The absolute worst nerdgas excesses occur when you have two geeks in a cross-franchise argument. You know the kind...

"Can the Enterprise take out an Imperial Star Destroyer?"

"How would a Jedi with a light saber fare against a Borg drone?"

Thus commence some of the geekiest and most pointless arguments know to humanity. When it comes to arguing about non-concepts, theology has absolutely nothing on sci-fi fandom.

I'm led to believe that in an earlier edit of the script, humans' brains were to be used as part of the CPU matrix used to run The Matrix. This was ultimately judged too complicated for the non-nerd public to understand, and the power-by-heat explanation was substituted. It's a crappy edit, but knowing the authors' original intent helps some.

John at Aravir:

That is indeed interesting. Alas, process doesn't show up on the screen -- you have to go with what actually gets filmed. That's what's "canonical" in these cases.

Ever witness a mass-nerdgassing? Frightening zeitgeist.

It was 1978, the long-gone Edens Theater in Northbrook IL with its huge curved screen and a swooping saddle roof (designed by my father, note). Opening night for Ralph Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings." Lots and lots of Tolkein-nerds in the audience, not just the half-dozen who gathered from my high school. We were already a bit skeptical having seen Wizards, and having seen stills of Treebeard with a sawn-off branch for a nose, but we had to go see it.

Yeah, the animation sucked, we lived through that. Yeah, some critical stuff was cut out, we grumbled quietly (even Jackson skipped Tom Bombadil).

Until we got to Lothlorien, and Galadriel says, "And this is my husband, Celeborn." Except she pronounced it as you would in English (nerdgassing on) and Tolkien's appendices to the books clearly stated that the letter C is always a hard sound. The theater echoed with "That's KEL-eborn." If nerdgas were sarin, we'd have wiped out the entire North Shore.

Okay, some nerdgas venting about the most hole/cliche-riddled "serious" SF movie I know of: the alien invasion flick "Signs" that starred Mel Gibson. Where to begin...

...how about with the premise that aliens used crop circles as navigation aids for their invasion fleet? You know, after traveling a zillion light years and finding Earth with no problem, they suddenly have no clue how to get to Philadelphia.

...how about the premise that this advanced spacefaring race chooses to invade a planet covered with water, the substance that makes them melt like the Wicked Witch of the West?

...how about the premise that these technologically sophisticated alien invaders decide to conduct their ground invasion with no weapons whatsoever, not so much as a pointed stick?

I could go on and on. Whew, it felt good to get that out of my system.

On the other hand, if kvetching (nerdgassing) about the improbability of machines using humans for batteries "combined with a form fusion" causes the kvetcher (nerdgasser) as well as his victim kvetchees (the nerd-gassed) to attain a better grasp of science, batteries and fusion - can it be all bad?

I'm curious as to whether the term applies when the underlying science itself is in question and the nerdgassers are physicists - where is the line?

Let's say, oh, multiple universes:

Is the Universe Made of Math?
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math
and...
http://www.slate.com/id/2087206/

Empire Strikes Back has to be the champion here:

Han gets out of his ship when it's parked in a deep hole in a small asteroid. Not only is gravity seemingly normal, but he's just wearing a little breather mask on his face--no body protection whatsoever. And he doesn't explode???

I realize we're talking a Galaxy Far, Far Away here, and maybe their biology is a bit different than ours, but seriously...WTF were they thinking???

(Ahh...that's better. The pressure was really building there, nice to vent some of that gas off...)

Star Trek had so many holes, it inspired no less than 5 books on the subject -- http://www.nitcentral.com/

The final battle scene in Independence day.
The president fires 5 missiles, while everyone else appears to have only 4.

My favorite nerdgasser is Phil Plait, The Bad Astonomer:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/

My favorite nerdgasser is Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/

All through The Phantom Menace, Anakin mopes about how he misses his Mom.

He ends up saving Naboo, and at the end of the planet they throw him a parade—but not one person thinks to, like, go and buy his Mom for him. Let's be honest here, she probably would have cost less than one of Amidala's glowy dresses, let alone the whole parade thing.

We're expected to believe that everybody, including Padme, just happened to forget about her? Of course we are, because how else is Anakin going to become Darth Vader? Bleah.

End of the movie. Not the planet. Feh.

I voted other because for me and my friends Dune (either version) is the ultimate for nerdgassing.

