Suspend my disbelief

So here’s me going back to the drawing board.

This post retains it’s original title, “Suspend my disbelief”.  That’s how it started life.  It just got lost when I started to make comparisons between Marvel and DC’s TV shows, whilst forgetting 2 of Marvel TV’s biggest and best.

So let’s get back to suspending our disbelief.

This is something that I assume all fans of American or science fiction TV shows are familiar with.  Throw comic book adaptations into that mix, and that is where I’m at.  I’ve gone deep down the DC TV rabbit hole, and in doing so have found my disbelief suspension limits.

At the start of series 3 of Arrow, episode 2.  A bad guy’s laying in a hospital bed a little worse for wear.  Team Arrow needs information from him that will lead to his boss, the big bad guy.  Needless to say, the big bad guy isn’t keen on this happening, and in order to shut him up assassinates him whilst he’s recuperating in hospital.

Here’s where I reach my limit.

The hospital bed that our soon to be dead guy is laying in is perpendicular to the window (every bad guy needs a room with a view after all).  Big bad guy stands on the roof top of the adjacent building and shoots him in the chest with an arrow, through the window.

“Where’s the problem here?”  I hear you ask.

The problem is that the arrow sticks out of the guy's chest at an angle that indicates he’s been shot face on.  No angle at all.  Yet the window is perpendicular to the bed.  A right angle, not parallel to the end of the bed.

The last time I checked you can’t bend it like Beckham when you shot an arrow.  There’s some basic physics here that’s being ignored.

But hang on a minute.  This is Arrow, right?  Where we have:

• Mirakuru
• The Lazarus Pit
• Magic herbs that Oliver eats to cure himself of…..well, anything.
• and a bow that The Arrow can bludgeon people with during fights, yet it never breaks?

That’s not to mention lots of jumping, flipping and flying that I’m sure also flies in the face of basic physics.  The list gets longer when you start to think that this is in a universe where we also have The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow.

Yet in all of this, the simple misrepresentation of the trajectory of an arrow is what brings the house down.

I'm going watch the Legends of Tomorrow travel through time in order to calm down.

Marvel vs. DC, TV goes head to head...

Ok, so I forgot the great Marvel TV shows:

I was writing a post lamenting my inability to overlook ignorance of basic physics.  This in relation to TV shows that I have been watching recently adapted from comic books.  The majority of these being from DC Comics.

I’ve been watching a lot of The Flash, Arrow, and most recently Legends of Tomorrow.  For the most part I have been enjoying them immensely.  More so than Marvel Agents of SHIELD, where I have just finished the third series.  I began comparing the franchises, against each other and their big screen counterparts.  Drawing a conclusion that while Marvel are champions of the big screen, DC had the edge on the small.  For me Agents of SHIELD has become peppered with filler with the purpose of forwarding the overall series long story arc rather than that of the current episode.  The result being episodes that go off the boil.  In this DC have a knack of making solid episodes, entertaining in their own right, while still furthering the series long story arc.

Having put the finishing touches to my post, I hit save and slept on it.  Something I like to do is read with fresh eyes and a clear head the morning after as a final part of the editing process,  It was while laying in bed that night that it occurred to me that I had recently started watching the second series of Daredevil.  This in turn reminded my of Jessica Jones.  Both Marvel franchises that are bloody brilliant.  Very different to Agents of SHIELD, The Flash, and Arrow, but just as good and arguably better.

So with this in mind.  I’ve realised that the difference in the quality of Marvel’s and DC’s TV shows isn’t so clear cut, and that I need to go back to the drawing board on that post.