It used to be that all doors of the future slid open like elevator doors.
The future ain’t what it used to be.
I’ve noticed something similar in myself. If I start noticing small continuity errors, or if geography or travel times are off, I realize that I’m just not engaged. Sometimes other elements, or my own general boredom, will keep me watching, but if if it gets worse, I’ll abandon it.
In terms of continuity, my favorite counter-example is in The Untouchables. In one scene, Connery is pacing around his apartment and there are a couple of brief cutaways to Kevin Costner listening. From one shot to the next, Connery’s collar button is closed, then open, then closed again. I only know that because someone pointed it out to me, and no one I’ve pointed it out to saw it on their own.
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.
Or waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. “Oh, five…ten minutes.”
I believe there’s an episode of the British comedy One Foot in the Grave which takes place entirely with the characters stuck in a traffic jam.
It depends very much on what I’m watching. What I can buy on Monk wouldn’t fly on NYPD Blue.
But across the board, I hate when something is supposed to always have been the case, but never came up in any form ever before and is now suddenly unavoidable.
Like if, season 3, we find out that one of the main characters has a kid and it wasn’t a secret or anything, but they never mentioned it before despite being super-close besties with their work mates and sharing every other intimate detail of their lives. And then, without an explanation for why (such as a change in custody agreement), some reference to the kid pops up in every episode- the parent is telling grieving families that they understand because they have a child, they’re frequently talking on the phone with or about the kid, they can’t come out to whatever is happening this evening because they have to pick up the kid, etc.
Or if there’s some big secret that’s been flawlessly kept for 25 years and there’s never been any evidence, reference, hint, inkling, foreshadowing, or anything. And then all of a sudden, people you know are accidentally dropping revealing hints left and right, incriminating photos are falling out of books, you’re running into random strangers in random places who know the secret and drop cryptic clues, and so on- all by random coincidence, not because you had suspicions based on the first clue and went looking for the rest.
Really, it’s all “where’s your personal line?” or “what bothers you?”
In general, I’m willing to suspend disbelief for special circumstances - magic, time travel, future dystopia, etc., as long as it’s consistent. I actually liked the Harry Potter books and how the atmosphere got darker and the magic got more complex as the series went on. Harry couldn’t do the spells in first year that he knew in 6th year that would have helped him.
Near future dystopias… sorry. Can’t believe that the world goes to hell in a handbasket that fast. The protagonist in “Handmaid’s Tail” was living (unmarried) with her boyfriend before the fecal mater hit the oscillating device, and is still of breeding age under American Sharia law? Nope, sorry.
Or, if it’s supposed to be in this time, and the physics is just all kinds of blatently wrong, nope, sorry. If a magnet is strong enough to pull a car through a building, it would screw up too many interior engine parts for your own vehicle to still be moving. Sorry if there are any F9 fans out there. Oh, and you can’t reverse an electromagnet and make it repulse the car you just attracted.
Modern language and patter in a historical period piece. Sorry, but the dialog in Will Smith’s Wild Wild West took me out of it.
Here are women in Iran in the early 70’s:
Here are women in Iran in the 80s:
So yeah, it can happen that fast.
This kind of thing all depends on how it’s handled in the script. If it’s written well I’m usually OK with it. I also like to remind people that a TV show represents a very small slice of a character’s life, so of course we don’t see everything. Like when people complain that Ross on Friends was a terrible father because he hardly ever spends time with his son. Except we got to see Ross for less than 13 hours a year. That leaves a lot of time for off-screen kid bonding, and I for one was fine not seeing it all.
Monk’s an excellent example for me and my wife. We’ll often say “Nothing on network TV, how 'bout… Mr. Monk?”
Now, I can nitpick any show, and usually have to bite my tongue. But with Monk, I’ll notice a mistake and just shrug it off (and I mean egregiously lazy writing that would elicit curse words if it were any other show).
This thread helped me realize that I can cut a show some slack if:
a) the rest of the episode/series is well-written;
b) I care about the characters;
c) I’m having fun!
The racking of a slide on a semi-auto pistol or the bolt on a rifle always gets me.
Bad guy (pointing pistol): Give me your wallet!
Good guy: You’re not getting it!
Bad guy (racking slide): I said, give me your wallet!
This happens constantly in TV shows and movies. Why do you point a gun with an empty chamber at someone? I guess directors think it looks cool or something, but for me it takes me out of the show/movie.
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.
The thing that always gets me (and I should try not quite so hard to notice it) is out-of-place/time props and scenery details - either modern light switches on the walls of homes in historical dramas (or weird little details like tiny framed pictures placed exactly where a light switch would be - obviously there to conceal a modern detail, or things in alien worlds that are clearly Earthly in design (the teacup in The Last Jedi), or this: https://i.imgur.com/Yc1jbre.jpeg
You can suspend disbelief that people in a galaxy far far away look like Earth humans, but not that they developed similar screw technology?
Unfortunately, the first picture is the oddity, not the second. That’s a country that was historically religious / Muslim; the revolution that kicked the Shah out returned them to “normal”. OK, they swung a bit further, but not that much.
Regarding War of Tomorrow and the comments upthread—ALL SPOILERS!!!
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The reason why the draftees were all overweight and elderly or otherwise did not fit the typical soldier profile was that they were down to scraps. Remember, for whatever scientific reason, the only people who could make the jump were the ones that were not alive in 30 years. It is likely that they had already went through most of the young people who would die in car crashes and the like (although Chris Pratt slipped through the cracks) and they were desperate and down to the scraps.
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Basic training was supposed to last a full 7 days and they would take the jump the following week. They were told that the way to kill (the males–the only ones they would see) was a bunch of shots in the soft underbelly and several to the head. There was more training to do, but the research lab in Miami was under attack and it was imperative to send everyone they had in that draft class on the current jump to stop that from happening.
The jump coordinates were messed up and they were supposed to be given a crash course at another location instead of falling from the sky.
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The guns weren’t useless or underpowered. Due to a lack of training with them, they were unable to do the shot to the belly, shot to the head thing that was demonstrated.
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They did seem to have a confusing part about the toxin—whether to make it in 2021 and then bring it back or use it in 2021 and stop the war. And Chris Pratt’s willingness to risk his life in the future was silly as if he succeeds in 2021, then his daughter is in no danger.
Not to mention that they fashoned their lightsabers from recycled camera flashes.
Doesn’t this go along with silencers in movies making guns absurdly silent as well as seemingly endless ammo when shooting?
Oooh! And the bad guys always missing and the good guys are all marksmen.
Bonus for automobiles exploding when you shoot them. Not to mention thinking a car door is any kind of cover against a bullet.
Which tells us change like in “The Handmaid’s Tale” can actually happen very fast.
Change it up and look at Nazi Germany. They went from normal to full-on crazy in short order. Look at the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The massacre of millions in Rwanda.
Zero to dystopia in short order is a real thing.
The rediculous travel times threw me off, then I just accepted it and mrs mollusc and I enjoyed and heckled the show but only after our disbelief yelled damnit, set up a perimeter and then ran a few protocols.