Sure there's the easy stuff; The absurd wierding modules of the film or the fat fremen of the mini-series. But it's the little things that make this fun.

My current major peeve is the house colors. Apparently it would just be too much for the viewing public to handle if the bad guys wore blue and white (the colors of House Harkonnen) while the good guys wore black and red (the colors of House Atreides). Both the Lynch film and the SciFi mini-series, to a greater extent, effectively reversed the livery of these Houses.

And is it that tough to make a CGI model of an ornithopter that has wings that actually flap or did nobody bother to look up the word in a dictionary?

There's a line in X-Men II that completely pulls me out of the movie every time I hear it. Mystique, disguised as Senator Kelly, is getting information from Stryker about Magneto's prison, when Stryker drops this gem:

"We developed the technology that built his plastic prison."

Really? So you mean you just made a prison out of plastic. What technology does that require other than telling some guy named Phil who works in a fabrication shop that you need a crap load of plastic? You could draw the whole thing up in CAD in about five minutes. That's some really high technology there.

I love the movie, but if I don't have lots of blue indicator lights and a sleek silver finish, it ain't technology, it's just stuff.

Great article.

Villain: And now, I will turn out the sun!
[Throws big switch. Earth in instant darkness.]

Gah! What happened to the 8 light-minutes it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Gah!....

{pause}

Just me then?

If there is one movie that I love to nerdgas about, it's X-Men III. It's been two years, and I still can't see or hear anything about what used to be my favorite comic-to-movie franchise without foaming at the mouth.

It all comes to a head for me in the final, should-have-been-climactic scene, when we see Famke Janssen standing on top of a pile of rubble with a constipated look on her face, while an intern waves a gel in front of her spotlight and another hits her with a fan. I mean, seriously, did the effects budget run out at that exact moment? We just sat through two hours of badly-written boredom, saw some of our favorite characters casually murdered for no good reason, most of our other favorites neutered or turned into whiny caricatures of themselves, and it was all for THIS??? I hate that movie so much, I wish I could hate it to death....

Hands down the fastest to get me all nerdgassy: Time travel. There just doesn't seem to be a good way to do this without running into some serious paradoxes. Take, for example, Back to the Future 2. Marty must travel to 1955 to prevent Biff from using a sports almanac from 2015 to take over Hill Valley in 1985. He's successful, natch, but if the "bad" 1985 never exists then Marty never has to travel through time and Biff DOES get the almanac! Which means Marty DOES travel through time. Which means he doesn't.

I think my nose is bleeding.

Oh lordy, there are so, so many.

Just recently I was nerdgassing at some length about BSG, season 3 of which I just finished watching on DVD. ("so the Cylons invented five singleton humanoids so secretly that no one, neither the creators nor the actual humanoids themselves, have any idea who they are, dispersed them into the human population for no obvious reason, then came and slaughtered 99.9999+% of the human population, and at least four of the five singletons just happened to be among the tiny handful that survived the nukes and made it onto spaceships?")

As often as I nerdgas about science or continuity though, I'm also a drama geek, so I'll nerdgas about narrative structure and symbolism and such. The midicholorians didn't upset me because of the dumb science or the lack of continuity, but because they attacked the mythological underpinnings of the series--turning the Force from something mystical, incomprehensible, and staggeringly vast and powerful, into something there's a frigging blood test for. Arggh.

I remember raving at some length about the scene in Deep Impact where there's a group of people--including a mother with a baby--drawing straws to see who gets to ride in a helicopter to higher ground. Some sarcastic asshole responds to a complaint with "What is this, women and children first?!" And nobody says "Yes, you waste of air, it is." But there was a lot of bad science to go with the bad ethics. (Starting in the very first scene, where the kid photographs the comet through a telescope and his camera goes "clickwhirrr".)

(BTW, there's another species of nerdgassing that occurs under the exact opposite circumstances: When you see a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Apollo 13 and you just can't shut up about how accurate it was.)

I find my self nerdgassing any time I watch The Two Towers Faramir instead of encouraging Frodo and Sam forward on the Journey instead takes them backwards into the city. NOT AT ALL IN THE BOOK. X-MEN 3 no nerdgassing needed here we all know why that sucked.

Highlander movies:

1. Awesome. They should have followed the "There can be only one" tagline and left it at that!

2. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

3. Look, sorry about HL2; lets just pretend it never happened, OK? (A wise decision.)

feel free to continue to critise the rest of the franchise from here.

