A friend, having read my last post, asked if The Queen really objects to botanical inaccuracies in movies. Oh yes, yes indeed. And not just in motion pictures, either. If I’d known, in advance, that the TV show LOST would feature a bunch of people on a tropical island populated with temperate foliage, I never would have put it in my Netflix queue.
Of course, I’m just as bad when something I’m passionate about is misrepresented on film. Like games, for instance. I still break into hives whenever I think of the scene in Freaks and Geeks where the parents play the card game Pit, just the two of them.
But my all-time least favorite scene–one that appears in about every third film, seemingly–has to be this one:
The hero and the antagonist are playing chess, a game in which both are virtual grandmasters. It's a close fought match, and they banter while they play. Slowly, their moves--and their conversation--become more aggressive. Eventually they are openly hostile to one another, both on the board and off.
Then, victory. Smirking, the villain says something irrefutable to the hero, moves a bishop, and announces check.
For a long moment the two men lock eyes. Suddenly, the hero utters a devastating riposte, breaks eye contact just long enough to capture the bishop with his queen, and, with the slightest hint of a smile, declares checkmate. He rises from his chair and walks briskly away, leaving the loser to gawps at the board in amazement.
Yes, I understand that one grandmaster saying “I’m going to checkmate you in seven moves” followed by 23 straight minutes of the opponent staring at the board before replying, “ah, you are right–good game” lacks some of the “pizzazz” of the Hollywood version. But I still would rather sit through both episodes of Viva Laughlin, back-to-back, than endure this scene again.
What’s the scene you hate?
The entire movie Swordfish. Except for the part with Halle Berry topless.
Oh, also Swimfan. Particularly the scene where they handcuff the girl in front of her body and then put her into the back of a cop car that has no dividing partition and bucket seats which provide easy access to the officer’s holstered gun.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet but I hate when a movie is shot in a geographic location I know well and there is a car chase and a left turn magically deposits them several miles away in another part of town.
Or? Even worse is when a movie is supposed to happen in a certain locale and you can clearly tell it’s not taking place there. Case in point: Mr. Brooks.
It drove me nuts that it’s so obviously NOT Portland.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet but I hate when a movie is shot in a geographic location I know well and there is a car chase and a left turn magically deposits them several miles away in another part of town.
Or? Even worse is when a movie is supposed to happen in a certain locale and you can clearly tell it’s not taking place there. Case in point: Mr. Brooks.
It drove me nuts that it’s so obviously NOT Portland.
I weep over the treatment of women, particularly when Hollywood refuses to let pretty women be ugly, when really a little ugly would be justified (i.e. labor, terminal illness, etc.), and particularly when Hollywood somehow decides that such moments are the time to make pretty women be even hotter! (i.e. the strategic tearing/removal of clothing, strategically placed dirt/mud on their faces)
The worst case of this is in MI2 – at the beginning of the movie they show a victim suffering from whatever virus that was and he looked postively vile after only a few hours of the illness, but at the end of the movie, when Tom Cruise’s girl should only have minutes to live, she looks like she only has a mild stomach ache. At least be consistent!
To that end, I really hate that the survival rates of women in movies are directly related to how attractive they are. Case in point: In “Independence Day” the PRESIDENT’S WIFE with her detail of Secret Service never has a chance, but the stripper with a heart of gold? She’s going to live forever!
My mom is one of those emergency preparedness people and whenever I want to make her really angry I tell her that my 48-hour kit includes a bikini, shiny lip gloss, and a bottle of self-tanner.
And while I am thinking about it, I really hate the recent climate-phobic movies where people are actually outrunning the cold (“The Day After Tomorrow”) or the heat (“The Chronicles of Riddick”). I mean, seriously? In the shade or next to the fire it is a pleasant 65 degrees, but two steps away?! CERTAIN DEATH!!!
For those of you who are bothered by CSI, I would like to point you to an internet sketch comedy group based in Vancouver, BC called LoadingReadyRun and one of their videos, CSI: CSI
You people are all great. Come watch movies at my place anytime.
What really bugs me is the nasty cop bosses. You know, who never believe the hero, and usually end up suspending him from duty forcing him to go maverick and track down the big baddy by himself?
Bad Boys is a parTICularly annoying example of this, because they end up killing all teh bad guys and blowing up all of the evidence. How are they going to prove it to their sceptic boss now?
