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Critical Research Failure
Funny you should mention that...

"All right, Dr. Hassan, you've got a five-thousand-year-old scroll of indeterminate origin. Roll a Research Check and attempt to identify."
"I rolled three."
"After examining the scroll, you take a stab at its origins and declare that it appears to be Homer's handwriting. The others in the room, realizing your mistake, laugh you out of the scientific community.  *"

The most glaring incarnation of Did Not Do The Research. A particular instance where — frequently during a discovery of great scientific or historical significance — the resident Mr Exposition, whose Techno Babble has been extremely convincing (and perhaps even accurate) thus far, suddenly makes some comment that is so totally off-the-scale of inaccuracy that anyone with a cursory knowledge of the subject realizes the writers made the whole thing up.

See also Gretzky Has The Ball and Cowboy Bebop At His Computer. Dan Browned is a more subtle version of this trope, where the research looks plausible but is in fact inaccurate. If you have to explain why something is an error, then it is not a Critical Research Failure. To put it bluntly: this trope is Did Not Do The Research evident to anyone with even elementary knowledge, or common sense.

Many of these will be Disaster Movies and use state of the art computer effects to keep your interest.

Contrast the MST 3 K Mantra, which tells us not to worry about these little details.

Examples

Anime
  • One scene in Grappler Baki involved a character who blinded people by pulling out their optic nerves... which, for some reason, involved sticking a finger into the side of his opponent's neck and pulling said nerve out. The optic nerve, which connects the eye and brain, really has no business being there...
  • Dragon Ball Z deserves a special mention here: Piccolo blows up the moon and...nothing bad happens.
    • Well Muten Roshi (or Kame Sennin, if you prefer) did exactly the same thing in Dragonball and... it stopped werewolves changing.

  • Code Geass R2. Episode 8. Schneizel moves his king into check during his chess match with Lelouch/Zero. Hilarity Ensues because you're not allowed to move your king into check in Real Life. Cue the fan base believing that Schneizel cheats at everything.
    • The general sentiment behind this is that Schneizel had already won and was simply setting up the situation to see how Zero would react in order to determine what kind of person he is.
      • Lelouch should have just told him to put the King back and make a valid move. Then proceed to call him a dumbass. Would have solved the problem entirely.
  • Eyeshield 21 sometimes gets the rules of American football wrong. Most glaringly however, was when a championship game ended in a draw because no one thought to include an overtime stipulation. Did we mention this was against the American team and the championship was held in America?

