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

[taste_is_sweet]

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.

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!

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...

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

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."

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.

Comments

[popkin16]

Yeah, I've always had issues with Before I Sleep. Leaving aside their previous experience with entities taking people over (which I had never thought of before and am now facepalming over), who the hell thought it'd be a good idea for the two more senior personnel to be the ones to take on the entities? Elizabeth was an accident, so there is leeway there, but Sheppard? Caldwell and Lorne should have protested vociferously.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Who the hell thought it'd be a good idea for the two more senior personnel to be the ones to take on the entities?

Yes! Exactly! And IIRC, Sheppard's willingness to do this aside (and I personally think is was completely out of character for him, considering he'd already had Wraith messing in his head and is an extremely emotionally private person in general), how could McKay have let it happen, let alone Caldwell? Surely some good-looking grunt would've been able to host the supposedly loving husband just fine. Even Lorne would've been a saner choice. It was just so incredibly stupid of all of them.

I think that someone, somewhere, suggested that Sheppard volunteered because he's a closet romantic. I'm sure the Sheppard/Weir shippers said it was because he wanted to have a plausible reason to kiss her. At least either of those reasons were, well, reasons, as opposed to the complete lack of explanation we got on the show.

[popkin16]

Caldwell especially, you'd think would object. You'd think Rodney would be all about practical thinking, i.e. don't let your military commander let an alien entity into his head. I could see John being a closet romantic, but I don't think that would overrule 1. His need for privacy, 2. His knowledge that letting someone else take over is not a good idea. John's smart, and a tactical thinker. He wouldn't go for it.

But yeah, at least that's a better idea than the nothing the show gives us.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am so very, very with you on that. Maybe the radiation from the capsules affected everyone's brain? ::hopes::

[popkin16]

I like that explanation :D

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

:D