Sci-fi lines that just hurt to listen to

[Chaotic Neutral]

The Kessel run quote was obviously Han speaking out of his ass to sound impressive.

[Bakustra]

The Kessel run quote was obviously Han speaking out of his ass to sound impressive.

Up-up-up! Author's intent. Lucas obviously had no intentions of scientific verisimilitude. (PS: that's exactly like what grif was mocking just a few posts up.)

[Junghalli]

Oh Christ. I suppose that you get in a tizzy whenever a downtown is not the lowest point of a city, or the city center is not in the exact geographical median? This is a line that is only as stupid as you make it, and people that say "well obviously George Lucas is mentally handicapped, uh, I mean, the people who made Star Wars don't care about scientific verisimilitude, yeah, that's it. Author's intent, man, author's intent!

I don't know why you have this apparent resistance to just admitting it's silly.

Come on, man. That line was a howler, pure and simple. Even the script has them taking a submarine through the core in the next scene.

Although Grif does make a good point in a way. Nerds people will react with outrage at stuff like that but swallow all sorts of ridiculous stuff that breaks science as long as it's tech. It does strike me that there's a little bit of a pervasive double standard with realism, where some types of unrealism get whined about much more than others.

[Chaotic Neutral]

My point is that something so easily dismissed is nothing near the level of calling poisonous snakes crawling all over you harmless.

[Bakustra]

Oh Christ. I suppose that you get in a tizzy whenever a downtown is not the lowest point of a city, or the city center is not in the exact geographical median? This is a line that is only as stupid as you make it, and people that say "well obviously George Lucas is mentally handicapped, uh, I mean, the people who made Star Wars don't care about scientific verisimilitude, yeah, that's it. Author's intent, man, author's intent!

I don't know why you have this apparent resistance to just admitting it's silly.

Come on, man. That line was a howler, pure and simple. Even the script has them taking a submarine through the core in the next scene.

Although Grif does make a good point in a way. Nerds people will react with outrage at stuff like that but swallow all sorts of ridiculous stuff that breaks science as long as it's tech. It does strike me that there's a little bit of a pervasive double standard with realism, where some types of unrealism get whined about much more than others.

It's a silly line, but people excuse equally silly lines all the time, just because they hate the prequels and/or love the original movies. Just as an example, the Kessel Run line and the core line both are easily stripped of stupid, but people will laugh at doing it to one and with doing it to the other. Basically, double standards.

[Junghalli]

It's a silly line, but people excuse equally silly lines all the time, just because they hate the prequels and/or love the original movies. Just as an example, the Kessel Run line and the core line both are easily stripped of stupid, but people will laugh at doing it to one and with doing it to the other. Basically, double standards.

Personally the Kessel run line just doesn't stick out as much in my mind because it was just that - a line. The planet core line was the set-up for a whole scene, so naturally it's going to stick out more.

[Bakustra]

Those lines were entirely improvised by Ford, interestingly enough. According to people involved, the originals were apparently a lot more complex. I think Ford ad-libbed the majority of his lines on-set. I know that many of his most memorable were.

[Srelex]

I dunno, they seem to be in the scripts I can look up online. Although maybe that's just updated.

[Bakustra]

I dunno, they seem to be in the scripts I can look up online. Although maybe that's just updated.

He definitely ad-libbed the dusting crops line, and switched parsec for standard time part in the Kessel Run line. I know that he ad-libbed a lot in general.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yeah, including the "I love you/I know" line in TESB. Apprently the scripted line was "I love you too" but Ford just couldn't make it work. The director finally said "say whatever feels right for Han"

[RedImperator]

It's a silly line, but people excuse equally silly lines all the time, just because they hate the prequels and/or love the original movies. Just as an example, the Kessel Run line and the core line both are easily stripped of stupid, but people will laugh at doing it to one and with doing it to the other. Basically, double standards.

I actually agree that people are less inclined to be charitable to TPM for any number of reasons, including "I'm mad that George Lucas didn't make the movie I wanted". That said, I don't think there's any principle that actually demands consistent standards from an audience; people are more forgiving of fiction when they care more about the characters, or they like the story better, or it's funny, or whatever. You see it in Trek fandom all the time--TOS consistently gets a pass for laugh-out-loud gaffes that would get the other four series slammed endlessly (Kirk didn't have trigger guards, either). I think it's just part of how people engage with fiction.

