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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6036022" data-attributes="member: 22424">Well, no, it can't be - most of it is flat impossible!(That said, as Neonchameleon says, there are greater and lesser levels of "making it up". The technobabble in Star Trek TNG is of quite a different character from that in ST: Voyager, for example, and that's down to research. Neither of them is right, of course, but one of them went to the effort to be a semi-plausible extrapolation of known physics, while the other was immediately obvious as bull. The difference being down to research.)(Dara O'Briain does a wonderful sketch about this, related to the film "2012". I recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_jIWEOz78g" target="_blank">this</a>.)I think this is the key. It's essentially a matter of mystery writing - ideally, the clues should all be available to the audience, but it shouldn't be obvious until the lead character puts it together; however, once they do, the audience should collectively say "ooooh, of course!"Unfortunately, doing that is hard, and very few writers have the talent for it (and, unfortunately, even the best have a nasty habit of leaving holes in the chain, of jumping to conclusions that are not supported by the revealed facts, or otherwise 'cheating'). Joss Whedon and Steven Moffat seem to be generally quite good at putting these things together, but other writers often aren't as skilled (or dedicated).And then, of course, there are those writers/studios who don't bother to do the work because they think their audiences are morons.This is a signficant problem - the mainstream audience have an inbuilt assumption that a smart person sounds a certain way. But of course, smart people sound... pretty much like everyone else. Write a smart character like that, though, and the audience won't accept it - and so we get House, and Sheldon Cooper, and so on. The smart character must be a know-it-all jerk, he must be constantly showing off his intellect to those around him, and so on.I'm glad to see that I'm not alone in my assessment of those characters. Particularly back in season 1, that show really annoyed me, because not only was Sheldon an annoying know-it-all, but he was frequently wrong, too!</blockquote>

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