*sigh*
Lame plot device alert….
You people are all great. Come watch movies at my place anytime.
What really bugs me is the nasty cop bosses. You know, who never believe the hero, and usually end up suspending him from duty forcing him to go maverick and track down the big baddy by himself?
Bad Boys is a parTICularly annoying example of this, because they end up killing all teh bad guys and blowing up all of the evidence. How are they going to prove it to their sceptic boss now?
*sigh*
Lame plot device alert….
“I just need to put this single test tube in my otherwise empty centrifuge and we’ll have the answer”.
Hello? You need to have another test tube of exactly the same weight sitting in the opposite position in the centrifuge to balance it. Otherwise you’re going to break it… and those things are expensive!
I hate it when the scene involves a video conference call over the computer and they are supposedly interacting but you can see the time indicator moving on the recording. Even Simpsons did an animated video conference complete with the time bar, play and pause button.
People using balsa wood, or some other ridiculous protection as a barrier during a shoot-out, and during car chases when you have a the equivalent of a Yugo overtaking, or even pacing the equivalent of a Ferrari.
And don’t get me start on any of the CSI francises – talk about a ‘cop’ show for stupid people…
I love how everyone in the movies always gets a parking spot right in front of where they’re going in major U.S. cities.
People using balsa wood, or some other ridiculous protection as a barrier during a shoot-out, and during car chases when you have a the equivalent of a Yugo overtaking, or even pacing the equivalent of a Ferrari.
And don’t get me start on any of the CSI francises – talk about a ‘cop’ show for stupid people…
To Ken 2E: whenever my husband and I are lucky enough to find parking right in front of where we are going we always refer to it as “Hollywood parking”
I spent years on the bomb squad, so any movie involving explosives, improvised devices, or explosions pretty much annoys me. An improvised device can be easily disarmed by just separating the detonator from the explosive, there’s no need to agonize over which wire to cut. If that big explosion is going to break all the glass around you, you aren’t going to stroll away from it. If it will pick you up and toss you across the parking lot, you’re definitely not going to be able to hear your lovely co-hort talking to you for a few days. And I was in the Army, as was DH, so the military stuff drives us crazy.
Also, when they show the characters shopping at the big box store and they have this whole huge, empty aisle to themselves. Anytime I go to Walmart, it’s crammed with boxes in the aisle and half of the state shopping for pork rinds.
Forgot this other CSI nit: addiction to stimulants combined with the ability to teleport. Which shift is Grissom on? (however you spell his name… I’ve watched all of five episodes, I think.) It’s day, it’s night, it’s the next scene and he’s magically 20 miles across traffic… I’d like to complain about the hokey lab stuff, too, but everyone else already got that.
I almost mentioned the silly “French accent in France” thing in my earlier post, but I couldn’t figure out what would be better. Speaking French with subtitles, I guess. But the American audience would never buy that, even assuming the studio wanted to invest in training actors to speak another language (or casting actors who actually do). And we can all see what happened in Firefly. So I’ll give up on the language thing in TV shows (which I don’t watch anyway), but hell, they ought to be able to do better in movies.
Movies that defeat their own premise. Minority Report is the worst example of this in cinematic history. The colour of the ball indicates whether a crime of premeditation or a crime of passion is about to happen. Crime of passion offers very little time to catch the guy before the dirty deed occurs, but one of premeditation allows for several days to pass, and two hours of chase scenes.
So, what happens? Cruise’s character is pre-destined to commit a premeditated murder based on the colour of the ball that comes down early in the film. In the end, the crime he commits is one of passion.
Oopsie.
I hate animated movies where *female* critters are voiced by men. In most of the “bug” cartoons (Ants, Bee Movie, Bug’s Life), all of the colony workers should be female.
Barnyard is the worst: they have a deep male voice for a frickin’ “milk cow”–with prominent udders for god’s sake. Hello?? Dude, those are tits!
I can’t believe this one hasn’t been mentioned yet:
The car-racing scene, in which the hero and his rival blast along at high speed and the director cuts back and forth between close-ups of their faces, with gritted teeth. They are neck and neck as they approach the finish line (or improbably narrow alleyway down which only one of the cars will fit) until one of the characters gets the bright idea to PUSH THE ACCELERATOR ALL THE WAY TO THE FLOOR and he zooms ahead into the distance. WTF? It didn’t occur to you to floor it already?
