Chaos Program

One of the things that makes being a fan of science fiction a little difficult is the traditional absence of creativity in Hollywood products. That is, even on the rare occasions when Hollywood tries to do science fiction, they don’t generally try very hard to make it good or interesting. An even worse problem is the traditional ignorance of science in Hollywood and journalism. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is that staple of TV science fiction: The Genius.

Notice that the word is capitalized. Not mere genius but more like Super Genius. The person with an intellect so enormous that he (usually, though sometimes a she, as characters Amanda Tapping played very well in Stargate: SG1 and much less convincingly in the deeply inferior Sanctuary) is a master of every science and all technology. Often these people are so brilliant they not only understand everything, they go far beyond what the rest of the world knows, inventing whole new sciences and extending existing ones to unimagined new heights.

In stories, these people have two functions. Those are to explain what is going on to the audience (and incidentally to the folks around them) and to come up with the one great idea that can save the day, or save the world, or at least save the story from a depressing ending.

The third, often unintended function, is to annoy the living hell out of the audience, especially those of us who know that that’s just not the way things work.
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