Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Paul Farquhar]

Nitt picking Red Eye? It didn’t have anyone who objected to being called Shirley.

 

[Umbran]

I literally said out loud "Did the Lib Dems form this government?!" because honestly it's the only explanation (I am mostly joking ...

Mod note:

No, you are mostly making political commentary which is against the rules and unwelcome on this site.

"Joking" is not a suitable excuse. Leave such comments out in the future, please and thank you.

 

[jian]

I mean, it's not the least plausible plot of a thriller series set on a long-distance international flight I've watched recently (that's still the inferior Red Eye - I love Richard Armitage but he needs to get a better agent!). At least this one, when you accept a number of somewhat implausible premises, the plot flows logically. The main two being:

1) In a clearly post-Line of Duty age, the "OCG", i.e. "Organised Criminal Gang" in British police-speak is a mighty and terrifying international force capable of agile-ly striking at individuals and their families in a way the worst, most-state-backed and well-funded terrorists and spies wish they could. This, to be clear, is an utter nonsense. There are specific countries which organised crime kills huge numbers of people and has its hooks deeply into the state (often despite hard work from the governments), but there's a reason nothing like this has ever happened.

Yes, the OCG as super-villain thing is just a terrible trope and needs to die in a fire. No UK-based OCG could pull off anything on that scale. It's all Krays-based nostalgia. This is all your fault, Jed Mercurio.

(I'm reminded of a throwaway line from the Origin Story podcast that the late 60s was when criminals in the UK switched to drug dealing due to new laws heavily influenced by the US (prior to that we'd actually been very humane about drug use and harm minimisation in a way that seems unthinkable now), and that prior to this the main income stream for UK criminal gangs was armed robberies. Which seems, again, unthinkable now.)

Just watched the first episode of Blue-Eyed Samurai and it's so full of nonsense and nitpicks that I can't continue. Another sign that we're in the worst timeline is that this dreck is on Netflix and getting a second series, rather than having a faithful adaptation of the Usagi Yojimbo stories, now on episode 200 or so.

(BTW I sort of like the teen Usagi science fantasy series but, you know, it's not Usagi in any way.)

 

[Mannahnin]

Just watched the first episode of Blue-Eyed Samurai and it's so full of nonsense and nitpicks that I can't continue. Another sign that we're in the worst timeline is that this dreck is on Netflix and getting a second series, rather than having a faithful adaptation of the Usagi Yojimbo stories, now on episode 200 or so.

Sad to hear about BES; I had heard good things from other quarters. 100% with you on Usagi. Stan Sakai is a treasure.

 

[GreyLord]

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

Depends on the Office. Various things I did when I worked in the office in very brief detail.

1. initially was there to look good. I waited for someone to show up so that I could talk to them and start their paperwork, then double checked the paperwork. Started work with clients and their investments. Took client calls. Advised on best strategy, or if they insisted, put in calls for them.

2. I advanced to Managing! Then I went over the paperwork #1 would have done and determined the next steps. I organized the schedules to what was needed. I went over accounts assigned to us and went over investments (if you have 400 clients and a 40 hour week, that's only 6 minutes per client if you only do clients full time, which, as you can see from the above, that's not happening). I actually had more than 400 to worry about, but the actual client was handled by those below me (see #1). I only handled ones which had issues elevated to me, which could be in the hundreds.

3. Promotion and now over a Region. Dealt with even bigger clients and bigger issues. Took a lot of calls. Worked on strategy over region, was now looking at contract creation and talking it over with lawyers and HR. Talking a lot with various managers over the course of a week. If I had time got out of the office for visits to locations.

4. Started own firm! Yay! Now I no longer have a 40-60 hour week...I have an unlimited week where I may never sleep again! A lot of calls to try to recruit clients. A lot of time looking at resume's and applications to find people to hire, or fill vacancies. A lot of time monitoring the market. A lot of time doing our own investments and managing a growing board of investors with us.

5. Retirement! Browse Enworld.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Just watched the first episode of Blue-Eyed Samurai and it's so full of nonsense and nitpicks that I can't continue.

What nitpicks did you have re: Blue-Eyed Samurai? It's basically a fantasy piece so I didn't really see any major issues with it despite various odd/questionable takes it was making. But I'm far from an expert on Japan in what I assumed to be the late 1700s or early 1800s (I dunno if they ever pin it down more than "Edo period" and I think elements of it sort of span the entire period).

Re: Usagi Yojimbo they were making a modern animated version around the same time as Blue-Eyed Samurai, not sure what happened to it. On Netflix as well.

This is all your fault, Jed Mercurio.

Your honour, he din' do it on purpose! Also the first person to do it gets a free pass, right?

The OCG in Line of Duty is maybe 1/100th as powerful as the one in Hijack, and seems to be tightly localized (like real dangerous OCGs - we don't have any on that scale in the UK anymore, but Mercurio has noted that a lot of elements of LoD are basically "what if police corruption and organised violent crime in the UK had stayed at 1970s and 1980s levels to the present day", though frankly S5 has shades of Mexico to it). But people copying him and exaggerating further has certainly been a bane and honestly distracts from the fact that state actors could barely (or even not) pull some of this stuff off.

Speaking of Hijack, S2 is set on the Berlin subway (the U-Bahn), and frankly, I have a lot of questions about how the Berlin subway works as a result, because you absolutely could not do what happens in the first episode in the London Underground, and yes, maybe the Underground is kind of the king/queen of subways in the West (the most efficient, the largest, the most complex, it makes the NYC subway, for example, look like trash - I hear and believe the Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul subway systems are equally or more impressive to the Underground), but I'm pretty most modern train systems are full of automatic cut-outs and automatic speed controls and setups where a controller turning on a red light physically stops the train from being able to go.

Looking it up, it seems like they might have picked the U-Bahn specifically because it isn't like that - as of now they're apparently still introducing automatic systems that we've have had for many decades here. So it looks like this may pass the nitpick test - I do read that they have a very good tracking and monitoring system, but not automatic safety systems, which is insane to me but there you go.

I see we are continuing with "Everyone in this show is a total jerk" though, as every single character, and I do mean literally every single one with no exceptions whatsoever in the first episode has been either mean, heartless, weird-in-a-bad-way, dodged important obligations, or otherwise committed a social faux pas. Very much including our """"hero"""" who has not only been a jerk in multiple ways but racially profiled a small South Asian asylum seeker and got him nearly shot by two burly polizei!