Particularly obnoxious in this regard were the 2 Fast 2 Furious movies, as they invented completely new nitrous-oxide related ways to use this ridiculous scene.
Oh, and scenes with lava in them. Remember the movie Volcano? There was a guy standing on the hood of some pickup truck who leaps (barely) to safety over the approaching lava – which the movie then tells us is hot enough to melt his entire truck on contact. Which is it? Is the lava so hot it melts pickup trucks on contact, or can a guy stand next to it and not suffer any apparent heat-related effects?
This commenter:
Primrose Hill has a specific geographic location–it doesn’t float around London of it’s own free will.
cracked me the hell up. As do you.
You guys are great.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is smoking. Certain actors use smoking as a way to eeeeeeeeee-mote and show that their character is either edgy or stressed out or both. But in the case of some (I’m looking at YOU, Meg Ryan) you can tell they don’t know the first thing about smoking. They fling the cigarette around like a crazy person, hold it awkwardly, and even (in Meg’s case) hoist the glowing cherry into their hair when things are going really, really bad for their character. Christ, people, go to a bar. Watch the regulars. Notice the spare, sometimes elegant routine regular smokers have for getting nicotine into the body, exhaling smoke, and putting the ashes into the ashtray (or on the floor). Above all, Meg, pay attention to your movements and get that damn cigarette out of your hair.
Knowing a little about mass, I hate action scenes when a villian is shot and goes from standing to flying 50 feet backwards, arms flailing, and sprawls into a distant wall. No way.
Also, people in movies who get a chance to talk before dying. Man, if you got a sucking chest wound, you’re going to squirm around for a little while, bleed, then expire, not tell everyone the meaning of life.
I have a master’s degree in classics, so any attempt to portray ancient Greek/Roman history or literature tends to set off my nerd alarms. I can kinda understand history, but did the writers of Troy even *read* the Iliad?
Alexander was just as bad, but reminds me of this really funny, arrogant Oliver Stone interview quote about why the movie didn’t do well:
“Perhaps I just failed in some way to communicate [my love of the story] to an American audience and American critics.
I have to start with American apathy to ancient history….It really is there. I screened the movie for the Moroccan film festival. And I felt it in these places. Poland, I screened it in Poland. There’s a fascination with that time, Greece, the details. And they know about Alexander. They know more than Americans. Americans don’t really know…
I wanted to get the language simple and strong like Greek dramas, so it was more like Euripides and also Aeschylus. Why didn’t they write a play about Alexander? Could have easily been a trilogy. Why didn’t anybody do that?”
Here are some dates:
Aeschylus: b. 525 BC, d. 455 BC
Euripides: b. 480 BC, d. 405 BC
Alexander the Great: b. 356 BC, d. 323 BC
Gee, Oliver Stone, I am also stumped why they didn’t write about Alexander the Great, because I’m an American and don’t know anything about history. Thank god you came along to make a TERRIBLE MOVIE about him to shed a ray of light into my ignorance!
PS: If you want to see the whole interview, it’s the URL I gave for this post.
I’m not 100% sure Oliver Stone was referring to Euripides and Aeschylus when he said that. The question is at the start of a new paragraph after all (in the interview but not in your post), not directly after their mention. I think his ‘they’ refers to playwrights in general.
“Why didn’t they write a play about Alexander? Could have easily been a trilogy. Why didn’t anybody do that? I mean why didn’t Shakespeare touch the guy, or Marlowe or Goethe? He was famous. Nobody touched him. Why? Because there’s too much success. He’s too much – too much for people.”
—
Another thing I really hate in movies is jump-scares. You know that kind – a sound is heard or a movement is seen behind a curtain or something, the protagonist creeps up, pulls away the curtain and out jumps a screeching frigging cat, or bird.
I absolutely loathe those moments because they make me hate myself for not being able to keep from jumping at them every time.
I also thought of another. Pregnant women who are more or less unaffected by being pregnant. One example, in the new Battlestar Boomer is pregnant and imprisoned aboard the ship.
Instead of showing her throwing up in a toilet or rubbing her stomach (two extremely common things pregnant women do) they show her in a tight shirt doing sit ups. Riiiiight. If Cylons are super human in that way too perhaps we are truly doomed.
Anything with an f’ing horse. That’s why they have riding specialists and experts on hand!
