Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Ryujin]

Outrun the tidal wave? Outrun the explosion?

Amateurs!

I’m going to outrun the SUNRISE!!

People on action movies don't run from explosions. They casually walk away from them without looking back.

 

[Artamo]

People on action movies don't run from explosions. They casually walk away from them without looking back.

Preferably with a dove flying off behind them too.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yes, it’s not explained for ages why their faces look like that (they all look as if they have acromegaly or similar) until after the heist, and almost in passing, you could easily miss it if you haven’t worked it out.

I just started watching Steal and I literally immediately assumed as soon as I saw more than one of them, that they'd done that for the sake of making themselves hard to conclusively ID by people and facial recognition. It didn't so much scream "acromegaly" to me as "Cro-Magnon man" (or Buffy vampire), those incredibly wide upper nose bridges and heavy brow ridges especially. Also you can tell they're prosthetics because they're so obviously unnatural (like the weird blue contacts one of the black guys is wearing - almost no human has eyes that colour, regardless of ethnicity) and kind of falling off a couple of times - I assume that was intentional, not just a blooper - (and the same black guy with the contacts has a goatee so fake it's completely obvious, but it still obscures his appearance). But unnatural isn't a big problem because they're there to make them harder to ID. I haven't got far but at least two of them had skin tones that looked fake too, possibly just caused by all the cover-up for the prosthetics.

You were certainly right to recommend it as getting a lot of little details right. I did think none of them being bothered by the prosthetics/contacts and rubbing at them or the like was a little implausible but perhaps that will be justified by practice or something.

The first actually questionable thing is a guy saying they might be made to sign NDAs about the event. < Extremely loud incorrect buzzer > I could go into detail, but no, you can't make people sign NDAs after the fact in the UK (worst case, they say no, you fire them, they probably have a decent case for unfair dismissal, and they can speak freely about the whole thing to whoever they choose), and if you try to, they're unlikely to be legally effective (there needs to be actual offer, consideration and acceptance - many NDAs lack this and are thus legally weak or ineffective in the UK), and they can also never, ever prevent you talking to the police, regulatory boards, solicitors, etc. about criminal activity.

Of course that same guy kind of seems like an idiot, so maybe he's just an idiot, I guess we'll see!

(The "this is the room with the good biscuits for guests, we nick them from time to time" and "I always wondered what the other floors looked" stuff rings appallingly true btw as someone who works in precisely that kind of building/environment lol. Also liked the micro-details like Sophie Turner's characters shirt is un-ironed and wrinkly, very real)

 

[Retros_x]

It's the most basic port and the one you absolutely know if you have or not because it's huge relative to USB-C. Not plausible!

I see you havent met my parents. Jokes aside, in times of wireless tools everywhere a lot of people are not using their pc-ports at all anymore. I don't think its too far fetched that anyone would be surprised there pc is missing a port, because they never used it before.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

you can't make people sign NDAs after the fact in the UK (worst case, they say no, you fire them, they probably have a decent case for unfair dismissal, and they can speak freely about the whole thing to whoever they choose), and if you try to, they're unlikely to be legally effective (there needs to be actual offer, consideration and acceptance - many NDAs lack this and are thus legally weak or ineffective in the UK

Legally correct, but I have seen employers try it on anyway, taking advantage of the general ignorance of the law to try and bluff people into keeping quiet.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I see you havent met my parents. Jokes aside, in times of wireless tools everywhere a lot of people are not using their pc-ports at all anymore. I don't think its too far fetched that anyone would be surprised there pc is missing a port, because they never used it before.

If they'd just got the PC that would be totally plausible, like taken it out of the box and gone "What the hell?!". People buy stuff all the time without checking the ports, including experts. Or if the laptop was something they'd stolen or just been handed, rather than their own laptop.

If the port was a small port easily visually confused with other small ports, I could buy it, like USB-C and Mini-Displayport, or USB-C and a specialized power cable port or the classic, USB-C and Micro-USB or Mini-USB. Hell, if they confused Displayport and HDMI, even, I could buy that, because you might not pay close attention.

But USB-A is a massive and extremely important kind of port given huge numbers of devices solely or primarily use it (mice and keyboards particularly, and there's no way Neagley doesn't use a mouse sometimes - even with a wireless one the dongle will use it). It doesn't look like any other ports unless you're new to technology (and this person was supposed to be an expert). There is no-one in the world who is competent enough to hack stuff, but doesn't know if their own damn laptop which they've had for months/years has a USB-A port (unless they recently suffered a TBI maybe).

There were a thousand outs here which could have made the scene plausible, but Reacher bravely threaded that needle and avoided all possible plausible explanations!

Legally correct, but I have seen employers try it on anyway, taking advantage of the general ignorance of the law to try and bluff people into keeping quiet.

Absolutely right.

Besides NDAs, the vast majority of non-competes particularly in the UK are either totally non-enforceable or have durations which well beyond the 6 months or so which might plausibly be enforceable in a UK court (maybe a bit longer in a specialist field with very high remuneration, but you can't have one so broad stop someone working at their profession), or are just ludicrously broad, but employers continue to hand them out because they're essentially legal wishful thinking. Personally I think solicitors who knowingly sign off on unenforceable contracts should face legal sanctions (certainly repeat offenders should), but the law society hasn't sanctioned anyone for nonsensical non-competes yet AFAIK. They have sanctioned at least a couple of solicitors for pushing NDAs about criminal acts and telling people they couldn't talk to the police/lawyers though. I do think there's also a winking element with non-competes where both the person signing and the people instructing them to sign know it's bollocks, but the bosses of the people instructing the signing don't really understand that, and it's essentially fake peace-of-mind for those bosses.

 

[jian]

FWIW I don’t think the NDAs are mentioned again, but then the show doesn’t spend much time on the legalities of what happens next - what is Zara actually supposed to be doing when she comes back to work, etc. The company is of course very disrupted for a while.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

FWIW I don’t think the NDAs are mentioned again, but then the show doesn’t spend much time on the legalities of what happens next - what is Zara actually supposed to be doing when she comes back to work, etc. The company is of course very disrupted for a while.

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

 

[jian]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

In my experience, sit at their own hot-desk for the day in an open-plan office trying to look busy (and often being busy because they’ve actually been given way more work than they can handle because the team got downsized recently but they haven’t found anyone new and don’t plan to).

The specific activity depends on the job - it’s increasingly specialised in many fields (for instance in the NHS, the contracts management team have really very different skills from the informatics team and it’d take you at least a year of training and experience in the new job to be any good at it).

 

[Ryujin]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

In my case, fixing a lot of other people's screw-ups.