Watched this show on History Channel, and I have complaints

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Dark Elf, Oct 12, 2010.

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  1. Dark Elf

    Dark Elf Administrator Staff Member

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    Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

    I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

    Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

    So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

    Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

    Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

    So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

    ...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

    I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

    So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.
     
  2. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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  3. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    To be honest, it's quite good. I only found the older one by searching for the Colossus supercomputer. I didn't find anything real.
     
  4. Dark Elf

    Dark Elf Administrator Staff Member

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    I nicked it from the Codex, naturally.
     
  5. arcanumlord

    arcanumlord New Member

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    So just so i understand this, the first post was some kind of lash out to those that complain on the lack of originality and complete implausibility of many shows by mentioning that history looks like an implausible and tired plot of a lame scifi show episode, right? Hmm, and is the history channel to be believed as accurate? History is normally told by the winners ya know.
     
  6. Grakelin

    Grakelin New Member

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  7. Frigo

    Frigo Active Member

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    I wish this forum had a "rate down" feature.
     
  8. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    The history channel gets its facts from winners all over the world.
     
  9. arcanumlord

    arcanumlord New Member

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    I support that feature, + rate for you!
     
  10. arcanumlord

    arcanumlord New Member

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    That's the error, they should get the facts from the losers too. :)
     
  11. Zanza

    Zanza Well-Known Member

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  12. Yuki

    Yuki Well-Known Member

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    *Grows a top hat and a bowtie*

    History is written by the victors!
     
  13. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    Losers only matter for paleontologists; those fossils have to come from somewhere. Though, perhaps it could be suggested that some fossils were winners? But how does that even matter if it happened so many millions of years ago...it could be argued that time had no meaning before man.
    If you can't really imagine something, is it worth having? A perfect historical record doesn't exist partially because the losers aren't really allowed say in what goes into winning documents. A tragedy, I'm sure. Edison used to get people riled up over Westinghouse's Alternating Current (calling it a deadly menace) electricity by misusing it to electrocute cats. People believed him because he was a household name. But the true tragedy was the torturing of cats to make an invalid point. Pieces of history already don't make sense. Indeed, there seems to be no depth to the cruelty of man throughout history. What purpose would the loser's side serve other than to firmly cement that we're inescapably cruel?
     
  14. magikot

    magikot Well-Known Member

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    Yet, it was Tesla's alternating current that beat out Edison's direct current for use in the chicago world fair in the early 1890s I believe.
     
  15. Grakelin

    Grakelin New Member

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    If Hitler hadn't lost the war, we would know the truth: He was saving the Jews from the British by bringing them to space camps where he shot them into the stars in rockets.

    And you know what? One day, the Jews will return, and we will all learn the truth.
     
  16. Peter Quincy

    Peter Quincy Member

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    I tuned in to the history channel the other day, and all they were talking about was aliens. So, yes, they may kindly piss off with their tabloid-history.
     
  17. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    Yet another reason I'm glad I don't have cable. These aliens people experience are nothing more than hallucinations caused by the production of DMT in their pineal glands. Though it is fun to think we're being studied by a creature above mankind. Ok I do believe there's something out there, but pretty much every planet we've seen that could have life on it hasn't had anything there, meaning the civilizations either died out or we're the only thing here.
     
  18. Muro

    Muro Well-Known Member

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    I'd say we have studies too little planets and with too limited methods to say that just yet.

    Then again, it would depend on your definition of "here".
     
  19. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    Well, the thing is, according to statistics, we should at least see something. Unless life is so rare in the universe that only a few planets in far-flung galaxies can support it. My definition of "here" is alive within our universe. Perhaps life exists in dimensions beyond ours, and that is where the aliens reside. Or perhaps the other life in the universe is so far in advance of humanity that they don't want anything to do with us. Can you imagine humans giving ants nuclear energy out of the kindness of their hearts? That may be the same scenario between us and another civilization. Advanced life won't give us technology, much as we won't give ants nukes.
     
  20. Muro

    Muro Well-Known Member

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    What we have been able to check were but a few planets, hardly anything compared to what's out there, plus it must have been exclusively from our galaxy, if I'm not mistaken. Saying that there is no civilisation out there because of that would be like saying there are no cell phones on the planet while being in the middle of the desert because of simply not seeing any.

    Not receiving alien radio waves are a different thing. Still, I recall reading an article in which it was said that if each civilisation emitted those for a thousand years (or something like that) before either nuking itself to death or advancing to a stage of development not needing those, finding ourselves in a time gap where there is nothing to be received wouldn't be very unlikely, even if those civilisations were numerous and right next to us.

    We send radio waves, though, so they could be aware that we're here, but even if they had the means to contact us, why bother? "Seriously, Zalpfthrax, radio waves? If they're still that primitive, they are obviously of no use to us. Tell me when they invent hyperdrive and we'll talk."
     
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