Film
  • In-universe example: Bluto's speech in Animal House.
    "Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
    "Germans?"
    "Forget it, he's rollin'."
  • Burn Up: During a US Congressional hearing on climate change, a scientist is told that snow levels are increasing in Antarctica. The scientist explains it only snows when it's above freezing. He got it backwards — usually it's below freezing when snow falls.
    • Although worded wrong, he's actually right; it's usually too cold to snow in Antarctica.
  • The Core is one giant critical research failure from beginning to end.
  • In- story example: The lead in The 40 Year Old Virgin successfully maintains his farce until mentioning breasts feel like bags of sand.
  • In Mission To Mars, the astronauts convert the signal from the face on Mars into a 3D rendering and say, "That looks like human DNA!" They're going by a short string of DNA; this is like taking a look at an E note and saying that it looks like it came from Beethoven's 5th. They then go on to say that the strand is missing a couple of chromosomes, which makes about as much sense as saying that a page of text is missing a few books.
  • Bad sci-fi movies (especially the ones shown on MST 3 K) are a gold mine for this trope. The Phantom Planet, for example, features a plot point where atmospheric changes cause the protagonist to first shrink in size, then grow back to normal (prompting the comment "So people are just balloons?").
  • The end of Short Circuit II involves a character using a medical defibrillator to revive the robot Johnny Five, recharging him shortly after he "died" due to a leaky battery. In reality, not only would the sudden application of a huge jolt of electricity not repair or recharge a battery — the most likely result would be to further damage the robot by shorting out delicate electronic circuitry — that's not even what a defibrillator is for in the first place, when used on humans! It can't restart a stopped heart, and it's not designed to. Quite the opposite, in fact; what a defibrillator does is shock a victim's heart strong enough to cause it to stop beating. This is necessary when the heart is in fibrillation, (erratic, useless, seizure-style beating that can't pump blood properly,) because the heart needs to be stopped before it can be restarted properly with CPR. Thus, a defibrillator stops fibrillation.
    • Since he originally came to life by being struck by lightning, it's kind of pointless to bring real electronics into it.
    • Surprisingly, in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah Connor uses a defibrillator for precisely this reason - shorting out a tracking device that was implanted in her which also, of course, stops her heart. But then she gets up and runs away a few minutes later with no help whatsoever.
    • Most fans of the Short Circuit films just kind of look the other way and pretend they don't notice it, because the scene in question is a real Tear Jerker. Besides, anything remotely resembling adherence to real science went out the window when a robot originally designed to run on nuclear power cell reconfigured himself to run off a rechargeable lithium battery—and then when he lost main power, keeping himself alive with a freaking SEARS DIE HARD CAR BATTERY. All things considered, using the EMT's defibrillator to keep J5 from dying is the LEAST nonsensical failure of science in this movie...
  • Yet another MST 3 K movie, Terror From the Year 5000, has an archeologist use carbon-14 dating to determine that a metal statue came from the future. And when he and another guy hold a Geiger counter over the statue, they are shocked to learn that it's incredibly radioactive. Seeing as carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope, you'd think they would have noticed this earlier...
  • The sequel to the movie Underworld, called Evolution, has this. Not with the title, but toward the end there is a super vampire werewolf hybrid god thing. While standing on the ground normally (i.e. not secured to anything on the ground) he reaches up and pulls a helicopter down and crashes it. This is meant to show us his strength, but he would do nothing more than pull himself up the rope at the helicopter. Note he doesn't yank, he slowly pulls.
  • Outside of the fact that the United Nations is actually made up of various countries, practically everything else about it is blatantly wrong in Left Behind. It's basically portrayed as being to countries' governments what the United States federal government is to the state governments; in other words, if the UN decides something, the countries apparently immediately hop to its tune. The leader of the UN wishes to arbitrarily unite groups of countries together and rename them, and somehow this is not questioned. In real life, there'd be hell to pay. Tons of countries hate each other, especially their neighbors. Okay, said leader has been shown to have some kind of mind control powers to advance his aims, but we're still just getting ridiculous here.
    • This is based on Real Life conspiracy theories believing that the United Nations was created by the Illuminati (or a similar organization) to be a world government. However, that does not make it any less ridiculous.
      • Which, for anyone familiar with the history of the U.N., is pretty hilarious seeing as how the United Nations is among the most powerless political entities ever devised. Never mind trying to rule the world, the U.N. can't even get its members to pay their dues. Sure, there are huge individual powers within the U.N., but they'd be powerful either way. It's like claiming a town square is going to conquer Rome because Julius Caesar made a speech there.
      • "among the most powerless political entities"? League of Nations. Look it up.
    • The Big Bad wants to establish not only One World Currency, but One World Language. In response to which everyone nods approvingly, rather than asking just what he is smoking.
      • Well, he is the Antichrist. Its traditional for that guy to get most of the entire world believing and saying some truly ridiculous crap.
    • Also, check out the flags flying outside of the "United Nations Building". Ontario, Saskatchewan, Nunavut... One World Government, Eh?
    • Also, the authors have some very...strange ideas about the geography of both Israel and New York City.
  • The film Swordfish has the protagonist crack 512-bit DES encryption keys, the fastest speed for which is 7.4 months with the cooperation of almost 300 computers and a dedicated supercomputer. He does it by hand. In less than one minute. While having a gun to his head and getting a blowjob.
    • ...and he creates a worm in AutoCad. You can "build things" with it (it's a major software for engineering drawing), but not programs.
    • Incidentally there's no such thing as "512-bit DES."
  • The Day After Tomorrow: The Critical Research Failure that stands out is a "rising air current" that was apparently cooling the atmosphere in the city at a rate that would drop it to absolute zero in minutes.
