Consistent and Believable

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Doctor Who is fun to watch, but it’s not consistent and believable like Babylon 5. The worst offender though is the History Channel’s World War II:

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he’s not only Prime Minister, he’s not only a brilliant military commander, he’s not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he’s also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he’s supposed to be the hero, but it’s not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

So it’s pretty standard “shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong” versus “evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide” stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: “Nuts!”. The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy – the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin’ play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there’s no way to take the Japanese home islands because they’re invincible… and then they realize they totally can’t have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified”. In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before — drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

And then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin’ unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you’re starting to wonder if any of the show’s writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I’m not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named “Enigma”, because the writers couldn’t spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means “Man of Steel” in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman “Man of Steel” and the Frenchman “de Gaulle”, whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

(Hat tip to Buckethead.)

Posted in Media, War | 2 Comments »

Comments

  1. Winchell Chung says:
    July 13, 2010 at 9:38 am

    Geoffrey A. Landis had his own comments:

    It’s pretty clear that the so-called “World war” is fake. It wasn’t even very well written. Take a look at the bad pulp names — the bad guy is called “Hitler” (little hit) and his sidekick “Mussolini” (a clearly-fake Italian-sounding name that sounds like “little muscle”.) I mean, come on! Make up something plausible. And the other bad guy, “…See MoreHorihito”. Jeez, writer, at least try something new, instead of recycling that same “put the word ‘hit’ in your villain’s name” idea, along with “horror”. Yeah, we get it, he’s horrible, and he hits. Subtle? No.

    And the good guys! “Church hill” — can you even think of something more saccharine? And, how about “Stalin” (literally, “steel”) as the ambiguous villain-turned-good-guy-turned-bad guy — and his nemesis, the real good guy, “Eisenhauer” (“Iron cutter”). Characters named “Steel” and “Iron-cutter”? Get real.

    And the ending, the decision to drop the ultimate weapon, done by a guy named True Man?

    Poorly, poorly written. Shoulda hired Heinlein and Asimov.

  2. Isegoria says:
    July 13, 2010 at 2:33 pm

    Over at Buckethead’s Perfidy site, Bram adds this comment:

    To make it even less believable, the History Channel gives the Germans Prussian Field Marshalls — the most talented and best trained Generals in the world with a long tradition of iron discipline and success against overwhelming odds. But they have a bumbling former Corporal overruling them every step of the way. The Little Corporal seems to go out of his way to lose key battles and issue senseless orders that can only lead to disaster. Pointless campaigns in North Africa, a shotgun style assault on Russia instead of a thrust at their capital, battles in cities that negate all the German organizational and equipment advantages, orders not to retreat that cost field commanders their ability to maneuver and doom entire army groups. All too much to believe.

    They even depict the Germans as foolish enough to dedicate significant resources to oppressing the population groups they conquered (who originally welcomed the Germans as liberators). Like the Germans were so stupid as to not understand the force multiplier of civil affairs and would not have waited until they won the war to deal with the populations of conquered territories. Who would buy such nonsense?

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