I’ve been digging some of the shows on the Sci-Fi channel lately, so when I saw them advertise this new show called ‘The 4400′ debuting last week on the USA Network, I thought, “Sweet! I can get in on a show right away and not have to rent DVDs or watch reruns to catch up.”
I’m down with the whole “suspention of disbelief” thing. It’s when they try to pass off real today’s-logic science in the shows that makes me lose interest almost immediately.
In ‘The 4400′, the pilot starts off with U.S. radar picking up on some huge orb heading toward the earth really fast. Every country on the planet panics and decides to send several warheads at the object, somehow all at the same time and within what seems like maybe an hour of deciding to do so. All of the warheads hit the ball at precisely the same time, seemingly doing nothing to it as it hurtled past the moon toward Earth.
Problems I had with this first scene of the series:
- I think the first country to decide to send nukes was China. Since when does China care about something that’s going to hit the U.S. from space?
- All the missiles travel at the same speed and somehow hit their target at the same exact moment.
- Then the U.S. launches their missles, we see a scene from one neighborhood as the people look to the sky and see about ten missles head toward the object, yet on the defense radar they seem to show maybe that many total coming from the entire U.S.. How the hell do these people see them all? Not only that, but we can hear the missles travel their entire distance to the object.
- The missles all hit at the same exact time and from the ground we hear them hit as the wispy clouds overhead part from, I guess, the shockwave. We see the explosion and hear it at the same time. Light speed != speed of sound.
- After the missles hit and we find out that nothing happened to the object, we’re treated of a shot of the huge orb from space as it continues to hurtle toward the planet, just as it passes the moon. The moon! So these missles not only traveled 238,000+ miles within a few minutes, but the sound and shockwave hit the Earth within seconds of the missles impacting.
I know it’s all science fiction — the show’s about alien abductees coming back to Earth with strange mutant powers. But that crap was just too much for me.
I was sitting in on a conference at LinuxWorld yesterday, and for maybe 20 seconds I got distracted while the speaker went on about something. When I returned my attention to him, I realized I missed something important he said. For a brief moment I thought, “no problem I’ll just hit the rewind button and hear what he said.” I find my Tivo far too convenient.
