Troperville
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"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, often mixed with a heavy dose of They Just Didnt Care. 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 soon realizes the writers made the whole thing up.
See also Gretzky Has The Ball, Dan Browned.
Contrast the MST 3 K Mantra, which tells us not to worry about these little details.
Examples:
- The aforementioned incident involving Homer's handwriting, which occurred without the dice or scorn in an episode of Sea Quest DSV. This troper nearly died when Lucas made the comment. According to later writers, Homer was a blind, illiterate practitioner of a Oral Tradition and may have never existed at all.
- Not to mention that the versions of the Iliad and Odyssey that we know today weren't written down until several hundred years after Homer's death - and therefore were probably the victims of mutation at the hands of the various rhapsodes who memorized the stories.
- As a good clue that the writers of Hallmark's made-for-tv miniseries of Dinotopia just didn't care, little Samantha (who lives in a dinosaur hatchery) declares that the resident Ceratopsian (frilled quadruped with horns
 ) is a member of the Hadrosaur family (long-necked "duckbill").
- Not that the movie had much legitimacy going for it, but there's a bit in Mission To Mars where 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.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation episode “The Royale”, has Data announcing that the planet they are orbiting has a surface temperature of -291ºC, in other words 18 ºC below absolute zero.
- 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. This Troper was not aware that evolution is a sentient or deliberate force. Either way, Phlox was describing the dying species basically adapting a failure, which is the opposite way evolutions works. Species die from failure to adapt, not adapting failures.
- Heck, the entire franchise utterly fails in this regard. Humans cross-breeding with other humanoid aliens (which is laughable in itself) and producing fertile hybrid offspring?
- This Troper watched five minutes of one episode he can't identify, because after the episode's Mr Exposition mentioned how antibodies were forcing mutations in someone's DNA he had to switch off the TV in frustration. 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.
- This troper has merely a passing knowledge of cryptography, but it was enough to realise that the whole premise of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress was based on BS. The entire point of the story is 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 a hell of a lot 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 bullshit (it's all a big scam), but minus one million because highly trained NSA cryptologists not realizing it's bullshit 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 saw Das Boot. Or U-571. Or fracking 'Allo 'Allo!
- This troper's mother was a retired NSA worker at the time she read it (don't know what she did, but I know she couldn't do an assignment in Moscow because she was pregnant with me (cold-war era mind you). She read the first few chapters and called Dan Brown out on BS. She had been a fan of his work up to that point, but has yet to look at the other books she hadn't yet read.
- Don't forget that the most brilliant cryptographic mind in the world sets the password on his doomsday device to the number '3'.
- Not that his explanations up 'til then had been miracles of believability, but there does come a moment in SF B-Movie classic The Amazing Colossal Man in which the Dr Exposition character claims that 'The heart is made up of essentially a single cell...' Appropriately mocked during the misting: "OK, you're not a real doctor, are you?"
- 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?").
- And he's in what should be an airtight space suit.
- Everything that ever happens during Missile to the Moon. There's Earth-normal gravity the whole way there, and then it just gets worse.
- While National Treasure does not claim to be factual in its plot, the concept and much of the dialogue is rife with historical facts, spouted off by the history-professor main characters at regular intervals. Funny, then, that they fail to realize that Daylight Savings was not invented by Benjamin Franklin...
- And speaking of National Treasure, the appearing-ink scene was total hogwash. Partially because breath-heat is not nearly powerful enough to activate that kind of ink, and also because lemon juice is a form of invisible ink, not a revealer for something already in place. (Rubbing it over the parchment and heating it should have obscured the words, not reveal them.) Admittedly, this movie is about history, but after CSI we've come to expect more from Jerry Bruckheimer.
- Then there was the assumption that light would hit the same part of a building at a particular time of day with total dis-regard for the fact that the sun is in a different place depending on the time of year...
- And how about the FBI agents not knowing who "Silence Dogood" was? That fact was printed in Disney FLIPPING Adventures!
- CSI is hardly invulnerable to this trope, especially to those familiar with actual forensic investigation.
- In one episode of CSI, the investigators recreate a woman's face using an imprint from a concrete block, then have to guess at her complexion and hair color. Because she appears to be Scandinavian, they give her light skin and blond hair. Fair enough. Then they give her brown eyes because they're the "most common," failing to realize that brown eyes are only common among non-Scandanavians. Following their logic, they might as well have given her black hair and a medium complexion to go along with the brown eyes.