Instead they have an English saddle on with a Western bridle and the the rider is doing who-knows-what with his or her hands. The scene calls for the horse to gallop and jump something while the person on board is flopping all over the place – it drives me crazy! As my riding instructor used to say, “The only person who could make their horse go faster by flapping their arms was John Wayne.”
Very few movies get it right – the Man From Snowy River gets a pass, as does the Lord of the Ring Triology. But anything lower budget sucks ass.
First, legal stuff. I used to practice criminal law and almost anything in a fictional criminal court makes me want to scream. The first time I watched “The Practice” on TV one of the lawyers tried to convince a jury that their client was innocent by saying “I believe he’s innocent.” Well hell, sorry, but you are very *specifically* not allowed to use that argument — you learn that in first year criminal law.
I also agree with whoever posted saying that CSI-type shows raise people’s expectations about physical evidence in criminal investigations to unrealistic levels. In most criminal cases there is no DNA to test, and super-duper-high-powered fibre analysis is just not relevant. The vast majority of cases come down to “I saw him do it” vs. “no man, that wasn’t me, it was some other dude.”
Finally, since I’ve mentioned DNA, in the movie “Mission to Mars” one of the characters mentions in passing the four nucleotides that make up DNA (C, G, T, AND A) and *gets one of them wrong*. I mean wtf? A little fact-checking wouldn’t kill you.
The one thing that really grinds my gears is in shows like Smallville or really anything that has to do with a superhero, the supporting character that is being attacked by the villain/freak of the week is unceremoniously tossed aside and knocked unconscious. This happens to such an extent that I am amazed that the characters aren’t deemed clinically retarded. Don’t get me wrong I understand that this technique is used so that these characters don’t find out about the heroes true identity.But Come ON!
The amount of times I have seen Lana Lang or Jonathan Kent thrown through a wall makes me wonder just how stupid that the show’s creators think we are.
Thats another thing that I don’t like about superhero movies. Everybody that surrounds and loves the main protagonist is blissfully unaware of the heroes alter ego. The one defining difference between Clark Kent and Superman is the lack of glasses and a strategically placed lock of hair.
Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White are all intrepid men and women representing the worlds most read newspaper. They can’t even see through their coworkers thin facade. Batman Begins did a great job considering that the love interest finally figured out Bruce’s Identity. So I have high hopes for The Dark Knight.
And Say what you will about character actors, Heath Ledger looks re-gosh-darn amazing as the Clown Prince of Crime.
P.S.
For the folks who are bothered by grocery bags having the inevitable french bread or celery sticking out of them, I pass on this link. This artist, Art Frahm, painted pictures in the 50s with an obsessive theme: women carrying bags of groceries that ALWAYS had celery sticking out the top. (The women also always have their underwear falling down, but it is more comical in its dated way than pornographic — artistically related to the scene where Marilyn Monroe’s dress is blown upward.)
Numbers. Charlie gets some mathematically complex idea, which leads to his girlfriend figuring out how to model the idea on a computer. In the span of a couple hours. Nice gui, the works. wth?
Oh hey, yeah, Numb3rs. I actually enjoy this show, when I see it (so I enjoy bad shows. So what?), but I suspect that anyone with even a little experience in math will find it extremely frustrating. The guy can use mathematical models to reach incredibly accurate results really really fast. Genius or not, that does not seem plausible.
Jacen – best moment in all of Lois and Clark was when the guy from the future raves about meeting the famous Lois Lane and just wants to ask, “How stupid are you?”
I started writing a reply but deleted it when I got past 300 words of ranting. So, briefly:
Any scene that takes place in a lab or involves any kind of scientist. I’m a lab based scientist and dispair at the pathetic lack of fact-checking and stereotyping. I’m not asking for total realism, but is internal logic too much to hope for?
More annoyingly, the scene toward the end where either or both the Hero or Evil Villain-Type sudenly decide to break out the super-weapon. Seriously guys, if you have a huge weapon, secret move or superpower (I’m looking at you, Magneto) use it at the START of the battle. Heck, do it early when your opponent is still at home in the shower.
I’m also bothered by the huge body counts the good guys tend to rack up. I don’t care how [cute your relative is] / [expensive the stolen device is] / [etc], was it really worth the lives of a dozen bystanders and forty redshirts?
