Friday, March 23, 2007

Exposing redundant exposition

I'm a big fan of the forensic procedural drama- I watch CSI (original recipe), Without A Trace, Numb3rs, and Bones. Normally the writers on these shows have enough technical jargon added to make the characters seem knowledgable to the home audience and normally-since I'm not trained in forensic science-I don't realize to what degree the filler jargon is just that-filler. However, the episode before last on Bones one of the characters was examining a body using UV light and a camera with a UV filter. The expositionary line went something like this: 'I'm looking at the body with a camera filtered to see only UV light below 400 nm.' But since I know that all UV light is below 400 nm, this just made me laugh and say to the TV- "that's dumb all UV is below 400 nm" Sometimes a little education is a curse. Note to forensic show writers: Dialogue where one character says 'the victims hyoid bone has been broken' followed by the other saying 'they were strangled?' is also getting old...

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