    • The critical research failure comes from the fact that it took an existing theory and decided that dramatic changes that would take decades centuries to happen (if they happened at all) were not dramatic enough. Besides, if everything happened in a slightly more realistic time frame, you would have seen the great grand-daughter of the Cheney expy saying that her ancestor was an idiot, you would not have seen the guy himself telling the world that he was wrong: we can't have that now, can we?
    • Also they outran a WAVE OF COLD and avoided freezing to death by closing a door on it and then standing near a fire.
  • Ever After. Da Vinci has the hero retrieve a cylinder for him. He opens it and unrolls the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was painted on wood.
    • Not to mention smaller, and at the time presented in the movie would have been in bright, vivid colours as it wouldn't have accumulated 400 years of dirt and decay (the painting today is filthy, but the risks of cleaning it are so astronomical that no one is willing to chance it).
      • The same thing happens in the great John Barrymore/Lionel Barrymore caper film Arsene Lupin, in which the titular thief steals the Mona Lisa... by wrapping it around his umbrella.
  • In the movie Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man the bad guys are derided for being pussies because they wear bulletproof coats made out of "Jap Kevlar". Kevlar was in fact invented by the US chemical giant Du Pont. Given that "Jap whatever" was historically a slur indicating a shoddy knock-off product, someone wearing "Jap Kevlar" for protection would be very brave indeed...
  • The bad guy's plot in Johnny English is to steal the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, force the Queen to abdicate at gunpoint, have an imposter Archbishop of Canterbury proclaim him King, then use the Monarchy's unused power of eminent domain to turn the entire country into a superprison. There is so much wrong with that plan my wall has a dent in it.
    • Also, Chris Tarrant proclaiming he'd be our first French king since 1066, completely ignoring 208 years of history.
    • Of course, this is a comedy film so it is almost a certainty that the plot was this ridiculous on purpose.
  • The Transformers movie gets a pass for a lot of things based on Rule Of Cool, but a few things are still outright mistakes.
    • Defcon three is not the highest state of alert (although many films still get it wrong other ways).
    • While trapped in the room by the murderous cell phone, Glen is told to hack the computer to get the radio working. He proceeds to turn the MONITOR around and calls for a screwdriver.
      • If he had been cannibalizing some of the parts (accidentally breaking the vacuum tube aside), it may have made some sorta vague sense. But he doesn't.
      • This troper thought it was pretty clear he was physically modifying it, since the girl asks if he can "hotwire" it. Also, the Secretary of Defense calls it Defcon Delta, not Defcon Three.
      • Considering that Delta is the fourth in any given sequence (the first being alpha, beta, gamma) That makes it WORSE!
  • The tagline of the film Biggles is "Meet Jim Ferguson. He lived a daring double-life with one foot in the 20th century and the other in World War I." Anyone who knows when World War I occurred should see the problem.
  • The Taras Bulba movie with Yul Brynner. It's entertaining, and this troper likes Yuliy Borisovich's acting very much, but when he watched it, he had to constantly seek refuge in the MST 3 K Mantra...
  • The 2005 film The Legend of Zorro did this by basing their plot around a villain developing a super-weapon explosive called "nitroglycerin" which is even more powerful then dynamite.
  • Stargate. A stone carving is carbon dated. Putting aside the fact that the type of stone in question is not of direct living origin (which is more of Did Not Do The Research — a lot of people don't understand how C14 dating actually works), the result of this test is assumed to tell the cast when the stone was carved. Anybody actually awake would realize that it should tell them how long ago the stone was formed (or to be pedantic, how long ago it died).
    • On the other hand most ancient carvings were originally painted, and you might be able to carbon-date microscopic traces of some dyes... but that's giving the writers too much credit.
  • The filmmakers of 40 Days And 40 Nights must not have been practicing Catholics. The "40 days" of Lent don't count Sundays. In reality, the protagonist would either abstain for 46 days and 46 nights (admittedly not as catchy a title) or, like so many Catholics, indulge himself once a week (admittedly not as catchy a premise). This is not really an example of Christianity Is Catholic.
  • In Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's husband fakes his death and frames her for the murder. After being paroled, Judd sets out to find her husband and murder him for real, but now with legal impunity, since she "can't be tried for the same crime twice" according to the statute of double jeopardy. This is not actually how double jeopardy works: a person can and should be tried for similar crimes that take place on different dates. If a person is accused and found not guilty of assaulting someone on May 1st, there is no reason why they cannot be accused and tried of assaulting the same person on May 7th. Naturally, this seems a bit incongruous when it comes to murder, but there is no special exception.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction the T-Virus dries up every river and sea in the world.
  • In Total Recall the protagonist mentions that "if Mars had an atmospere, it would be almost entirely oxygen." First of all—Mars as an atmosphere. Look up. See how the sky is pink? Why is there a colored sky? Because there is an atmospere. Also, how would the guy know what the atmosphere would be composed of?
    • There's also a scene where the wall of a Mars colony gets a hole in it, and everything in the room is sucked out as if there were a total vacuum outside. Wt F?
      • While it doesn't make up for all of the mistakes, the difference in the Martian atmospheric pressure and the pressure the domes would have would be a factor of around 3300. Also the original short story was written 10 years before the Viking missions gave us clear data on the Martian atmosphere.
  • Terminator 3 had a particularly amusing example when John Connor tells his companions that they have "enough C4 to blow up ten supercomputers!" Anyone alive and conscious within the last 20 years should know that the size of a computer has little relation to its processing power. If that were so, then the 70s computers featured in the same film near the end should've dwarfed the computing capacity of the titular character.
  • Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie 2012 looks to out-stupid even The Day After Tomorrow. I mean, this trailer for the film refers to the Mayans as "mankind's earliest civilization" within the first thirty seconds. Emmerich, I believe that the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Chinese, and the Romans would like a word with you...

