The stupid--let me show you it.

So, I've been posting to Television Without Pity--mostly in the HEROES forum, where I've been lambasting the horrible, horrible writing (and the resultant mind-numbing stupidity of the characters). In one thread, one of the usual suspects, a fanboy who cannot admit that anything doesn't make sense wrote:

"Seriously, Claire's inhability to feel pain, Sylar hability to feel empathy and Elle's inhability to control her power should've been major warning signs the eclipse was near if Arthur wouldn't have warned us first."

To which another poster responded thus:

"What did any of this have to do with the eclipse? Claire lost the ability to feel pain in the second episode, so why wasn't anyone else affected? We saw no signs of Daphne having problems with her ability, for example. They also seemed to be trying to show that Sylar has been an empath all along - that's why he kept Brian Davis's TK and lost everything else to the Shanti virus.

If anything, your assertion just proves how muddled the show was in this volume."

To which Fanboy replied (note the bolded text in particular):

"The eclipse is supposed to affect these people's abilities so the fact that it was coming should've affected those more sensible to it like Claire or Sylar and those who would've used their abilities since childhood like Elle, since an eclipse is an astronomical event that doesn't occur over night it does make sense that Claire's abilities would've been altered since episode 2 same goes to Elle or Sylar."

I just couldn't let that go by without comment.

"An eclipse is precisely that--an astronomical event that occurs overnight--if by "overnight" you mean "over the course of an hour or less.

Before and after the moon passes between the sun and the earth (more precisely between the and SOME POINTS on the earth), it's a completely ordinary day. The earth spins around it's axis and it whizzes around the sun. The moon orbits the earth, exactly as it does every day. The only thing that changes is that sometimes the moon passes between the sun and some place on the earth's surface and it's shadow falls on the earth.

Spooky stuff for primitive savages. Completely predictable even for non-industrial civilizations which pay attention to such things. One of the sillier things in the whole Villains volume was the alleged import of psychic visions predicting the eclipse when 30 second on Google or a look at a handy almanac could tell you the schedule for eclipses for years to come (as well as which locations will experience partial or complete eclipses). Admittedly, most eclipses don't cover the entire earth from NYC to Japan, but...I chalk that up to more writer stupidity."

But the Fanboy wasn't done humiliating himself yet:

"An eclipse occurs when one celestial object moves into the shadow of another and while the actual shadow takes place over the course of an hour it takes waaaay longer than that for the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in the same gravitational system along a straight line(for example, a planet moving into the shadow cast by one of its moons, a moon passing into the shadow cast by its parent planet, or a moon passing into the shadow of another moon). Since it takes time for these celestial objects to intersect the position of the observer someone whose ablities are affected by these global events should sense those changes even before the eclipse actually takes place which is exactly what happened to Claire, Sylar and Elle weeks before the shadow was cast among them."

Another poster responded to that:

"My memory might fail me here, but where in the show was it said that that's exactly what happened to these character's abilities? From what I saw, Elle's problems were said to be psychological issues caused by her father's death and her relationship with him. Claire's inability to feel pain was because of something Sylar did to her brain. Sylar's characterization was so muddled that I find it impossible to tell what was intended by the writers and not sure they know themselves, but I don't remember his ability to absorb the powers emphatically to be written off to the eclipse. On the contrary, from the show itself and especially from the writers' interviews, I got the impression that they didn't want to (or failed creatively to) impose any specific rules on powers/eclipse dependency. Every time eclipse is brought up, the writers mumble something unspecific (like "all eclipses are different", or "who said Mohinder is right about the powers/eclipse connection") and move on to the next question, so I don't see how it could be said that that's what exactly happened. Correct me if I am wrong, and there is specific on screen evidence."

I also chimed in, though I went back and edited out my attempt to explain to the dimwit (again) the silliness of his argument. (I didn't want to draw the ire of the moderators).

"Edited to remove argument about the details of how an eclipse happens.

As a metaphor, I suppose it might've had some value. But made into a literal plot device it was laughable. It was even more laughable when it became clear that the writers had never thought about the implications of this plot device when, as Alpert points out above, they had to resort to "uh...every eclipse is different" and so forth to "explain" how this (utterly predictable and recurring) event could possible have surprised anyone--much less the alleged Machiavellian masterminds (including one 400 year-old immortal) on the show."

But...the breadth and depth of his cluelessness was impressive. So much so that I had to memorialize it here.