A weblog by Hao Lian.
A journey into the soft of night.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
“What, would it be good, bad, ambiguous, intractable … sexy?”
“Not sexy. But all those other things sounded close.”
That wasn’t it. This was, though:
“So you guys were supposed to be twins [drowned out by crowd]”
Mary Jane gets jealous of Peter’s success. That’s right, Peter. He is possibly the nicest and nerdiest interpretation of a superhero ever, whose success manages to offend Mary Jane. She questions her love, thus compounding Spider-Nerd’s problems, thus putting his life in mortal danger. Along the way, the movie touches on every other cliché not yet employed in this subplot. Also: nobody bleeds; Harry chooses to be near Mary Jane’s bosom and die rather than call an ambulance; you can talk audibly even if a monster pierces both your lungs; Spider-Nerd’s rib cage is invincible; you can survive a grenade explosion two inches from your face with minimal reconstructive surgery; women will predictably scream in large numbers every time something—usually glass—breaks; you can take your kids out to watch a highly dangerous battle between monstrous freaks; gravitational acceleration is 9.8 meters per second squared for the first three seconds before falling to zero; and an invincible monster will rampage your city when all he really wants is forgiveness. Having watched this and Bones in the same week, I think I’ve reached my capacity for bad writing (and I still have to read over this week’s Dark Balloon posts).
To recreate a murder, the detective avaunts. She leaves the scene, she scurries, she is no more, et cetera. You would think she’s going to the crime scene and have an epiphany about the nature of mankind and/or the murder in question. No. She journeys into some forensics department room of the police station. It’s completely dark. There’s an illuminated table in the center with a technician standing opposite our detective. Sand is falling on the table, or so you think. Until they begin talking.
Then, you realize with mounting horror and fascination (horcination), the falling sand and table contraption is actually a hologram machine. The sand acts as pixels, right? Wrong! When possible hypotheses for the mechanics of the murder gently float on the table, the sand just flows around it. Does the sand create the hologram? No. In real life, that’d be awful. Imagine projecting a movie onto a screen as we do now. Imagine that screen was infinitely long with tiny holes. Now accelerate the screen downward at 9.8 meters per second squared for the entire duration of the movie. Now make that movie three dimensional. That’s how awful that idea would have been.
Not the type of people to take this setback without fighting, the writers merely ignored the sand. It’s there to look pretty. It’s decoration sand. There’s decoration sand in my hologram. The horcination continues. With every hypothesis, the technician pulls up a new visualization. How? The viewer has no idea; I have no idea; the writers probably don’t have any ideas. They’re just standing there, talking, and new holograms pop up. The detective has a degree in kinesthesiology, which is the basis for the conversation that’s ongoing I suppose. Now, you might ask yourself, “Is the conversation scientifically accurate? Would that redeem the show?” First of all, I tried to focus on the dialogue and the completely improbable futurism of the room, and I passed out. The doctors said I had an aneurysm and hernia and heart attack at the same time induced by stress, but I think it’s because shutting down the body is its way of defending against hyper-bullshit.
Nothing can redeem the show. During the last spring season, Jesus tried and his liver exploded. Jesus doesn’t even have a liver. (They were invented in 1821, long after he died, came back to life, and defeated gravity—the final boss.) If you can project your thoughts onto a 3-D hologram, I refuse to suspend my disbelief. My disbelief is so great that there’s not enough hard drive space in the world to which I could suspend it. There’s no limitation to the plot devices you can construct if you let yourself write an imagination machine into your TV show. Let there be police robots! Let there be computers that stop crime before it happens! Wait, this completely abandonment of reality already happened, and it was called Minority Report, and I already saw it, damn it.