Indistinguishable from Magic

I recently discovered The Boys on Amazon Prime. I’m binge-watching it at present and started writing this when I’d got to the penultimate episode in the first season; by the time you read this, I will probably have finished the second season. *

 

The Boys has been described as a superhero show for people who don’t like superheroes, and I wouldn’t dispute that, although I happen to like superheroes (well, some). Much has also been made of Karl Urban’s accent in the show. Urban plays Billy Butcher, a former member of the British special forces who is on a mission to bring down the superheroes (‘supes’) - especially Homelander, who he believes is responsible for the disappearance of his wife - and his accent lurches alarmingly from Urban’s native New Zealand to Mockney in a manner that suggests it’s probably deliberate.

 

The supes in The Boys are the antithesis of the archetypical superhero. Corrupt, lawless, and controlled and monetised by Vought International, whose goal is to integrate The Seven (their top superheroes, analogous to DC Comics’ Justice League) into the US military. Butcher’s rag-tag band of vigilantes aim to bring them down, turning the usual superhero tropes on their head: the bad guys are the good guys, and vice versa.

 

Creators of superheroes inevitably build into their characters some flaw or vulnerability. Superman’s inability to penetrate lead with his x-ray vision and his weakness against kryptonite for example, without which his character would be unbeatable. Actually, Superman’s near invulnerability makes him the dullest and most boring of all the superheroes in the DC or Marvel universes. Batman and Ironman, who have no superpowers but rely on their wits and technology are the most interesting of all the heroes.

 

Much popular science fiction, or fiction that features superheroes or wizards has a fundamental problem. The only rules that restrict the heroes are the ones imposed by the creators. Technically, science fiction ought to abide by the laws of physics, but as we have yet to develop faster than light travel, time travel, teleporters, etc, etc, we have to suspend disbelief and go with the ‘near science’ that writers invent to explain away their complete disregard for nature’s laws. In fairness, there are some writers – Arthur C Clarke, James Blish, Isaac Asimov, and Larry Niven to name a few – whose works are characterized by a concern for scientific accuracy and logic, but others…

 

Arthur C Clarke

Take Star Trek. I can remember watching and thoroughly enjoying the original series when it first appeared on TV screens in Britain, although the corny lines and cheap special effects were apparent even then; who can forget the episode featuring Kirk versus the Gorn? The Next Generation (TNG) has its moments – episodes featuring The Borg are particularly enjoyable – but where Next Generation really gets on my nerves is with the jury-rigged enhancements made to the USS Enterprise that are – to borrow from Arthur C Clarke’s third law – “indistinguishable from magic.”

 

Kirk v The Gorn

Clarke’s third law states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and in Star Trek TNG it seems that almost every single episode features Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge creating – as if by magic – a solution to a seemingly insoluble problem.

 

Less Engineer, more Wizard

Usually, there is some requirement for the Enterprise to travel faster than the supposed safe upper limit of warp 9, or for the ship to travel through time, or to become cloaked, or to become capable of some other hitherto unthought-of functionality. Thus, La Forge, or Data, or the two together, will come up with some gibberish about reconfiguring the warp core and concatenating the frequency modulations with the energy field created by some stellar object, which will enable the ship to travel at speeds in excess of warp9/travel through time/become cloaked/all of these (delete as appropriate).

 

And once this has been successfully implemented and the mission accomplished, this groundbreaking technological achievement is never mentioned again. Until the next time the Enterprise needs to travel at speeds in excess of warp9/travel through time/become cloaked/all of these, in which case La Forge, or Data, or the two of them together, will come up with some new solution to the problem.

 

Did Captain Picard never have to give feedback to Starfleet Command? Does he never get asked how the Enterprise managed to travel at speeds in excess of warp9/travel through time/become cloaked/all of these? You would think that these wondrous technological advances would be seized upon by Starfleet, developed and refined, and then rolled out across the fleet, but no, they remain the Enterprise’s amnesic little secret.

 

These sort of narrative devices – the modern-day equivalents of the “with one bound he was free” trope – diminish any sense of jeopardy and are thoroughly boring. Back in the 1960s, the Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward made a feature out it by having Batman and Robin left in some fiendish trap at the end of one episode, from which they would escape by some highly implausible, but highly ingenious trick in the next. One I especially remember is the dynamic duo using some discarded chewing gum to block the air hole of the altimeter in the basket of a hot air balloon in which they are slowly rising and from which they would have plunged to their deaths had they reached a certain altitude. 

It worked in Batman because the whole thing was played for laughs – each week I would try to guess how the duo would escape the trap they found themselves in; I never guessed one – but in TNG, or Harry Potter to name another, it’s a bit ho-hum. The characters in Harry Potter get themselves out of trouble by waving a wand and muttering some incantation, but even that is less of a cop-out than Star Trek’s introduction of magical technology.

 

Accepting that a fantastical subject, be it science fiction, magic, or superheroes, requires a huge suspension of disbelief and at no point in The Boys did I think “that’s ridiculous” because the whole thing is ridiculous, but it follows its own internal logic.

Despite the gore (the body count is alarmingly high, there’s claret and dismembered bodies all over the place), and the language, which is definitely suitable for post-watershed viewers only, The Boys has its tongue firmly in its cheek, and all the better for it.

 

* I have.