Literature
  • Dan Brown.
    • The most basic grasp of cryptography is enough to realize that the whole premise of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress was nonsense: a "new" type of code that is unbreakable even when trying every possible code key. In reality this is called a one-time pad, which The Other Wiki says has been around since 1917, and is much simpler than the technobabble Brown came up with. Brown gets a point for accuracy because it is actually central to the plot that the premise was nonsense (it's all a big scam), but minus one million because highly trained NSA cryptologists not realizing it's nonsense is also central to the plot.
      • Another classic line in that book was a description of the legendary Enigma machine as "the Nazis' twelve-ton encryption beast". Clearly Brown never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Nor did he see Das Boot. Or U-571. Or 'Allo 'Allo!. Enigma was the size of a small case and could be carried by a single person.
      • The most brilliant cryptographic mind in the world sets the password on his doomsday device to the number "3".
      • The TRANSLTR supercomputer the NSA uses to break encryption is said to be able to brute-force key lengths in the thousands in a matter of hours. There is a minimum amount of energy that is needed to represent a certain state. If you take that as the maximum energy efficiency such a computer could achieve, it would take more than the energy output of your average supernova to simply count from 0 to 2^256, which is the number of possible keys for a 256-bit key. And of course, the energy and time cost double with every bit added.
      • Let's try the kanji.
      • The book extensively depicts a country with about the same HDI as the USA as a 3rd world hell hole.
  • In the Clive Cussler novel Atlantis Found, the good guys discover the bad guys' plan is to separate a large ice shelf from Antarctica, at high tide, and allow it to float away which will cause the Earth to become unbalanced, the continents to suddenly shift, and civilization collapse while the bad guys ride it out in a gigantic ark. For those who don't see the problem, a floating object displaces its mass: if the ice floats away, it is replaced by a mass of water that's exactly the same.
    • The same novel has vehicles used in Antarctica being specially modified to work in the thin air, since the air gets so much thinner at the poles due to Earth's rotation. Uh, no. While the air above the poles is slightly thinner because of the cold and Earth's rotation, the air at the South Pole is mostly thinner because it's at 10,000 feet above sea level.
    • This is the same novel where a 1940s diesel/electric-powered German U-Boat remains in working order and undetected by the superpowers during the entirety of the Cold War?
    • It's a Cussler book. By necessity, it runs on Rule Of Cool.
  • In The Big Friendly Giant, the titular BFG (no, not that kind of BFG) goes on a rant about how Humans Are Bastards because they're the only species that kill members of the same species. Anvilicious if in-character on its own, goes straight into Wallbanger territory when you realize the author was entirely serious about this aesop.
  • Margaret Mahy's Miranda's Big Mistake. A character is described as tripping over her costume's tail while playing one end of the pushmi-pullyu. The pushmi-pullyu has a head at both ends, as anyone whose knowledge of Dr. Dolittle didn't come from Eddie Murphy movies would know.
  • Jacqueline Rayner's Doctor Who novel, The Last Dodo, features "Mervin, the missing link between fish and mammals", which is just what it sounds like it should be. The thing is, we already know the steps between fish and mammals — they're called amphibians and reptiles. (Amphibians and primitive synapsids, since we want to be pedantic. Most scientists don't classify synapsids as "reptiles" anymore.)
  • In The Catcher in the Rye, this is used in universe when Holden Caulfield writes a paper about ancient Egypt, which reads thusly: "The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century." That is the whole paper. Holden also wrote a note blatantly telling the teacher that that was all he knew and that he couldn't pay attention in class.
  • In Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, set in the 1930s, the Duke de Richleau is arrested while in France for being an aristocrat. The assumption being that, having hunted down and guillotined as much of their nobility as they could during the Revolution, the revolutionary authorities (or their successors) are still looking to complete the job. A quick look at any decent encyclopedia would show that the Bourbon monarchy was restored to the throne following the defeat of Napoleon, and while there were further upheavals, the Reign of Terror was not repeated.
  • There's a Star Trek book where Data claims to have investigated the phrase "A watched pot never boils" and found that watched pots will always boil if at a temperature of "100 degrees Kelvin or above". Leaving aside the obsolete term "degrees Kelvin", this may be true if it's liquid methane in there. (Water boils at about 370 Kelvin; perhaps the writers meant Celsius.)
    • Don't forget the value of water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius is only valid if the water is at the standard sea-level atmospheric pressure of Earth. So... yeah.
    • Could that be a reference to the episode (Timescape) where he tests the saying by timing it? Only to have Riker suggest he turn off his internal chronometer, but not to show up late for his shift?
    • There's another Star Trek example that is again temperature-related, from a different book. One can guess that author tried to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius (or "centigrade", as it's called in the book) merely by subtracting 32, without dividing by 1.8 afterwards. As a result, a supposedly perfect paradise planet is said to have a mean surface temperature of a "pleasant 50 degrees centigrade".