Anyhow, I hew to the belief that if the audience has to stop and reinterpret the line so it makes sense, the writer fucked up. Alec Guiness and Harrison Ford make the "twelve parsecs" work in their deliveries and reactions; Han is smugging it up, and Obi-Wan thinks he's full of horse shit, and that works no matter if "parsecs" is a unit of time, a unit of distance, or a unit of unicorns. But the planet core line was a piece of expository dialog, delivered along with an ominous musical cue and a dead serious reaction shot from the Jedi. Yeah, you can make it work--you can make the whole supernova thing in Star Trek work if you try hard enough--but that doesn't make it anything other than a gaffe. I don't actually think it's bad enough to "hurt" (there are, bluntly, better candidates for that in that script, though I don't think any of them are science-related), but I think by now the thread has wandered away from that standard.

[Terralthra]

The 12 parsec thing is bad science, but again, I don't mind it because it does its job (Han is confident in his fast ship) and the actors sold it (Ben has just the right look on his face to appease the science lover in me).

Both the script and the novelization make it very clear that the line is meant to impress someone who doesn't know their ass from an astronavigation computer, and Ben doesn't buy it for a second.

It was idiotic EU writers (Kevin J. Anderson) who took it at face value.

[RedImperator]

But the planet core line was a piece of expository dialog, delivered along with an ominous musical cue and a dead serious reaction shot from the Jedi.

On the other hand though, if you search/replace "planet's core" with something like "dragon's cave" everything else works. That's primarily why I'm so forgiving of it - it's an easy fix that my brain can just do.

Well, everyone's mileage will vary on stuff like this--it's a suspension of disbelief issue, and every audience member will have a different way of engaging it. A lot of it just comes down to whether you like the movie enough to overlook it; this applies to most scientific gaffes. I doubt the crack in the event horizon would be constantly mentioned if it had happened in the context of a great story, instead of a weak, by-the-numbers Voyager plot (seriously, the whole thing was "ship gets stuck in anomaly of the week, writers crew invents technobabble to get out, Janeway acts smug"; the event horizon gaffe is the only memorable thing about it).

[RecklessPrudence]

I've always wondered about the 'event horizon' being a problem (for USS Voyager, not the show) - after all, isn't an event horizon where the gravitational field is so intense not even light can escape? Can't Voyager travel FTL? I can't remember if gravity wells mess with Trek Warp like they do with Wars Hyper, do they? If they don't, apart from the whole thing with Voyager's Roche limit and getting torn apart by shearing, etcetera, none of which is addressed in the episode as far as I can recall, why should this thing they're calling an 'event horizon' even be a problem? You can just engage warp and get the fuck out of dodge, right?

All of the above is moot if grav wells do, in fact, mess with Trek Warp. Also if they've redefined a black hole's event horizon in Trek to be something weird.

[Metahive]

Doesn't really matter as they explicitely identify the "event horizon" as an "energy field" in this episode.

[Freefall]

It's a silly line, but people excuse equally silly lines all the time, just because they hate the prequels and/or love the original movies. Just as an example, the Kessel Run line and the core line both are easily stripped of stupid, but people will laugh at doing it to one and with doing it to the other. Basically, double standards.

They're both fucking stupid. Just because some people excuse one stupid thing doesn't mean you should suddenly be so willing to excuse another. If you really have to break it down, the "planet core" line is somewhat more offensive because "planet core" is a pretty self explanatory term, whereas lots of people aren't going to know what a parsec is. The planet core line is also followed up by a silly underwater chase scene that actually shows them apparently going through the planet's core.

To borrow from RLM: "Now, by 'planet core,' I assume he means 'planet core.'"

Either way, I never had any problem chocking both of them up to whoever came up with the lines not knowing what they were talking about, or at least just being careless. Frankly I was pretty surprised to find people actually attempted to justify the 12 parsecs thing (and rolled my eyes when I heard there was an actual contrived explanation in the EU).

And really, why should we give writers a free pass to come up with whatever stupid crap they want? We should call them out on their ignorance and idiocy, not go out of our way to fix it. Unless you just like the challenge as a mental exercise. That's cool too.

