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I’ve watched a couple of things over the past week where a seemingly big factual error or strange bit of logic took me right out of the story. Stuff that makes you wonder why no one involved in the production process at any point said “wait a minute”.

The first example of which was watching the first episode of BBC’s new Saturday evening show Merlin. In the show Merlin is a young apprentice wizard and his mentor figure is played by the Victor Meldrew dude, Richard Wilson. At one point Merlin handed Victor Meldrew a letter to read and he replied he couldn’t read it because he doesn’t have his glasses on. To be honest, at this point nothing stood out as being illogical in my mind. It was only a minute or two later when I actually saw him putting the glasses on in a different scene that I realised…

Wait a minute! This supposed to be medieval times of knights on horse back fighting dragons. Where the hell did a guy with glasses come from? Did no one think that perhaps this might not be appropriate for the world the story is set in?

To be fair, I only watched the first few scenes before I switched it off; a mixture of being bored and annoyed at seeing the glasses. Maybe if I watched more I’d learn the whole point of the character is supposed to be that he is way ahead of his time, inventing stuff that other people marvel at. But in that case why didn’t Merlin ask what glasses were, or ask why he was wearing pieces of glass on his face?

The only other explanation is that the whole show is going to play fast and loose with the “historical” setting, but there was nothing else in that first 10 minutes to suggest it might. The tone of the thing was decidedly straight faced dungeons and dragons stuff. It’s not like it was trying to be like A Knight’s Tale which famously included several anachronisms like armour having a Nike tick on it, and the crowd singing “We Will Rock You” as the Knights joust.

Did no one at the BBC at any point realise that glasses are not appropriate for that universe? I did, and it made me switch the show off as a result.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to get at with this blog post. If you disregard the logic of your own world then you take the audience right out of the story and they might not ever get back into it.

The second example from the past week is from the movie Doomsday, the latest movie by Neil Marshall, the guy behind Dog Soldiers and The Descent. I really liked his first two movies but a few things in Doomsday took me right out of the story.

The film centres around a future where Scotland has been quarantined off with a virus. They decide the best way to contain the virus is to rebuild Hadrian’s wall and leave the people with the virus to fend for themselves on the other side. 30 years later when the virus strikes London, this hard as nails elite female soldier is given the mission of going beyond the wall to find a scientist who they believe has managed to survive the virus.

In the scene in question, she meets the squad of army grunts that have been assigned to go with her, and as she meets them they are packing all the weapons and gear they are taking with them. You get a a bunch of really blatant exposition where the squadies explain all the equipment.

The problem I had with this scene is an army guy sets up the armoured transport by saying

They may be ugly, but they move like shit off a shovel. Twin V-12 engines. 2 inch armour plating, they’ll take everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons.

This wasn’t set up as arrogant boasting, this was set up as simple fact – These armoured vehicles can sustain damage from 30mm rounds — but

Spoiler alert:

Only problem was, a couple of scenes later one of the virus survivors jumps on top of the vehicle when it’s in motion and manages to smash the windscreen on the front of the thing with an axe as if it was sheet of single pane glass.

Shatter-proof plastics have been un-invented by the year 2030 it seems.

Evidently the taking “everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons” doesn’t refer to the great big windows on the front of the thing. A seemingly big flaw in the vehicle’s design because a few moments after the glass is smashed the driver is shot by a bow and arrow through the now large hole directly facing her, which results in the armoured transport crashing, flipping over onto its side and being rendered useless.

You might think I’m being really picky now since movies are full of conceits that allow the story to move forward, as well as laws of physics which often bear no resemblance to those found in the real world. But come on! You can’t have a scene where the character not only talks about the vehicle but actually lists its attributes and specifications in detail and then you totally ignore those attributes a few scenes later because you need a way for the characters to lose the vehicle.

In my mind a vehicle that can sustain 30mm rounds should be totally unaffected by a guy hitting it with a hand-held weapon, including an axe. Where is the consistent screen logic?

It took me ages to get back into the story after this. Something which could have been avoided had the vehicle been destroyed in a way consistent with something that can survive “everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons”

/End spoiler

I’m not wishing to pick on Merlin and Doomsday, they just happen to be two things that I have watched in the past few days which threw me out of the story at certain points because of these logic problems. Seeing these two things made me realise just how disrupting it can be to an audience member if something doesn’t quite ring true.

The good news is stuff like this is easily fixed if you catch it in time. Fixing a character that isn’t working; that is the hard part. Fixing a character so he doesn’t have glasses hundreds of years ahead of time; that’s a piece of cake. Shame no one realised before it was too late!