Finally… where do all the henchmen come from anyway? I mean seriously, has anyone ever seen the ad for “Hench Persons Required: slavish loyalty a necessity, oddly styled uniforms provided”?
I started writing a reply but deleted it when I got past 300 words of ranting. So, briefly:
Any scene that takes place in a lab or involves any kind of scientist. I’m a lab based scientist and dispair at the pathetic lack of fact-checking and stereotyping. I’m not asking for total realism, but is internal logic too much to hope for?
More annoyingly, the scene toward the end where either or both the Hero or Evil Villain-Type sudenly decide to break out the super-weapon. Seriously guys, if you have a huge weapon, secret move or superpower (I’m looking at you, Magneto) use it at the START of the battle. Heck, do it early when your opponent is still at home in the shower.
I’m also bothered by the huge body counts the good guys tend to rack up. I don’t care how [cute your relative is] / [expensive the stolen device is] / [etc], was it really worth the lives of a dozen bystanders and forty redshirts?
Finally… where do all the henchmen come from anyway? I mean seriously, has anyone ever seen the ad for “Hench Persons Required: slavish loyalty a necessity, oddly styled uniforms provided”?
Ooooh, and I just remembered another one. In that show JAG, one of the protagonists, Mac, spoke Farsi.
Incredibly, this enabled her to communicate with any kind of Muslims, including Arab terrorists (who would be speaking Arabic, which is not even in the same family of languages as Farsi, even if they do have some vocabulary in common the whole structure of the language is different!), bedouines (can’t remember where that desert they met those was, but hard to believe they’d speak Farsi, instead of some dialect of Arabic, Urdu, or something like that), and whatnot. GRRR.
My aforementioned fiance had a bunch of other problems with the show, but I’m not gonna start with those.
#1 – any beer commercial showing fewer than 3 hot chicks per dork.
#2 – anything that references man walking on the moon, or shows those terrible hollywood hoax pictures. Everybody knows we never went!
Another thing that grinds my gears is when the villain’s outlines that his complete plan for world domination to an incapacitated protagonist.
You might as well hand out fliers detailing which wire to cut or the best way to bring down a dirigible. A really well conceived bad guy would shot the hero straight up rather than dismiss all of their henchmen and leave the super spy alone to his own devices.
And please when you apprehend said super spy take off all their articles of clothing especially any watches or pieces of jewelry that could possible house a laser, saw , or some form of small explosive. I know this is sacrilegious, but If you look back Bond really isn’t that crafty, his enemies are just that stupid.
Ugh, JAG. Where to begin?
And for any military movie that shows ZULU time. You only care for ZULU time when you’re in that timezone. When you’re in Iraq, or Hawaii, or wherever a hot shot team of lawyers goes (that happens right, JAG? right?) you go by the local time.
Makes no sense to operate on the fact that it’s midnight when the sun is up, and everyone is eating lunch.
And military movies, especially submarines. As mentioned earlier, they aren’t the dark moody places hollywood thinks they are. You can’t be expected to clean if you can’t see the dirt. They’re mostly brightly lit at all times. And being cleaned.
Also, flooding is generally a one way trip to the bottom. Much as your submariner son tries to lie to you about how safe it is, if there is a hole, water will come in. When that happens, the air inside gets pressurized. When that happens, (Boyle’s law) the air heats up.
So everything squishes and catches fire.
Just so you know. Tell your submariner you’re proud, and he can stop lying. You know he’s doomed.
Oh, and yeah, radioactive things don’t glow green. Underwater, the water glows blue. It’s called Cherenkov radiation.
Excellent thread. My top three:
Since seeing the “you got me monologueing!” bit in The Incredibles, I’ve noticed how almost universal this scene is. Just feaking shoot the guy, don’t spend five minutes yammering on.
Any cop/CSI/law show where the suspect just starts answering questions, and never _ever_ says “I ain’t talking without a lawyer!”
The nine out of ten cop/csi/law
Any scene at a club or concert where a band is playing, and the characters in the audience can carry on a normal conversation.
Excellent thread. My top three:
Since seeing the “you got me monologueing!” bit in The Incredibles, I’ve noticed how almost universal this scene is. Just feaking shoot the guy, don’t spend five minutes yammering on.
Any cop/CSI/law show where the suspect just starts answering questions, and never _ever_ says “I ain’t talking without a lawyer!”
Any scene at a club or concert where a band is playing, and the characters in the audience can carry on a normal conversation.
