They did something similar to Barry Allen on the Flash. He works for the police in the forensics department, but he is also an IT/Engineering genius who will develop a functioning AI. I think writers sometimes assume that all science is the same.
Spoilers Gotham - Season 3
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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They did something similar to Barry Allen on the Flash. He works for the police in the forensics department, but he is also an IT/Engineering genius who will develop a functioning AI. I think writers sometimes assume that all science is the same.
It's not?
I'm not sure if you're joking or if you want to have the discussion.
Assuming you want a non-joking answer: I have no doubt that all science is related in some fashion and that is inherent in the name itself (science = scientific method). In practice, though, each scientific branch has its own background and knowledge base, and it can take years to become competent in any particular one. Experts in multiple sciences (renaissance men, in the older vernacular) exist, but it is silly to assume that in-depth knowledge of one type of science naturally means competence in another.
Worse. I've met folks who think nurses are scientists....
Oh, thank goodness. I've been patiently waiting to hear your opinion on that film since March, and didn't want to jump to any conclusions about your review until I saw it in person.
It was a joke (guess I should have put in the smilie).
Barry Allen being an all round scientific genius goes back to the Silver Age comics. He invented the special material which allowed his costume to shrink and expand so he can store it his ring. Plus he created the Cosmic Treadmill. Allowing him to not only travel in time but to parallel dimensions.
The show has actually downplayed his genius. I guess that is the result of giving him a team of allies and friends who are experts in certain fields.
The show has actually downplayed his genius. I guess that is the result of giving him a team of allies and friends who are experts in certain fields.
I liked that bit they established where Barry could temporarily become an expert in a field by studying it at superspeed, but that he didn't retain the knowledge for long. That was an interesting use of his powers, and it was a more plausible explanation for how he could have expertise in any needed field.
One of the more credible depictions of specialization in fictional geniuses was Sherlock Holmes. He was a pioneer in forensic science, an expert in every field of knowledge relevant to criminal investigation and detection, but he didn't even know the Earth orbited the Sun until Watson told him, because it was knowledge in a field that wasn't relevant to his studies. That's maybe a bit of an extreme example, but people who are expert in one field of science often have no more than a layperson's knowledge of other fields.
Then there are the bizarre, random swerves, like Lucius Fox suddenly becoming a forensic scientist. Something similar happened in the execrable War of the Worlds: The Series from 1988. The female lead, Suzanne McCullough, was a microbiologist and biochemist, but there was one episode where the writer apparently forgot that and made her the team's psychologist. They even tried to lampshade it in a later episode, with a character remarking on how unusual it was to have both specialties. But that doesn't explain the other episode where her inability to identify the composition of an alien device on sight is taken as proof that it must be incredibly advanced technology, rather than simply as proof that she's a doctor, not a metallurgist. (Come to think of it, that McCoy meme is itself a good aversion of the "expert in everything" trope -- except in TUC and STID, which both seemed to think that McCoy's medical training would somehow translate to skill at torpedo engineering.)
Maybe it wasn't their intent, but I always assumed that there was some type of very delicate procedure that precision skills (as a surgeon) would actually be useful in terms of steady movements and hand/eye co-ordination. Plus, working under pressure, with lives in the balance, and what not. In real life it was obviously just a way to give the character / actor a heroic sendoff.
Except it was out of character to have McCoy be okay with working on a weapon. In "The Empath," he said, "I will not take a life, not even to save my own." He's a doctor dedicated to doing no harm.
Also, I just don't buy that excuse. Yes, surgeons have precise hand-eye coordination, but I'm sure plenty of engineers and weapons technicians do too. And I just don't buy that the skill set tailored for doing delicate work with soft, squishy body tissues is translatable to doing delicate work with wires and circuit boards. Hell, earlier in the same movie, McCoy had been clueless about how to treat a wounded Klingon, and at least that's the same general type of problem as treating a wounded human, even if some of the specifics are different. Yet somehow he's perfectly adept at handling the radically different type of problem that modifying a torpedo would entail? (And I have a huge problem with his cluelessness about Klingon anatomy, too. Thirty-plus years in Starfleet and he's never had occasion to study a Klingon patient or cadaver?)
I never intrepreted as McCoy knowing what to do with the torpedo. He was assisting Spock, which I assume translates to doing what Spock tells him to.
It's a fair point about him not wanting to take a life, though.
Which translates to Spock passing up the assistance of any of dozens of trained engineers and weapons specialists in the crew who already knew what to do. Just because the screenwriters couldn't think of a more sensible use for one of the main characters.
I forgot about Lucious suddenly being the forensics guy for GCPD until you guys mentioned it. It is especially weird since he was basically a tech guy, not a bio/chem guy. If they wanted him to work for the GCPD it would have made a lot more sense for him to be either a consultant on tech related cases, or to have him come in and give them all sorts of new gadgets or something.
I think the McCoy argument is getting into "Old Man Yells at Cloud" territory. 
True, but that's classic Star Trek territory. Main characters do everything, even if it would make more sense for someone else to do it.
Why can't we just presume they were pressed for time and Spock needed a 2nd set of hands?
Also maybe it would have been repetitive to have Spock once again save everyone.
Because there were more than seven people on the ship. This wasn't like TWOK where the ship was mostly crewed by cadets, or like TSFS where the ship was running on automation. There was a complete crew of qualified personnel on board, probably including dozens of people far more qualified to modify a torpedo than Leonard McCoy. In the time it took Spock and McCoy to get down to the torpedo bay, Spock could've just as easily ordered a weapons specialist to meet him there -- if there weren't several already there to start with. I mean, is it crazy to propose that the torpedo bay of a starship might actually be crewed with people qualified to work on torpedoes? And surely working with a weapons specialist who already knew what to do would've taken a lot less time than working with a medical doctor who needed to have every step explained to him as they went.