My dearly missus is a beautiful person both image and spirit. Good Christian woman basically put in this earth to pray for the deeds her husband pulls. One of the things we both enjoy is watching TV/Movies: sometimes we pause, talk and discuss the show, sometimes we just watch and enjoy.
Obviously we have common shows and themes we like and others we don’t. She is very forgiving about some of the liberties TV people take and can stand a show even when they are past due, ie: I stopped watching Criminal Minds 3 years ago and she is all sad this year is its last.
And then comes 9-1-1: Lone Star. I recorded the first three episodes for her to watch even though I had made my points about what I did not like the series. I sat with her through episode one and then came episode 2 and the Instant Mercury Poisoning case. The scene where TG Hound discovers there is something wrong with the Focaccia sandwiches, opens one and there to see is about half a cup of liquid mercury and my wife just lost it.
Mercury is heavy, very heavy. Our generation was not as protected and we got to play with when we should not, so we know. My wife, my cute petite wife let loose a rant of very Rated-G imprecations and questioned the sanity of the writers. That much mercury would have added about a pound to the sandwich and then comes the little detail that the liquid would spill by the normal manipulation of the meal. And of course, whatever mercury remained in the sandwich, you would actually feel it in your mouth.
Dearly Beloved demanded that I stopped the show, delete all that was recorded and removed it from the DVR schedule. I said nothing but complied. When even my wife, one who goes to extremes to suspend disbelief so she can watch TV shows (and the Hallmark Channel Christmas movies) loses her mind, you have fucked up as a TV writer.
And just to give you a bigger clue how bad it is, in this house we religiously watch Below Deck.
PS: I watch it too, but I do it because I am trying to figure who would be the crew member that I would toss overboard while holding a battery around their necks.
Some of them are really bad. Mrs B deep-sixed NCIS:Los Angeles late last year because it got too stupid and preachy for her. (Funny, I was betting on NCIS:NOLA getting booted first.) I think what troubles her more is when the characters break the law but get away with it because theyre the “good guys” and are doing it “for the right reasons.”
Re the battery, Miguel, would you do that to help sink them, or just because you’d get a charge out of it?
NCIS L.A. should have closed with the wedding. It would have been the perfect ending.
“Cat, Mandy, Mindy and the 2 Tiffanies”
Damn it, I memorized the list! 😀
Sink,,,, the deepest.
The blatantly unconstitutional actions by cops and agents on TV dramas irritate me too, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s being done not just because the writers are dumb as a bag of hammers, but to normalize that sort of cops behavior in the minds of the general population, who will accept it as gospel.
You expect that the writer in Hollywood to assume that middle Americans know what organic mercury is and why it and mercury vapor are very dangerous but why bulk liquid mercury isn’t really?
In one episode of Game of Thrones they kill a bad guy by pouring molten gold on him.
Molten gold is runny and iridescent, like molten iron. And dense. A gallon of it would weigh hundreds of pounds. It’s clear it was a guy with a bucket of gold paint. That’s when I had my “fuck it” moment.
Your wife is a wise person. I had the exact same reaction to the episode. I even commented on it in the original post.
My favorite part is they respond to a lunch time event, but wait hours and hours until after dark to call up the supposed poisoner for a delivery. Not worried that he would strike again? They gave him enough time to deliver how many more meals? They were also so absolutely sure it was him, not the meal preparer, or some vindictive psycho in the office building?
But it was a great scene, they confront him, he guiltily turns to run away, and the cops appear from nowhere to arrest him. They get an on scene confession, and cut to commercial!
Sometimes you have to go with the Coconut Effect- the general audience expects a visual or audio thing to happen, even though it’s actually wrong.
Kind of like the sharp sliding/ ringing sound Foleyed in upon the drawing of a sword, even if most don’t do that.
It was also a cheap rip-off of Mithradates executing a captured Roman general by making him drink molten gold.
But anyone who has watched “Cody’s Lab” on YouTube knows elemental liquid mercury isn’t that bad.
In elementary school I remember the class building a mercury barometer. We filled a yard-long, sealed-at-one-end tube full of mercury, and my job was to hold my finger over the end, invert it and immerse the end of the tube, finger and all, in a pool of mercury.
We had a seesaw, too. 🙂
Ah, those were the days!
O2
I still regret my father’s partner sold his mercury bob pendulum clock before I could inherit it. It’s such a marvelously non-PC device, a pendulum whose weight is a glass jar holding several pounds of mercury. (And yes, it’s built that way for a purpose — temperature compensation.)
As I recall, drinking elemental mercury is pretty harmless, it just runs back out the other end. Vapor is more problematic, at least in the long term.
We kind of enjoy Below Decks. I was surprised by that, but it’s pretty watchable.