Video Games
  • In Battlestations: Midway which torpedo bomber flew at the titular battle? Why, the TBF Avenger, of course!
    • Six of them did, yes.
  • In Koudelka, the first part of the Shadow Hearts series, the action takes place in an old Abbey in Wales. Which, the manual cheerfully tells everyone, including people living there, is a "small country in the north of England".
  • In the PSP game Def Jam: Fight for NY: Takeover (a prime example of Colon Cancer), there is plenty of cringe-inducing trash-talk that gets tossed back and forth before almost every fight in the main storyline. One of the opponents you can fight for money in the Dragon House is named Prodigy. All trash talk pertaining to this opponent makes reference to him claiming to be a prophet. The only possible explanation for this is that the game designers failed to realize that "Prodigy" and "Prophesy" do not mean the same thing.
  • In Metal Gear Solid, two characters are revealed to be clones of each other, except "one got all the recessive genes, whereas the other got all the dominant ones." This makes no sense whatsoever; you can't divide one's genome into dominant and recessive genes and create viable specimens out of that, much less expect them to have the very same appearance as is the case in the game.
    • Of course, as it turns out, the character stating this was both A. deliberately mislead about it and B. to use a technical term, balls-out insane.
    • Word Of God states that Liquid hasn't passed a Biology class since the 8th Grade. Also, he has blonde hair - which is a recessive gene.
  • For an in-universe example, the "Meet the Soldier" video for Team Fortress 2, in which the Soldier natural 1's his Knowledge (history) check and describes Sun Tzu the genius tactician as Sun Tzu the Memetic Badass Kung Fu master who herded animals onto an ark, beat the crap out of them, and gave the name to the zoo. Of course, the Soldier isn't exactly a genius, so...
    • This being the same Soldier who travelled by himself to Poland and went on a Nazi killing spree, awarding himself with medals he designed... YEARS after the war ended.

