Not me mind you, I grew up watching TV in the 60s and 70s. Episodic TV was normal for most of my life, but it is a relic of a time now past, and some people have trouble engaging with it.

I follow a number of podcasts where younger people watch movies and television and hearing their interaction with an episodic series like the original run of Star Trek is interesting.

Having known pretty much only serialized story telling where the events of earlier episodes influence or even drive the events of later episodes they are sometimes befuddled when the character don’t reach back and use solutions that they have already discovered. Or when the characters act surprised to learn some fantastic historical fact more than once. Such as ancient Greek gods were in fact visiting aliens, such as in original Star Trek episodes Who Mourns for Adonais and Plato’s Stepchildren. It is unnatural to their story consuming habits to treat each and every individual episode as a unique story independent of the others.

This is not a slight on them. Art changes and the art forms of earlier generations are rarely consumed or interpreted the same by following generations.  I have seen people perplexed by Rick in Casablanca waiting so long to shoot Major Strasser unused to a production code that forbade the hero for shooting a man, even a Nazi, who had not yet pulled his weapon. Strasser must try to shoot Rick before Rick is justified in shooting Strasser.

It will be interesting to see what new evolutions in story telling confound and confuse future artistic consumers.

In lieu of writing about the Republican insurrection one year ago today I am instead going to write about several repeating aspects of guns in popular media that always irritate me when they appear.

1) Throwing People: Over and over again guns are depicted as violating Newton’s Law of Motion. A target hit by a round is lifting into the air and flung backwards. Targets weighting hundreds of pounds. If such forced was being delivered to the target an equal force in the opposite direct would be applied to the shooter. In the case of handguns to their wrists. People are not thrown by bullets and very often don’t even collapse or fall down when hit.

2) Inhuman Accuracy: The greatest offenders here are the John Woo films and his imitators and Zombie movies where people firing with a piston in each hand, moving from speeding vehicles, and leaping through the air, sometimes all three at the same time, hits distant or difficult targets. Accuracy with a firearm is much easier to obtain than with a bow but such shooting is beyond the realm of possibility.

3) Lasers on Sniper Rifles: The point of mounting a laser on a gun is to assist in accuracy. The concept being that where the ‘dot’ appears is where the bullet will impact. This is true over relatively short distances, but it is not true over scores or hundreds of yards with a sniper rifle. A bullet the instant it leaves the barrel falls toward the ground with an acceleration of 32 feet per second/per second. If a round travels at 2700 feet per second, after 100 yards it has traveled 1/9 of a second and will be 3 feet 10 inches below when that little red dot. Mounting a laser on a rifle is purely there so the ‘hero’ can spot the tell-tale dot and avoid getting shot.

4) Steady Scope Images: Related to the laser but preceding it in history is the moment in TV and film where an assassin is holding a scoped rifle to their shoulder and we get a shot of what they see through the scope, a perfectly still telescopic image of the target. No wobble or shake because the camera is mounted on a tripod but take out your smartphone and zoom to a distant object and see how steady that image appears. Through a high-powered with a tripod or bracing the image will bounced and shake unless the assassin is an android.