Science keeps making fantasy harder
On Star Trek there were an element required to have a story. Either the transporter or the communicators had to be inoperable.
Otherwise, it's just... "Oh noes! A monster! Beam us up." THE END.
There would be a point in almost every episode (where folks left the ship) where some magnetic storm, shielding, some-damn-thing prevented just leaving.
But today that story-problem of the far-flung future afflicts everything. Everyone has a cell-phone, so every horror movie, suspense film, man against nature story has to establish that for some damn reason or another the cell-phone doesn't work.
"Dammit... no coverage!" Is a line from almost every horror movie and thriller (and a lot of romantic comedies based on miscommunication) from the 21st century.
There's a maniac outside the house!! Okay. Call the police. Back in the day the maniac had cut the phone wires, but today telecoms have to take the blame. One would guess, from movies, that cell phones don't reach almost anywhere.
What got me thinking about this is the Malaysian plane crash and how uncomfortable we are with not knowing something. What is Google Earth even for???
But even 20 years ago there was plenty of the world that was expected to be incredibly hard to see.
The TV show LOST ran from 2004-2010 and it is funny how you can see the GPS problem creeping up on the writers over the years. At first the idea of not knowing where an island is is just one of those things. It happens. But by the end of the show the GPS revolution was so entrenched in smart phones and auto-navigators that the poor island was moving around in space and time and God knows what to remain plausibly LOST because in the real world nothing was lost.
And it has been interesting to see the many references to LOST in talking about this plane.
But back in the day stuff that sank at sea was presumed to be probably beyond our realm.
One instance of this kind of shifting expectation was the Clinton-era plane that crashed in the ocean off NY. Some of the families were demanding the bodies be recovered for burial. (This still amazes me.)
Folks... they are lost at sea. The Navy explained that it would endanger the lives of living people to even try to recover the corpses from the sea floor, but some families were quite upset.
It was a cultural shift. At some point our TV shows had created the impression that there is something easy about doing stuff at the bottom of the ocean, and that all bodies are recovered. The ocean floor is a much tougher environment than space, and sometimes bodies are not recovered. Our WWII dead from the invasion of Europe are in Europe. But nobody was intentionally left in Vietnam. Shifting standards.
