There is a conceit in movies that always irritates me: the audience surrogate character. His whole purpose is to comment on how cool or how scary the events are as they happen. The best (worst?) example I can think of is Link. In the Matrix Reloaded, he's the operator on the computers during the big freeway chase, and his whole job is to look scared so the audience knows This Is Serious Fight, and to cheer when the heroes pull out an impossible win, presumably so that the audience knows that the writers would like you to feel thrilled now please thanks. That kind of writing is cheap, like sucking on a greasy coin or cribbing lines from Hannibal.
As a writing technique, it's awful, but being an audience surrogate can be a truly great thing in one place: education. I just watched Phil Plait's Bad Universe on Discovery, the last of three episodes testing the waters for audience interest. Discovery Channel, if you're listening, the waters are just fine. In a scene about solar coronal events, the Bad Astronomer shows a demonstration of chain reactions that I've seen before, where ping pong balls are set on mousetraps to make a violent cascade of springing traps and balls, then he shouts with glee, “That's so cool!” as if the audience needs to be told.
Here's why Phil Plait is different from Link: the audience for science really does need to be told.
We need to know how cool science is, and how to recognize what is science and what is nonsense. In education, it isn't bad writing to have an audience surrogate because it's real. He is that excited, and he wants us to be that excited too. Having someone clapping on screen and laughing for us allows us to clap along and agree. The intro to the show talks about destruction and debunking, yet it could not have a more positive message, and telling the audience when to cheer really helps.
Think about this show. It's all about what's dangerous in the universe, and how it can kill us, with little excursions on how some of these things can be prevented. The preventative portion of the show is ostensibly the positive bit, except that the answer often seems to be that either it's impossible to prevent the problem or that we've just never invested in the solution. This show about inevitable destruction and extinction is played with such undeniable fun and excitement. The best news is often, “We don't have a good answer for that yet.” To present galactic-scale problems with unknown or incomplete solutions in an exciting and excited way is certain to draw new minds to the world of science.
Bad Universe sits somewhere between Mythbusters and Cosmos, for what appear to be soundly strategic reasons. Showing passion for science like the dignified Carl Sagan really ought to be enough, in a perfect world, but let's be real here. To draw people in, you need to blow something up at least once per episode. I want to complain that the papier-maché supernova wasn't really that accurate a model, in the same way that I sometimes want to complain that a Mythbusters stunt didn't use experimental controls that made sense, but I just can't do it. I can't.
There are enough CG effects in the episode that clearly they could have gotten away with a CG supernova to demonstrate a dying star's destructive power, but they chose fun over accuracy. A computer model would have shown the audience exactly how it all works, but blowing up a paper ball with dynamite is just better. I do computer animation myself, and I can't clap for a CG supernova (much as I'd like to animate one just for its own kind of personal fun). I can clap along and laugh for that stupid paper bomb though.
Discovery Channel, please give this man a camera and more dynamite, immediately.
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