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Bad science makes bad television

I should stop watching TV. I really need to cut down on the time I spend banging my head on the coffee table and shaking with rage. Now, it's not bad acting or bad writing or even cheap reality shows that drive me to madness. It's bad science.

I should stop watching TV.

I really need to cut down on the time I spend banging my head on the coffee table and shaking with rage.

Now, it's not bad acting or bad writing or even cheap reality shows that drive me to madness. It's bad science.

You wouldn't think this would come up so often, but TV screenwriters and directors seem to go to a special institute where scientific knowledge is removed from their brains, possibly with hot needles and bleach.

To be clear, I know that there are some things we'll just have to take for granted, based on TV budgets.

Anti-gravity and artificial gravity aren't possible, but having the cast of Star Trek float around on wires would be awkward.

Likewise, faster than light travel is impossible, but getting Captain Kirk to his next encounter with a bouffant-haired space babe would take too long without it.

But when a show makes science a big part of its premise and pretends to be getting it right, things get painful.

Consider Unforgettable, a new series that's about a former cop with hyperthymesia. This is a condition presented as perfect recall of all past events.

So the main character can confidently walk out of a crime scene having scanned the place once, and need never glance at a photo of it again.

But while a lot of articles present hyperthymestia as a photographic memory, it's more complicated than that.

The most famous hyperthymestic is a woman named Jill Price, who has astonishing recall of the events of her own life. But dig a bit deeper, and her memory isn't perfect.

Given a normal memory test, such as a list of items of information to commit to memory, she doesn't do better than anyone else. She can remember her own life, it seems, because she can't stop obsessively thinking about it.

Then there's Terra Nova. Yay! A show about dinosaurs! I love dinosaurs!

Oh, wait, the creators know absolutely nothing and are just making crap up as they go along? Boo!

Terra Nova is set 85 million years in the past. So of course it has Brachiosaurus and Allosaurus (lived about 150 million years ago) and Carnotaurus (lived about 75 million years ago) and a bunch of made-up dinosaurs.

One of the characters tosses off a remark in the pilot, intended to establish her as the smart one, about the brachiosaurs' incisors -- except that dinosaurs never had incisors, or molars, or canines. Only mammals have specialized kinds of teeth.

The writer couldn't be bothered to look up a single real fact for her to announce?

This brings out my nerd rage until my face turns red, my head explodes and my girlfriend has to scrape my brains off the walls.

You know what makes for good TV? Real science.

Hyperthymesia is fascinating and Price has said it's as much a burden as a gift.

Dinosaurs existed from 220 million to 65 million years ago, and as far more than killing machines to menace a few good guys. Likewise, there are interesting stories of forensic science that don't involve neon-lit labs with instant DNA matching, stories set in the silent vacuum of space that don't have loud explosions and tales of history that don't involve secret Jesus conspiracies.

If you want to just make stuff up, you can. One of my favourite shows is about a vampire slayer, after all.

But if you want to tell stories with science, please do it right.

Do your homework, read a book, maybe two. Good science leads to better stories than bad science.

Matthew Claxton is a reporter for the Langley Advance.