winterbadger | (no subject)

I've been watching a good deal of the show NCIS recently, and while I enjoy it as brain popcorn, I am amused by some of its failings.

Characters frequently go back and forth from the NCIS headquarters building at the Washington Navy Yard and Norfolk (a Virginia city with one of the largest US Navy bases on the east coast) in a matter of minutes. In one episode that I watched the other day, as the team left to investigate a murder in Norfolk, one character asked if another had time to participate before he had to fly overseas. "Sure," came the reply, "My flight isn't for two hours." In two hours, you could barely make a flight out of the country if you left the Navy Yard and headed straight to the airport. You certainly couldn't make a detour to Norfolk, which is a 3-4 hour drive from DC.

The use of computers is HILARIOUS! Characters frequently execute complex and highly visual actions (running programs, seeking out files, displaying data) entirely by typing on the keyboard. Almost no one ever seems to use a mouse. The team's computer guy will constantly hack into highly secure systems in seconds (maybe minutes if it's really tough). They trace all sorts of things (messages, money transfers, etc.) from one server to another across the world--not at all unreasonable, but all their trace programs come with a handy map that displays an animated line that moves from one country to another as the trace is executed. I'm not an experience computer security professional, but I'm fairly sure their software doesn't generally display maps like that. Cute, though! Oh, and the recent episode where they "traced" an DHS order that all their agents had to take polygraph tests through several foreign *organizations* back to the CIA's National Clandestine Service? Silly on so many levels, but let's start with the fact that DHS can't directly issue an order to NCIS about *anything*. They describe firewalls as physical objects (one character opened up a computer's case to enhance its firewall). And in one episode a hostile computer system sent them a virus that caused a monitor to explode because it thought it had shorted out (what? if it thought it had shorted out, wouldn't it *reduce* power, not have a power *surge*)?

One episode featured a victim and suspects camping out in Shenandoah State Park (Shenandoah is a national park, and was featured in a separate episode as such). But not to worry, the state park rangers were wearing National Park Service uniforms. :-) Oh, and all the exterior locations are shot in southern California, which has very distinctive mountains that look nothing like the Appalachians. :-)

But I love David McCallum (the whole reason I watch the show is to see him again), I'm rather fond of Mark Harmon, and that Cote de Pablo--sexy and smart! :-)

In fact, they snuck a wonderful little DMcC bit in one episode. His character, Dr Mallard, inadvertently reveals he was something of a ladykiller when a young man. Special Agent Todd, intrigued, asks the team lead, the hardbitten and closemouthed Gibbs, what Mallard looked like as a young man. "Ilya Kuryakin," Gibbs replies, striding off. :-)