Oct 10, 2008 04:40 PM
5,534
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 7:29 PM
Tue Feb 9
26 posts in the last 24 hours
Judging by the ratings, a lot of people tuned in last night to watch Eleventh Hour, Jerry Bruckheimer's Fringe-esque show about Hood, a "special science adviser to the FBI" played by Rufus Sewell. Based on a British show that failed, the series winds up making science seem even more like a preposterous Medieval fantasy than Fringe does. After watching last night's season premiere, we came up with eleven ways that Eleventh Hour manages to smear the reputation of good science in its misguided effort to represent what real "biophysicists" like Hood do.
Here are all the ways Eleventh Hour shows us that science is evil.
1. Science leads to dead fetuses.
We first encounter our science bad guys when they are hurling bottles of dead fetus out the window of a car in biohazard containers.
2. Cloned children can kill their mothers.
Our scientists are implanting clone babies into women, all of whom die in childbirth. Hood, our special science adviser, explains, "This abomination is what happens when you try [cloning] human beings." Um, no. Cloned baby animals do tend to die faster than uncloned ones. But cloning has no effect on the health of the mother.
3. Scientists are only one step away from forming sleazy international cloning gangs.
Which is exactly what they do in this episode.
4. Science leads to women impregnating themselves with cloned babies for cash.
The sleazy international cloning gang recruits down-on-their-luck women to bear their deadly clones by paying them cash and refusing to give them adequate medical care.
5. The main thing scientists bring to the table are poignant aphorisms.
We never see Hood actually geek out about anything, or go into a lab. Instead, he just says sciencey things like "In science a negative result is just as valuable as a positive one," or "DNA is like a personal barcode."
6. You can explain cloning with grapes.
See, the grape is like an egg. And then when you fertilize it, it turns into stem cells that are just like a whole bunch of grapes. Wow, thanks for the science lesson, you retards.
7. Scientists like to use religion to intimidate bad guys.
When Hood wants to question a suspect whom he knows is religious, he drags him into a convenient Catholic church, shoves his face into the crotch of a crucifix, and yells, "Maybe you're a waste of God's time!" Way to use logic in the service of crime-fighting there.
8. Science all takes place in Seattle, where there are a ton of rich people who pay sleazy international cloning rings to make copies of their dead kids.
Nuff said.
9. Science is just a form of microscopic masturbation.
Hood goes beyond the grape explanation to give us an even more precise understanding of how cloning works: "Cloning takes skill," he says. "To clone anything takes science stroked gently with an artistic hand." Oh that makes sense. Because my hands are totally small enough to put nuclear DNA inside your fucking grape.
10. When it comes down to it, science is really the same thing as religion.
While persuading the rich Seattle cloner not to buy copies of his kid from sleazy international cloning gangs, Hood offers this salvo: "[Your son] Gabriel's soul is more than its constituent parts. He is not the product of his DNA." That's totally biophysics talk right there.
11. You can cure anybody with a little CPR.
And that's exactly how Hood saves our cloning victim mom. Just gently press on her chest, and she's breathing again. Luckily, he rescued her from science, which would have just led to her clone-induced death when all those grapes popped and the baby's soul started leaking everywhere.
On a scale of one to WTF, I give this show an eleven.
Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Start a new discussion