I don't think the Matrix example requires much nerdgassing to fix; "morpheus was wrong" does the trick for me. He claimed/believed all sorts of other things that were either wrong or simplified: neo was unprecedented, the oracle was what she seemed [not sure of the spoiler requirements here, so I'm being vague], neo's purpose, etc. It doesn't seem a stretch to add the battery thing onto that list. This is one of the reasons I actively like the second movie, it fixes all the problems of the first movie. Why aren't the agents omnipotent? see second movie.

Superman II...I think most people know where I'm going with this one

The assinine Kryptonian powers invented in this film from the fingerpoint-lifting off the ground, to the jelly "S" shield Big Blue tosses at his enemy to the mindwiping kiss. I know Superman was getting pretty powerful in the comics in the Silver Age, but these powers just seem so out of line.

Ok its not a sci-fi movie but it IS Nerdgassing. From season 6 of Buffy (full of Nerdgassery at its finest...)

JONATHAN: Where’re we going?
WARREN: To Final Jeopardy. Where Buffy’s the one in jeopardy.
ANDREW: We are really super-villains now, like ... like Dr. No.
WARREN: Yeah, back when Bond was Connery, and movies were decent.
JONATHAN: (scornful) Who remembers Connery? I mean, Roger Moore was smooth.
WARREN: You’re insane. You’re short, and you’re insane.
ANDREW: I like Timothy Dalton! (Warren smacks Andrew upside the head.) Hey!
WARREN: Don’t make me pull over, okay?
(later)
WARREN: Connery is Bond. He had style.
JONATHAN: Yeah, but Roger Moore was funny.
WARREN: Moonraker? The gondola turns into a hovercraft? It’s retarded. Besides, the guy had, like, no edge.
ANDREW: Dalton had edge. In Licence to Kill he was a rogue agent. That’s edgy. And he was amazing in The Living Daylights.
JONATHAN: Yeah, which was written for Roger Moore, not Timothy Dalton!
WARREN: Okay, this is stupid! We’re wasting time. End of discussion. (beat) I mean, there’s a shot of like pigeons, doing double-takes when the gondola blasted by! Moonraker ... is inexcusable.
WARREN: Connery is the only actor of the bunch.
ANDREW: Timothy Dalton should get an Oscar and BEAT SEAN CONNERY OVER THE HEAD WITH IT!!
WARREN: (grimly) Okay, that’s it. (they scuffle)
JONATHAN: Hey! Stop it! Guys! (Sees Buffy approaching in the monitors) Look!
ANDREW: Oh, she’s coming over here! What do we do?
WARREN: Jonathan, grab your magic bone! (they giggle)

Far worse than the "fusion" part of the Matrix was why the computers bothered to immerse everybody in a virtual environment. Why not just kill off everything but the brainstem at birth? A vegetative human will produce just as much body heat, and they don't go getting uppity.

I think "nerdgas" may be my new favorite word.

I'm having a hard time thinking of one just at the moment. However, I think the term could apply to general nerdy correction so I'll share one of those!

A co-worker recently said there was a fly the size of a Cesna buzzing around the newsroom. At which point I told her that that would be impossible because it would collapse under its own weight. What with the volume increasing at a faster rate than the surface area of the skeleton, which is why things with external skeletons don't get very big...

It's a good thing they all know I'm a big dork already!

Nerdgassers are merely a manifestation of the same human tendency that generates wine connoisseurs ["an amusing and chatty zinfandel, obviously matured in the company of lilacs and yew casks"] and political commentators.

Awake on a train, your critique of chronodynamics relies on whether one adopts a "conservation of time-path" mechanism rather than that of the "pinched loop" [Donny Darko] or the "multiple tracks and railroad roundhouse convergence" conjectures for the nature of time [Sliding Doors].

Me a nerdgasser? Why thank you for the compliment!

JJB

I want to nerdgas a bit about the Alien movies - specifically I, III, and IV. If your spaceship has an alien infestation problem, why in the heck don't you all get in a spacesuit and open up the whole ship to vacuum? In the first one, they expend all that effort trying to chase it out the airlock - HELLO, get in your suits and open both airlock doors, and you don't even have to find it to kill it! Same thing at the beginning of III, when the facehugger is creeping around and they're in cryostasis. Open the airlock, no more facehugger. Same thing in IV - climb in your suits, open up the ship, and instant disinfectant.