Live Action TV
  • Boston Legal, to the extent that chronicling them would take its own wiki. Lawyers routinely meet with judges without the presence of opposing counsel, evidence that has nothing to do with the case is introduced, the closing arguments frequently have nothing to do with the case, and the same firm occasionally represents both sides in a case.
  • Hercules The Legendary Journeys, the Kevin Sorbo series in which Greek and Roman gods are introduced by name to the Greek hero.
    • Despite the usual modern perception, the two Pantheons were considered distinct when they were still worshiped. A few groups combined them, but they were mixed with the Egyptian gods just as often. Given Herc also meets the Norse gods, this isn't all that unusual.
  • The heading stuff about Homer's handwriting is a reference to a bit in Sea Quest.
  • Star Trek The Next Generation:
    • In "Genesis", Mr Exposition mentioned how antibodies were forcing mutations in someone's DNA. Antibodies are protein markers that attach to the surface of foreign objects in the body and direct T-cells to annihilate the intruder — they have neither the means to enter a cellular nucleus, nor the ability to cause alterations in DNA.
    • Fortunately, ''Threshold'' never happened, even according to its author, so we won't have to talk about the "evolution" there.
    • To be fair, this is likely a simple case of technobabble misnomer. The episode writer probably meant to use retrovirus as the culprit du jour. If this troper's memory serves, at the time ST:TNG was wrapping up, retroviri were still a relatively unexplored and largely unknown concept. (Unlike today, where they seem to be overtaking radiation to explain bizarre genetic mutations.
  • In "Relics" (the episode with Scotty) Data describes a Dyson Sphere as being made of "carbon neutronium". Now, Neutronium is matter compressed to the point where it no longer has separate atoms; how it can contain an element is anyone's guess.
    • While the word "neutronium" is sometimes used to refer to neutron-degenerate matter, in Star Trek like many other science fiction it is simply yet another super-strong Unobtainium.
    • In "The Royale", Data announces that the planet they are orbiting has a surface temperature of -291 Kelvin. For the record, the Kelvin scale is absolute- there is no temperature below 0. Humorously, this temperature is also impossible in Celsius, which the writers may have meant.
  • The Star Trek Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor" gets evolution completely wrong. Supposedly, a species of sentient people have evolved a genetic defect that is killing them off to make room for an upcoming sentient species. Okay, species could potentially die off if bad genes somehow pass on enough times, for enough generations. Yet what Phlox was describing was that somehow the bad gene for the dying species was a deliberate move by evolution to clear that species out of the way. Evolution is a sentient or deliberate force? Either way, Phlox was describing the dying species basically adapting a failure, which is the opposite of the way evolutions work. Species die from failure to adapt, not adapting failures.
    • Actually, genes can do some very weird shit. It could work if the gene evolved in the new species and was being spread virally to the old. While neutral at worst in the new species, it's lethal in the old. But I doubt they put in more thought beyond "Lol, evolutionz"
  • Star Trek Voyager had it's share of Did Not Do The Research but one incident that finds its way into critical research failure, is in the very second episode. The characters find themselves trapped in a singularity. How do they get out? By finding a crack in the event horizon. For reference the event horizon is a mathematically defined sphere around the center of a black hole (Or any other sufficiently dense Negative Space Wedgie), determined as the point at which light can no longer escape. There is nothing to crack.
    • Ironically, the Lightspeed Event Horizon of a singularity means nothing to a FTL-capable vessel. And yet, everyone makes that mistake. In Star Trek's case, you have to worry about the subspace event horizon, beyond which you couldn't escape at warp 9.99999(repeating). Warp Ten, on the other hand...
  • CSI is hardly invulnerable to this trope, especially to those familiar with actual forensic investigation.
    • Real CSIs usually stay in their labs while other people go to the actual crime scene... in CSI they do both jobs usually. This is probably the best known, except possibly the next one...
    • Let's not forget the time that they used silica, the second most common molecule on the planet, as GPS Evidence.
    • A small plane pilot is killed by drilling a hole in the engine's exhaust pipe, which causes the carbon dioxide emitted by the engine to suffocate the victim. Said victim, however, did not notice the deafening noise that the punctured exhaust would have caused (ever wonder why it's called a muffler?). Oh, and he apparently didn't notice the black, stinky smoke either.
      • Actually it's a pretty big problem in Real Life (see here) for carbon dioxide to suffocate a pilot in a small plane, even without would-be murderers drilling holes in their mufflers. And speaking of Critical Research Failure, planes don't have mufflers (the loud sound from the propeller pretty much makes them pointless, and as for jets, well...that's just not how a jet engine works).
      • That's actually carbon monoxide, not dioxide, and it's actually a poison, not a suffocating agent.
    • Let's not forget any time they mention anything pertaining to ballistics. For instance, there has never been a single case where ballistic evidence pertaining to things like spent brass or marks on a bullet have solved a crime, simply because such things change with every single time a gun is fired due to mechanical wear and fouling. This is a decidedly obvious thing.
      • This hasn't stopped the US Congress from believing that trope and attempting to pass a gun registry of guns' bullet marks.
  • The Weakest Link research team proved itself the weakest link when the question was asked to a contestant "Montreal is the capital city of which Canadian province?" They claimed the answer was Quebec, while in fact the correct answer is none. Quebec City is the capital of Quebec, as Montreal has not been the capital city of the province since its parliament was burned down during a riot in 1849. Anyone who uses Google for more than porn picture image searches could have found that critical detail in under 10 seconds.
  • Pick a cop show. Any cop show. That interrogation scene with a desk between the concerned parties? That's not how it works in real life.
    • Having been in said interrogation room with a desk in the middle, this troper would like to know what's unrealistic about it.
    • Some episodes of The First 48 had a similar setup. Worse, interviews on cop shows are almost never recorded, as they are in real life, in case a witness or suspect lies about something later.
  • 24. Jack Bauer makes a successful cell [mobile] phone call from inside the hold of a flying aircraft. Shouts of, 'It's a Faraday cage!!' were heard...
  • In one Farscape tie-in novel the heroes' escape depends on Rygel's helium farts exploding.
  • A brilliant moment in the 2008 series of The Apprentice (UK) involved a candidate who claimed to be a "good Jewish boy" trying to buy a Kosher chicken in Morocco... from a Muslim butcher. He thought it'd be "close enough". For the win, he asked the butcher if the chicken was "blessed" and made the sign of the cross.
    • While the blessing bit is a bit confusing, halal and kosher rules are sufficiently similar to each other that in countries where the two religious groups are speaking to each other, it's not uncommon for one group to shop at the other's stores when the alternative is unavailable; quite literally, halal is considered "close enough" to kosher and vice versa for many.
  • Almost any time the series Friends made any reference to Ross' job as a paleontologist, a Critical Research Failure was bound to follow. Fortunately, for most of the series, they carefully avoided making all but passing references to it, perhaps for that reason. Unfortunately, in one episode, Ross and Phoebe get into an argument over evolution. Phoebe claims not to "believe in it," although to the show's credit, Ross actually says, "Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like, like, like the air we breathe, like gravity." That falls apart, though, when Phoebe's argument-ending rant is, "Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat? And, up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess of crap came out." Given that the answer to the latter one, as anyone who took more than one science class in college would know, is "Ummm... no?" and the answer to the former, as anyone who took 6th grade history would know, is, "Seriously, no," the fact that Phoebe's argument causes Ross to cave is just infuriatingly wrong.
    • This troper knows several people, all of whom passed sixth-grade history, do believe that everyone thought the world was flat before Columbus. And they always give me a look like I'm some kind of real-life troll for saying so.
    • This is [[Cloudcuckoolander Pheobe]] we're talking about. Thus it's totally justified.
    • There is one - count'em, one - instance known where the writers of Friends actually did do the research - in the episode where Ross was concerned that people were using the part of the library where his thesis was stored for sex, he mentions a well-known book on paleontology that actually exists. The fact that this is the only case where they did do the research depresses many actual paleontologists, who really wish that their field would get at least one decent representation in media.
    • There is, unfortunately, a situation, where the fact that Friends didn't do the research made someone else's life much, much worse: There is a Real Life paleontologist, currently working, whose name is David Schwimmer. Mentioning the sitcom in question near him while it was in production generated a very agonized expression on his face.
  • In the '50s The Adventures Of Superman, the Gadgeteer Genius Professor Pepperwinkle often provided nonsense explanations about how his inventions worked— the most egregious was a teleporter that worked by using a vacuum pump to suck the air out from between a person's atoms, causing that person to shrink to microscopic size, and then shooting them through a telephone line and knocking the receiver off the hook at the other end with their momentum. Can you spot anything wrong with that explanation? If not, You Suck.
  • In Chuck, an email is lost when the computer it was opened on is dropped and broken.
    • It's possible that Chuck set up his computer to be an email server, in which case it would have received the email directly and stored it on the hard drive. It would be a bit odd, but Chuck would definitely have the tech skills needed to do it.
  • Sure, you may not expect a lot of research in Soap Operas, but when FBI Agent Winifred started talking about a box to secure a toxin as being "metal with titanium alloy", this troper started banging his head against a wall.
    • Note, though, that Winifred being a sub-5-foot-tall FBI Agent is not a Critical Research Failure. There are no height requirements for special agents.
  • An episode of Voyagers had the main characters having to stop von Braun's group of rocket scientists from surrendering to the Russians, "Or man will never walk on the moon". Uh, wouldn't they just work with Korolev's group? Or do cosmonauts not count as human?
    • No.
  • An episode of Mc Millan & Wife had Sally kidnapped by a rogue group of Satanists due to her resemblance to the Egyptian goddess Serena. The Satanists' leader's identity is exposed because he makes a comment about ancient Egypt. There are so many things wrong with this, but here are some of the big ones: 1) There is no connection between any form of Satan worship and Egypt. 2) There was no Egyptian goddess named "Serena." 3) "Serena" isn't an even remotely Egyptian name.
  • Kutner from House is an Indian American who was placed in foster care after his parents died, implying that there was no next of kin willing to take him in. This would simply not happen in Indian culture; as long as any relatives could be found, some member of the extended family would have adopted him regardless of any inconvenience.

