taste_is_sweet: (Felicity)
taste_is_sweet ([personal profile] taste_is_sweet) wrote2014-03-28 04:31 pm

Superman Syndrome, or Premises that depend on people being Giant Idiots

You guys know what I'm talking about--that episode where normally competent, logical and sane characters lose their collective minds in order for a plot to happen. My personal favorite (and by 'favorite' I mean 'most hated') is the Stargate: Atlantis season two episode The Long Goodbye, where the same people who were nearly blown up by a starship commander with an alien entity in his head the episode before, decide to let alien entities into the heads of the military commander and leader of the entire expedition. Naturally this goes just as badly as you'd expect. Hyjinks ensue.
And this kiss, which made all the McKay/Sheppard shippers cry.
Kiss


There were even worse violations of logic and sense that season (::cough, Michael, ::cough::), but I know SGA is far from the only series of any genre which has given the characters collective brain damage when convenient. A more recent favorite of mine is another second season episode (and is there something about year two?) of Arrow, where despite constant and deadly hijackings, aid trucks continue to be sent into a destroyed and lawless part of the city with no protection and their logos clear on the vehicle sides.

If only we could do something about that!
Capture

But nowhere, nowhere, is this example of joint idiocy more prevalent than in any plot requiring a normally intelligent character to somehow not recognize another character in a flimsy disguise.

Arrow, of course, is a perfect example of this. And while I know that the whole show would collapse if Officer Quentin Lance ever noticed how very similar Arrow's height, breadth and the lower half of his face was to Oliver Queen, or if Laurel Lance ever recognized the enormous cleft in The Canary's chin as belonging to her sister, the absolute impossibility of this lack of recognition is both hilarious and irritating as hell.

I mean, we're not talking Batman-esque cowls here. We're talking teeny little eye masks with a wig and/or a hood. As an example, I made a hero of my own:

My husband by day...
Dom as is

And as a badass superhero! Let's call him, 'The Engineer'.
Dom the superhero


I know that none of you know him as well as I do, but seriously. How long would it take you to recognize him after speaking to him face-to-face day after day for several minutes at a time? And his nifty steampunk goggles actually make his eyes harder to see than the characters' eyes in the show. Quentin is a cop, for Pete's sake. His daughter Laurel is a hotshot lawyer. Presumably they'd be good at noticing stuff, like how similar those two vigilantes are to people they've known for decades.

"I can't help but feel I'm missing something."
Paul Blackthorne

Or if that's too much to ask, what about the fact that The Arrow and The Canary only appeared shortly after Oliver Queen and Sarah Lance returned from the dead?

And yet, the selective idiot ball keeps getting passed around. Maybe one day, Starling City's finest (former) Detective will actually detect that that Arrow guy is awfully familiar...

And hopefully he'll deal with it better than these guys.

[identity profile] junnights.livejournal.com 2014-03-28 11:43 pm (UTC)(link)
hehe - nice picks of your husband:) must say that the 'superhero' one looks better though... as the other one is clearly not his best angle... The slight twist to the head gives an illusion that he's way heavier than he actually is (not that I've seen him in real life.. but looking twice at the picture was enough...and also looking at the googles one). As for the superhero thing? hmm... well - I heard somewhere (or read.. most likely a documentary though) that there are 6 people in the world that looks fairly similar to us (not talking close relatives here) so the eyeglasses on/off and people believing it is actually somewhat plausible despite how obvious it seems... (and if the way one holds ones body, facial expressions, behaviour ++ is also extremely different... well...
Edited 2014-03-28 23:44 (UTC)

[identity profile] taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com 2014-03-29 03:55 am (UTC)(link)
::Shrugs:: I liked the pictures. :)

I will agree that in RL it is certainly plausible--I don't have the best memory for faces, and lots of people have mistaken me for others they know. That said, the main characters of the show interact all the time. I think that eventually anyone would realize that Arrow actually seems so much like Oliver because they're the same person...