- This troper worked with facial recreation for a forensics class and will say that it is hard. He could barely make a recognizable picture of his partner who had to stand in front of him while doing it. Now try to imagine not knowing what the person looks like and needing to go on a witness' (very shaken) memory. In fact, the program he used (which was one of the more common ones on the market used by P Ds) avoided the above scenario by rendering everything in black and white.
- In another episode a woman drenches herself with liquor from a handle-sized bottle and lights herself on fire and burns herself almost to death as well as burning a second person all the way to death. It is my understanding that only 100+ proof liquor will ignite - and that, even then, it will not burn very hot. Secondly, alchohol of 100 proof or more comes in special bottles with non-removable spouts that prevent fast pouring (as in bottles of Bacardi 151). Also, how common is it to find 100 proof liquor in a handle-sized bottle!?!?
- This troper can't watch historical films after taking AP European History. The Man In The Iron Mask, though accurate in how Louis XIV is supposed to have acted obviously lacked some research into French history. Perhaps it's just me not reading the book, but Louis was most definitely not a tactical genius (as shown in the opening moments in the French court) and actually used the people to strike back at the feudal aristocracy of France. What can you say? AP Euro will, in fact, ruin your life.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- The lead in The 40 Year Old Virgin successfully maintains his farce until mentioning breasts feel like bags of sand.
- The non-canonical 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.
- 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.
- Teaching Miss Tingle was by no means a good movie, but in the first twenty minutes, it did something that made this Massachusetts-based troper, even at age 14, call bullshit. One of the main characters is a girl we're constantly told is a great brain, and she produces a final project for her History class that's an "authentic recreation" of the diary of a girl who was killed during the Salem Witch Trials, right down to the book being authentically aged to resemble a diary that had survived the period. The titular bitch-on-wheels of the teacher opens the diary at random, and finds an entry on how the fictional girl fears she'll be burned at the stake tomorrow. No one was burned at the stake in the Salem Witch Trials. The student in question is disappointed -- madly so -- to find she got a C on the project, but she should just be glad she didn't get an F and laughed out of class to boot.
- Not to mention the fact that the young girls were the ones doing the accusing and the vast majority of those accused and/or killed were men and older women.
- The same goof was made by an episode of Charmed, as well as - if I recall correctly - in Relic Hunter.
- 24, like CSI, could probably fill it's own page with such lapses. In this troper's mind, they'll never top the Season 4 incident where terrorists hijack a nuclear missile transport and manage to immediately lose all satellite tracking by ducking into the mountains... of Iowa.
- Most versions of The Phantom of the Opera, including the stage version of the musical, are set sometime during the Belle Epoque. The Joel Schumacher movie, aiming to evoke the earlier era of Napoleon III's reign, moved the time frame to late 1870-1871--right when said reign was collapsing due to the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (and altogether not a fun time to be in France).
- Real Life Newscasting : A July 4th, 2008 report by CNN revealed that "55% of gun owners use them in suicide attempts." That'd be more than thirty million attempted suicides, or ten percent of the population.
- Try to watch the scene of A Beautiful Mind where Nash explains his equilibrium (his real life magnum opus) with an economist. If the economist doesn't laugh, he may cry.
- In case you're curious, in the movie, Nash explains it thus: Four guys are in a bar, there are four brunettes and one blond. Everyone has the hots for the blond, but if they all hit on her, she'll get turned off by the attention and leave without them, after which the guys will have no chance with the brunettes because they won't like being a second choice, so all the guys go home alone. Nash's "equilibrium" is for all the guys to agree to snub the blond and go for the brunettes. The Critical Research Failure is the fact that the definition of a Nash Equilibrium is where no party acting on its own can improve their outcome, which is obviously not true in this case as any one of the guys can decide to screw over his friends and hit on the blond. The actual equilibrium is for the four guys to agree somehow for one of them to get to hit on the blond while the other three take one for the team with the brunettes.
- And then they all walk out with Richard Feynman anyway.
- Krakatoa, East of Java managed to get this in the title: Krakatoa is actually west of Java.
- The movie Amadeus features, besides the well-known Historical Villain Upgrade of Salieri, a scene in which Mozart dictates to Salieri the orchestration of the "Confutatis" of his unfinished Requiem, part by part. Most of these parts were not filled in until after Mozart's death by Süssmayr.
- Pretty much every Disaster Movie has this to some extent. This troper once watched a film (I believe it was called The Core) that had an obligatory foreign city getting destroyed sequence involving the (stone) Colosseum in Rome becoming a giant lightning rod and then exploding. This troper found himself unable to stop laughing for at least five minutes after that.
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