking past the Lexcorp tower in reused establishing-shot footage season after season, and all the Vancouver actors who’d later turn up on Supernatural and/or Battlestar Galactica appearing in one episode apiece.
Very true. Try binging the first few seasons of House sometime.
Maybe it’s just me but I always feel in movies where the hero who’s a well trained marksman or soldier who shoots a bad guy, bad guy falls over dead, and then the hero SLOWLY walks over to the body to poke and prod him only for the bad guy to immediately get up and fight the hero again.
I’m just saying, if the guy who literally was menacing me for the past story arc took one bullet and fell down “dead”. Instead of getting in close to “make sure” I’m just shooting him again. Makes even less sense in zombie media when it happens and they’re not trying to conserve ammo.
Even if you’re trying to conserve ammo, there are obvious options (e.g. heave a rock at him) for making sure he’s dead/incapacitated before closing to grappling range.
I’m well aware intellectually that that’s nonsense in the real world. But I’m totally OK with it in fiction because it’s so useful/convenient, unless it’s a work that is going way out of its way to present itself as incredibly realistic.
That said, something that is often associated with hit-on-the-head-and-knocked-out is slightly ridiculous plot armor… a truly evil villain gets the drop on the good guy, who is a serious thorn in their side, knocks them out and… just wanders off, leaving them there. It makes more sense when it’s the good guys doing the knocking out, because they’re good guys, so they don’t casually kill random goons. But when bad guys do it it really grinds my gears.
The whole knocked out/finish him was always a pet peeve of mine, especially as a long-time TT-RPG gamer, who always has a ‘well if it were me…’ answer to the various stupidities of fictional heroism. Which is probably why I (and many like me) love the double-tap philosophy from Zombieland.
Appropriate clip from said movie in blurrvision for those who don’t want to see violent/moderate gore.
One that I hate so much is the final of Criminal Minds. FIlm and TV drama explosions are fake as fake can be but that a whole building explodes killing multiple people and the explanation is that the perpatrator cut the furnance gas line and threw a lighter in the room. WTF!
To get gas explosion you need very precise stoichiometric ratios and even then they are not energetic enough to blow out three story building. They might kill one person if that person is next to the flash point but that is not even given.
Lazy, lazy, lazy.
So you handle DOES read “Man, get out!”
it’s more in the lines of comic books and cartoons and some horror movies but anytime anyone declares themselves to be "the one true ultimate evil " worshippers or minions of said evil there are examples of this done right (Raistlin in the Dragonlance books Emperor Palpatine/Darth Vader in star wars )
but most of the time its so eye rollingly stupid looking and sounding
Ha, I never noticed that since I always read it as “Mange tout” 
Does this happen often in comic books and cartoons? Maybe with the most simplistic cartoon villains, like, I don’t know, Cobra Commander on GI Joe? But It’s been my experience that most bad guys don’t think they’re evil, even in most fictional settings. They may be Mad With Power and Playing God, but they’ve deluded themselves that whatever mayhem or murder they cause is for the Greater Good. Either that, or they’re Wreaking Righteous Revenge Against a World that Wronged Them.
That’s usually my dividing line- when it’s impossible, and there’s no explanation, or just a cursory hand wave.
Shows like NCIS do it all the time- first and foremost with jurisdiction. I realize that NCIS is a cop show, but AFAIK, they’re very constrained in where their jurisdiction extends. I’m not at all convinced that just because someone is tangentially connected with the Navy, that NCIS would then have the ability to step in and supersede local law enforcement, the FBI, or anyone else. And I’m pretty sure that anything involving foreign agents would be primarily the FBI’s show after NCIS did the initial investigation.
And they play fast and loose with the times- both travel and otherwise. For example, I used to do computer forensics for a living. First step was always to connect the hard drive of the computer in question to something called a ‘write blocker’, which basically allowed us to read data off of it, and prevented any data/writes going the other direction. So we’d hook it up, and make a copy. Which took a while- drives are large, and copying them via USB or Firewire is slow. Call it a couple of hours maybe for a 1 TB drive. Then the slow part began. We had software (EnCase/FTK) that would go through the drive image bit by bit, and identify files that were extant, deleted, and fragments of files. It would index them and their contents as best as it could. This took hours and hours as you might imagine.
Then finally, once the copying and indexing was done, we’d actually get down to analysis. This usually consisted of trying to narrow it down to just the file types we wanted and trying to get keyword/string hits, or if we were looking for images, trying to filter out the thousands of tiny useless graphics that would invariably get indexed And then finally, once that was done, we’d try and determine what had gone on.
Sometimes if the case was email related, all that work was just to get any .pst/.msg files off the drive, which we’d then feed into a different software package that allowed us to take a whole bunch of local Outlook installations, Exchange servers, and so on, and parse them such that we could identify who sent emails where, who replied, when, etc… This also took time and effort to parse out who sent what, when they got it, if they read it, and so on.
What I’m getting at is that it takes FOREVER to do a lot of that stuff. Hours, if not days to do something really simple like get someone’s PC and extract their email from it, knowing that it was all stored locally, we had all the passwords handy, and we knew what we were looking for.
And we couldn’t decrypt shit. It just isn’t within the capacity of anyone except maybe the NSA, as it takes SERIOUS computing power. So if someone had encrypted something, we generally went back to the attorneys for password subpoenas (if they felt it was worth it), as that was far faster and more likely to get the information than anything we could manage technically.
Anyway, that sort of thing just makes me laugh in movies and TV shows when they get a phone or a PC, plug it in, and in the next scene, Kasie or McGee is saying that they found all this guy’s emails and stuff… as if a couple of hours had passed, instead of a week or two later like it would be in real life.
Walking around on an lien world without your helmet is a frequent problem in bad SF. Fritz Lang even had characters doing this on the moon in Frau im Mond. Technical advisor Hermann Oberth must’ve been having fits.(Although, to be fair, H.G. wells put an atmosphere on the moon in First Men in the Moon and the Fantastic Four comic book posited a “blue region” on the moon where The Watcher had his summer home.)
Our favorite response to this is to quote Dr. Flexi Jerkoff from Flesh Gordon – swing open the hatch on your phallic spaceship and take a deep breath, and say “Good! There’s oxygen here!”
I don’t mind not wearing helmets on alien planets only because I enjoy seeing actors faces when I watch movies. But that’s the only justification, and you cannot have any bad consequences in-story because there’s no in-story reason for not wearing a helmet.
That’s one of the reasons I get so annoyed at Prometheus.
One of the few Time Tunnel episodes set in the future took place on the Moon (and used a lot of footage from 1950’s Destination Moon). It didn’t have an atmosphere, but you could talk to others on the surface with using your radio.
Even in the sixth grade, I knew that sound doesn’t travel through the vacuum of space. This was even worse than Ancient Greeks, Israelites, Britons, et al. speaking perfect 20th century colloquial American English.