Anyway, since I rather like the spirit of the actual topic here, I will try to keep it going at least a little bit. Here's one from good 'ol ID4 (and I even checked this one so nobody has to fix it)

NIMZIKI: Not to mention that this whole cockamamie plan is dependent on a machine that no one in the world is qualified to operate.

Will Smith: I wouldn't say that, sir. I've seen these things in action, and I'm well aware of their maneuvering capabilities.

Hey, I've actually been on several commercial flights. Guess that means I'm overqualified to fly those planes, huh?

Kind of disappointed I'm having trouble thinking of any really bad sciency lines though, considering how often I feel I make fun of them.

[KlavoHunter]

Given that "Parsecs" is a unit of distance, and the Kessel area is infamous for having a ton of black holes, perhaps what Han was espousing with that line was how close he was able to shave it to them for a shortcut.

[Dooey Jo]

Any time a character says they're going to FTL, or jumping to hyperspace, or lightspeed, or warp, or whatever, as it is an affront to science SCIENCE! while still being hugely important to the plot.

[Freefall]

The Kessel area wasn't infamous for anything back when the movie was actually released, and most people seeing it for the first time aren't going to know anything about it, nor could they, because the movie makes no mention of anything about it.

The "distance to black holes" thing seems to be the EU explanation that has been mentioned, but that was basically a retcon created years and years later to attempt to make sense of the line, not because the line itself made sense already. In fact, if you have to invent a big elaborate explanation for something years late, that just proves it didn't make sense in the first place.

[Norade]

Saying you made a trip through an area known for shallows or sandbars in a shorter distance or along an unusual route is something an experienced sailor might brag about. The Kessel Run is the same thing.

[Nephtys]

I do remember Stargate parodying some of this during '200' and elsewhere, like Wormhole X-Treme. They love making fun of 'Reverse the polarity'.

Like the Star Trek parody sequence when Carter says 'I can't reverse the polarity of the field! The singularity is exploding', before Mitchell goes '...set weapons to maximum'.

Then again, in the first season Finale, Teal'c comments about the mighty FTL capabilities of a Ha'tak class Warship in such a blatantly stupid way. "This vessel is capable of traveling at TEN TIMES the speed of light". Really Teal'c? You're Apophis's lieutenant, have traveled to other worlds and are qualified to fly FTL starships, yet you think the thing only goes at 10 times lightspeed?

[open_sketchbook]

"This cave is not a natural formation. Somebody built it, so it must lead somewhere."

I guess the perfectly square shape and smooth metal walls probably tipped her off.

[adam_grif]

Then again, in the first season Finale, Teal'c comments about the mighty FTL capabilities of a Ha'tak class Warship in such a blatantly stupid way. "This vessel is capable of traveling at TEN TIMES the speed of light". Really Teal'c? You're Apophis's lieutenant, have traveled to other worlds and are qualified to fly FTL starships, yet you think the thing only goes at 10 times lightspeed?

The characters were expecting the ship to take a very long time getting to Earth at that speed, and comment about how they must have been significantly upgraded since then. I would call an improvement of several orders of magnitude "significant", anyway.

[Metahive]

I do remember Stargate parodying some of this during '200' and elsewhere, like Wormhole X-Treme. They love making fun of 'Reverse the polarity'.

If we already dig that up, don't forget "The singularity is about to explode!!!".

EDIT:
A, you mentioned that already. But one can't comprehend the true beauty of that line without dramatic bolding and italicizing!

[RedImperator]

Saying you made a trip through an area known for shallows or sandbars in a shorter distance or along an unusual route is something an experienced sailor might brag about. The Kessel Run is the same thing.

You know, even if someone we willing to grant for the sake of argument that that was what the line originally meant, and was not actually a lame EU retcon, that just changes it from a gaffe to lousy writing. The audience has no idea what that actually means and we never get any clue from the film about it (and to anyone who knows what a parsec is, it sounds, you know, like Han was confusing a unit of distance with a unit of time).

"Han was full of shit" is a much better rationalization on so many levels. It doesn't require elaborate backstory, it can be conveyed entirely through the reactions of the actors, and it establishes something about Han and Kenobi's characters. Read that way, it's actually a nice, compact bit of writing.