magnetism and stupidity

This summer I have been watching Warehouse 13 and old episodes of Sliders. Of the two Warehouse 13 is easily the more well-written but both have some serious plot-development and believability issues, even for science fiction. The problem is that I know that without some of those plot issues there really wouldn't be good storyline to follow. So, do I gripe about it or accept it for what it is? I am still working out what standard to use for what is sloppy storytelling and what is just me nitpicking.

As one example that I have seen repeated many times in TV and the movies, including the usually very well-written Lost last season, the last episode of Warehouse 13 had a scene where a character was wearing a magnetic coat and metallic objects slowly inched their way toward her before flying at her. Anyone who has played around with magnets for more than five minutes knows, though, that the region of space between where an object will not move toward a magnet and where it will move very quickly is small. Metallic objects do not visibly inch toward magnets. They either stay still or they move very quickly.

The magnet thing is just something that irritates my geeky side. I know that most people would not care. Something that is a bit less geeky that gets at me, though, is when characters behave in unrealistically stupid ways just to move the plot along. In Sliders the concept is that the main characters move from dimension to dimension seeing alternate worlds. No matter how many times they run into situations that are far different than they appear on the surface throughout the series at least one character will make serious assumptions based on the face value of a situation and do something stupid as a result in each episode. Somehow the characters have forgotten everything they learned in their experiences in the previous umpteen dimensions that they visited.

Since I generally life science fiction I should probably just buck it up to some extent. If I can accept the premise of a show that is about jumping dimensions or about collecting artifacts that have almost magical behavior, then I probably should not get too bothered if the magnets in that story don't behave like I expect them to.