Keep Heroes away from science
Like all intellectual science writer-types, I don’t watch much TV. Apart from Dr Who and The Simpsons (which I of course only watch because I have young children), numerous films (because I fancy myself as something of a film buff), loads of film and music documentaries (especially those that count down the top 100 something or other, to which I am frankly addicted) and international rugby matches. But nothing apart from that. Except Heroes.
For the uninitiated, Heroes is a US TV drama about individuals who have evolved fantastic abilities, such as being able to fly or rapidly heal from any wound. The second series of this drama has just started airing on British terrestrial television. Although it is hugely enjoyable and one of the only TV shows that I make a point of watching, there is one aspect of it that I find incredibly annoying. That is the efforts of the writers to give the show a shimmer of scientific respectability.
The worst example of this is the explanation given for how a genetics professor has been able to identify and track down many of these gifted individuals. Apparently, he used the results of the Human Genome Project.
What? That’s just nuts. Individual people didn’t have their genomes sequenced as part of the Human Genome Project. An amalgam of the genomes of around six different people were sequenced and then only once. So far, about the only individuals to have had their genome sequence are James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and Craig Venter, who helped to sequence the human genome.
There really is no need for this. The writers could simply have said that some people have evolved these abilities and left it at that. Even that’s obviously complete rubbish, but it’s vague enough to be acceptable in something that’s obviously meant to be fantastical. As soon as the writers start trying to provide more detailed scientific explanations for various plot points, then it’s all going to come unstuck.
When the main premise of a work of fiction is completely impossible, then it’s best just to say this is the way things are and offer the minimum of scientific explanation. Take George A Romero’s zombie films. There’s hardly any explanation given for why the recently deceased have started rising from their graves to feast on the living. That’s just the way things are in this fictional universe.
There’s no point trying to find a detailed scientific explanation, because there isn’t one. It could never happen. And the same goes for Heroes.
Now, I’m not saying that science can’t be the jumping off point for some perfectly decent fantastical adventure. The X-Files, which I also used to watch, was very good at this: widely extrapolating from some known scientific fact into the far reaches of the bizarre. But there’s no point developing some fantastical premise and then trying to bolt on a detailed scientific explanation. It just never works.
I’m usually well up for a bit of suspension of disbelief, but randomly throwing in some misunderstood science immediately brings me crashing straight back to Earth.