New Media

Western Animation
  • The Danny Phantom episode "Infinite Realms" was made of this trope. It has the standard faulty witch-burning "fact", but the really annoying bit was when Vlad tried to complete his desire to "rule the earth from the skies" by taking down the Wright brothers' flyer. First of all, someone as illustrious as Vlad would know that hot air balloons and zeppelins had existed for at least decades before the first heavier-than-air vehicle. Secondly, it was common knowledge that the tech was becoming feasible, and a lot of people were getting in on it. Thirdly, the Wright brothers studied and tested the theories regarding flight of that time, so the crash would simply convince them to do more tests. Fourthly, they would not notice a big hole in the wing, attribute their failure to that, repair the plane, and try again?
    • And the fact that it would hardly change history save for the fact that the US wouldn't be able to call dibs on the invention of heavier-than-air machines after its invention was already well-known around the world by ANOTHER inventor, because the Wright Brothers didn't even bother to have proof or to make public their invention in case, you know, one of the numerous inventors who were as close as them actually make it in the meanwhile? Not two years after the Flyer's first successful test, Brazilian inventor Santos Dumont flew his 14-bis in Paris, winning an international contest about inventing flying machines and being considered the inventor of the airplane for years before the US just decided that it should be the Wright Brothers, even though they took too long to register their invention... Basically, the Flyer was mostly a non-issue regarding the earlier months of flight technology advancements world-wide because the rest of the world just didn't know it even existed.
  • Disney's version of Hercules.
    • Not least of which, the fact that Heracles is the Greek name of the hero and Hercules is the Latin name.
    • The movie's creators did actually do the research (there's plenty of nods and literal Mythology Gags to things like the 12 labors), they just chose to ignore it in favor of a G-rating and the Rule Of Funny.
    • The opening scene of the movie, with the Greek historian narrator being cut off by the Motown-style, gospel-singing Muses, hangs a huge lampshade over the film and makes it clear it's not even pretending to be accurate.
  • Mentioning the Flyer, just about every depiction of it makes it fly way too good to give it any believability for this historic knowledged troper. But a particularly bad example comes from The Simpsons, where a Flyer replica (or the original, not sure) is hijacked by Sideshow Bob and, not only it takes off relatively easily, it manages to stay on air for around a few hours (in stable flight even!) until it reached its destination (when the original Flyer could only fly for about 10 seconds, or up to 20 in a good day). Sure, the show is known for stretching the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief as far as it goes, specially when it comes to historical and geographical accuracy, but the joke was around the plane being ridiculously slow, when it should have been about it lasting that long.
    Grampa: Oh, jeeh — you're ignorant! That's the Wright Brothers' plane. At Kitty Hawk in 1903, Charles Lindbergh flew it fifteen miles on a thimbleful of corn oil. Single-handedly won us the Civil War, it did.
    Bart: So how do you know so much about American history?
    Grampa: I pieced it together, mostly from sugar packets.
  • Frequently done deliberately in Futurama for comic effect. One notable example, "with wind chill it's 50 degrees below absolute zero".
    • Grab three people in the Futurama production cast, and at least one of them almost certainly will be a doctor or physicist. They love doing this crap.
  • Pretty much any cartoon that has Thomas Edison or Ben Franklin and Time Travel will lead to the cast causing the future to have no electricity; the Ben Franklin kite story is untrue, and I guess Tesla doesn't count in history.
    • Especially egregious in Jimmy Neutron in which Tesla was actually mentioned, albeit as an insulting aside by Edison... though that's in character.
    • Not to mention that it goes in hands with the Flyer's example. American writers often ignore the fact that some inventions attributed to Americans not only were already being researched world-wide somewhere, but sometimes they were already discovered somewhere. Before the USA this is true for Europe, as most people today probably believe gunpowder was invented in the late Middle Ages there, when it was invented much earlier in China. This comes from the false assumption that those discoveries were magically assembled in those inventors' minds, like it happens in the science of fiction (not to be confused with Science-Fiction) instead of being the fruit of the labor and research of dozens of scientists in various experiments with more or less relation and communication in between that eventually lead to those "leaps". Believing that Edison invented electricity out of the blue is like believing Einstein's theories of nuclear fission came to him without the efforts of Rutherford and other scientists in the discoveries about the atom before him... or, for a simpler analogy, that the car was invented without someone needing to invent the wheel before it.
    • Franklin WAS responsible for breakthroughs in the study of electricity. He didn't do the experiment with the kite himself, but it was his idea.
  • In-universe episode of Teen Titans:
    Beast Boy: Now I know how George Washington felt after Napoleon beat him at Pearl Harbor.
  • In the X-Men animated episode Days of Future Past, Part 2, Gambit travels to Washington, D.C. But the monitor shows the State of Washington (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).
  • In the Powerpuff Girls episode "Impeach Fuzzy", Mayor pulls a particularly epic one.
    Mayor: Oh my dear girl...If George Washington used snails instead of greyhounds to pull his sled, there'd be no trees for Honest Abe to shout from the highest mountain!
    Ms. Bellum: ...What?!
  • A Totally Spies episode had a bad guy fire a ray that absorbed all water at a woman drinking some from a bottle and her bottle becoming empty. Never mind that the human body is mostly water and the woman would have probably shriveled up and died.
  • Parodied in Recess, possibly in reference to Animal House, with TJ's inspiring speech, "Aid Albert Edison give up when they stole his theory of regularity? Did Benjamin Franklin give up when the Germans shot down his kite?"
  • According to the Phineas And Ferb episode "Greece Lightning", gladiators were Greek instead of Roman.
    • Lampshaded in the second episode of the half-hour, where one of Ferb's non-sequiturs is "You know, gladiators were Roman, not Greek."