@akeeyu: “Any movie where the hero/villain/damsel in distress/breakfast pastry is falling from a great height and:
A: is caught (for example, by Spiderman) mere moments before impact and suffers no deceleration injuries”
Though the movies don’t ever get into it, this does come up at least once — Spider-man catches Gwen Stacy with a line of webbing after one of the Green Goblin’s many incarnations tosses her off a building. He pulls her up and she’s dead! And he never knows if she was killed when Gobby threw her, of if he snapped her neck accidentally while trying to be a hero. Ouch.
@trickykid: “I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet but I hate when a movie is shot in a geographic location I know well and there is a car chase and a left turn magically deposits them several miles away in another part of town.”
Ah yes — The Hunted, am I right? Just guessing from the Portland ref you made; that movie was the worst with Portland’s geography. Best part: Benicio del Toro jumps into the Willamette River in Portland, then somehow flows over Willamette Falls — miles and miles UPriver. To say nothing of the footchase which hopscotches back and forth past Portland landmarks blocks apart, or on opposite sides of the river itself.
Nathan Harrison–Gobby actually tosses Gwen off a bridge: the artist draws the Brooklyn Bridge, but Spidey refers to it as the George Washington Bridge in the dialogue balloon. (One of the great gaffes in Marvel history.)
I would add, reminded by the Classics MA above, that any Roman epic that decides to include Latin tends to get it wrong. I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but “Gladiator” had a scene that showed a gateway near the Colosseum with a Latin inscription indicating that the this is where one entered for the Games, and it was a mess: noun/verb disagreement, nouns declined incorrectly, you name it. I always respected “Buffy” because they were careful with their Latin, but the sword&sandal folks just butcher it mercilessly. Which is what makes the “Romans, Go Home!” Latin lesson in “The Life of Brian” a source of such delight for us Latinists.
And on geographical errata: I’m a Manhattanite, and it makes me crazy when people walk around a corner and find themselves in a neighborhood across town. At the beginning of the original “Men in Black,” Will Smith’s cop chases an alien from the Daily News building (42nd & 2nd Ave) to the Guggenheim Museum (89th & 5th Ave), which is over 4 miles. Will Smith is a very fit man, but that’s not really feasible.
“A Beautiful Mind” – Nash explains something that is … not the Nash equilibrium. He explains something that is, in fact, no sort of equilibrium. It’s bad enough that people conflate economics with accounting.
The Spiderman movie where Doc Oc makes a fusion power source with enough energy to provide electricity for the entire planet, as much power as the sun. And yet they were able to just drown it in the river. It didn’t boil away the water or cause any other issues, just dropped into the water and now everything is fine. What a load of hoo-ha
All of you who mentioned babies and pregnancy reminded me of my peeves:
After a gruelly labor, ejust delivered newborn is: completely clean, has a perfectly round head (this was not a c-section!), and is obviously at least 3 months of age. I mean come on, look at that head control! Even those of us who had large babies don’t have freakin’ 3 month old babies pop out.
That, and then WOW, the next day, you can’t even tell the woman was ever pregnant. That baby weight? Gone in 60 seconds! I guess that’s what happens when you give birth to a 3 month old baby!
All of you who mentioned babies and pregnancy reminded me of my peeves:
After a gruelly labor, the just delivered newborn is: completely clean, has a perfectly round head (this was not a c-section!), and is obviously at least 3 months of age. I mean come on, look at that head control! Even those of us who had large babies don’t have freakin’ 3 month old babies pop out.
That, and then WOW, the next day, you can’t even tell the woman was ever pregnant. That baby weight? Gone in 60 seconds! I guess that’s what happens when you give birth to a 3 month old baby!
Any space opera (think one of the myriad versions of Star Trek) where the brilliant but troubled captain comes up with something to do with the warp drive or the beaming device or the energy field thingy that is a “one in a million chance, but just might work,” managing not only to save the ship but to close the hole in the space time continuum yet again. Hey, didn’t they just do that in the last episode? How many one in a million chances do they get? Sheesh!
Oh, and any scene in which William Shatner gets his shirt torn off. Natch.
Shameless plugs for trendy bands on TV shows, wow, all these great bands show up in the middle of nowhere, just in time for unimportant character to randomly blurt “I love so-and-so”
Also, skeleton halloween costumes with the incorrect number of ribs.