Headscratchers / Cosmos

• The Spaceship of the Imagination can exceed the speed of light, shrink to subatomic size, go backwards and forwards in time, handle extreme heat and cold.... but take it into the event horizon of a black hole and it starts to shake and shimmy? I hope Tyson kept the receipt.
  • That's actually fridge brilliance; it explores the cosmos as it is revealed to be by science, so its abilities break down where current day science's understanding of what is going on breaks down. It even happened before; Taking it to Titan Tyson was able to see hints that there might be life, but wasn't able to get a conclusive answer.
  • I think of it this way: The ship of the imagination can do anything the pilot can imagine. In the face of something as awesome and powerful as a black hole, Neil simply can't imagine flying into it without repercussions.
• In the 1st episode of the new Neil Tyson series, the spaceship of the imagination is shown departing from Earth orbit, surrounded by real-life spacecraft, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. The problem is, the spacecraft are shown far far closer together than they ever get in real life. This may have been the fault of Brannon "Star Trek" Braga, who's listed in the credits and was likely involved with the special effects team.
  • That, or it's simply a case of Artistic License, which the series does employ. (Chlorophyll factory, anyone?)
• We get a ton of shots of the Ship of the Imagination in the new series, but I just looked for images of the ship from the original series to compare it to. However I can't find any and after watching a clip of the old show I'm not even sure you do get an external shot of it. Can anyone help with this?
  • Because there was no CGI at the time, the old ship is just an animated facsimile of a dandelion seed. It looks kind of like a lens flare.