Web Comics

Commercials
  • Here's an ad for the Chevrolet Silverado where Howie Long mocks the competing Dodge Ram for having a heated steering wheel. The Critical Research Failure comes through Silverado's upscale badge-engineered cousin, the GMC Sierra Denali. The Sierra Denali can be ordered with- you guessed it- a heated steering wheel.
    • That's probably not so much Research Failure as it is "knew all along but ignored it deliberately to make the product look more macho."
    • Sort of justified as the Sierra Denali has a starting price over $20,000 more than the Silverado and Ram.

Real Life
  • The picture at the top of this page. To answer the protestor's question: Yes. Yes we did.
  • Tony Blair once stated that Britain and the USA stood side by side 'during the Blitz', that is, the German bombing of UK cities in World War II. By the time the USA joined the war, the Blitz had long since ended. George Bush went one better, stating that Japan and the USA had cooperated successfully for 100 years...
    • To be fair (but also to go into extreme semantics), Bush never said 100 consecutive years. (though even then, most of the cooperation would have been total indifference to each other)
    • Blair could conceivably have been thinking of the Eagle Squadrons, RAF squadrons formed with volunteer American pilots, who served during that time, at least.
    • But Turkish President Abdullah Gul really took the cake. During a recent visit to Moscow he eulogized about peaceful and harmonic relations between Russia and Turkey... for the last 400 years. Cheerfully ignoring the fact that for the best part of these four centuries said relations basically boiled down to one, barely intermittent, war.
    • Obligatory George W. Bush example: trying to lead the head of a foreign nation in a Christian prayer. This head of state was King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Who is exactly as Islamic as he sounds.
  • In the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, one CBC journalist claimed that "relations between Britain and France were at 'historical lows.'" Everyone who has even the slightest knowledge of history rolled their eyes.
    • Fun fact for those who only know Hollywood European history: Britain and France have spent more time at war with each other than Germany has spent existing.
      • Or that Germany even exists in the first place (thanks to Napoleon) because Britain and France were once at a state of war.
  • At one point in early 2007, a Canadian MP from Newfoundland complained about the European Union's plans to ban the import of seal products (seals are routinely killed and processed in Newfoundland) by saying that "There are two members of the European Union that also kill seals, and those are Russia and Norway".
  • Almost every news story in the world about drugs contains a Critical Research Failure, especially in the UK. Common themes are that modern strains of cannabis called "skunk" are anything between 20 and 200 times stronger than 30 years ago, that the street value of a confiscated stash is some ludicrously high amount, and that the destructive effects that cocaine has upon its producer countries has something to do with the pharmacology of the drug.
    • Articles about cannabis on the BBC News website often feature a stock photo of a pile of leaves and twigs that were probably pulled out of a nearby hedge.
  • The Tea Protest put out by many Americans had several signs and people saying "Teabag Obama". For those that don't know Tea Bag is the act of putting your balls in another man's mouth. Strangely there are still sites with Teabag Obama online. What would be somewhat ludicrous of comparing the current United States with Britains' actions became one of the funniest things ever with a bunch of people proclaiming they want to put their balls in Obama's mouth.
    • In any case, the real case of Did Not Do The Research, was that the original Tea Party was a protest against the reduction of taxes on British Tea, that put American Tea Smugglers out of business. Well... reduction of taxes and the granting of a monopoly to the mismanaged, practically bankrupt East India Company whose stock just happened to be mostly held by various bits of the British government, which is what ticked off the common colonists (and again, those smugglers). Still it's a faulty historical linkage, as the colonists big beef was, ya know, 'no taxation with out representation,' not 'we don't like being taxed, even if you did win an election.'
  • Jack White of the White Stripes once claimed that "Think about it: every time there’s a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days". As Julian Baggini points out, the lists routinely include albums such as 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Pet Sounds' and 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" which took many months to record and utilised the latest studio technology available.
  • A particular data type in .NET Framework has a constructor that takes the number of "biliseconds" as one of its parameters, "bilisecond" apparently being a special unit of time created by Bill Gates (and defined in the documentation as a billionth of a second). That a billionth of a second already has a name ("nanosecond") is bad enough, but it's not the worst part. I'll let the following quote from developers of the competing implementation speak for itself:
    Some genius in MS came up with 'bilisecond', and gave it the ambiguous definition of one-"billionth" of a second. I'm almost tempted to use a nanosecond or a picosecond depending on the current culture :-) But, wait!! it turns out it's a microsecond, in reality. AAAAAAAAAAAARGH. Did this misguided individual think that a millisecond is a millionth of a second and thus come up with the dastardly name and the very wrong definition?
  • Remember kids, Narnia is a tool of the devil!
    And that's just the least of it!
    • Don't forget that Harry Potter teaches your kids witchcraft, as does D&D.
  • This Troper would like to point out one major flaw in Neo-Nazi thinking: Christianity owes its' start to Judaism. Everyone in the Bible was probably Jewish at one point or another. Even Jesus was born and raised Jewish. Unfortunately, this is a Critical Research Failure that can't be laughed at. (Or shouldn't be.)
  • Saying a news medium suffers from this from time to time is an understatement.
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