Speaking of Alien IV, what kind of ASININE spaceship has an "emergency default command" to CRASH INTO THE EARTH? You would think computers that far in the future would at least be smart enough to avoid crashing into the home planet of humanity. Crashing a ship that size into the Earth would cause a mega-catastrophe!

Rob B, I'm with you 100% on the Superman II analysis.

So much so that my nerdgassing on the subject 25 years ago led me to sire my firstborn.

While dining with a former girlfriend [whom I had taken to Superman I when we were dating] and her then husband, he made the comment that S2 was a vastly superior movie than S1.

I countered that I could extemperaneously list a dozen major flaws with the film. He figured I was BSing and challenged me to do so.

Half an hour later as I finished demolishing the morally repugnant ending of "Might makes Right" when Superbully returns to clean the bar patron's clock and compared this with Mario Puzzo's original vision of Superman as Greek tragedy with the hero's struggle to act with moral rectitude by keeping his promise to Miss Tessmacher -- thereby choosing between the remote demigod-protector role assigned to him by Jor-El and that of the striving compassionate-humanity exemplified by Jonathan Ken -- the seeds of the collapse of that marriage were sown.

Lyn filed for a separation half a year later and moved in with me, leading to my aforementioned firstborn son. :>)

Nerdgassing is not mere nitpicking: it is passionate advocacy for what one sees as right amongst a world rife with wrong .

JJB

You CAN'T nergas about
1) The Matrix
2) Total Recall
because you can't tell what is real and what is simulation (which need not be realistic).

Star Wars must win the nerdgassing contest if quality of absurdity is the key measure, or nerdgas moments per hour of video.

Star Trek has a much greater quantity of nerdgassable instances, however.

Is it fair to nerdgas pure fantasies such as Superman or X-Men? While potentially entertaining, no one in their right mind (or is that left mind?) could consider them science fiction!

So should I even mention my #1 nerdgas choice: the Godzilla franchise??

Lastly, Marko is right on in describing the absolute worst nerdgas excesses. Alien vs Predator?

I ike Poll.

I like John Scalzi.

All these comments and no ones mentioned the grandaddy of all nerdgasses: The mac virus bringing down the alien mothership in Independance Day?

There's probably one or two other points that need addressing in that film too, probably... ;)

I didn't mind BSG seas 3, because at some point the cylons do mention "the programmers", and in seas 4 it comes out that they were programmed not to think about the final 5. I was smart enough to skip the Star Wars prequels. Two Towers did have me frothing at the mouth. Got too tired of the Star Treks. And while I just had a conversation with my father about the issues surrounding Doctor Who (both the original and the new), I think the award goes to Stargate Series'. Bad enough that everyone speaks english, even in another galaxy (in the original film, by the way, they went to a planet on the other side of the known UNIVERSE). And it's extremely annoying that no one can properly pronounce Shau'ri. Then there's the whole, yes, we CAN have both multiple realities, created every time a choice is made, and yet STILL travel through time and change just our particular time line. But to me, the worst sin was the Gate Landscape. Because of it's size, Earth has deserts, mountains, plains, etc. etc. But pretty much Every Time they step through that gate, they take it as a given that whatever it is they find within a certain area of the gate is THE WAY THE PLANET IS! For example, when Carter and O'Neill first end up in Antartica, Carter mentions that it's an ice planet (or going through an Ice age, I'm not sure which). If no signs of intelligent life are found near the gate, then there must not be any on the planet. If our heroes had come from some small moon that was only one way, I could understand this, but as it is it's ridiculous (just simply saying, "ok, there's nothing in the immediate area, and we don't have the tech to explore beyond that", instead of always saying "it's a jungle planet", "it's an empty planet" (though at least they kind of fix it in Atlantis, with the introduction of the jumpers.....))
AAAAAAAUUUUUGGGHHHHH

Wait. Is it possible this many people have nerdgassed and not complained about both the sound made in space battles when things blow up and the fact that space battles are done as dogfights, which ignores how things travel in space? BSG makes some effort to keep it quiet, but things still blow up with (somewhat muted) sound. Firefly/Serenity also made some effort, but in both cases, there's sound in outer space.

As to the Mac virus in Independence Day, I was, when that came out, running a Novell network and having a hellish time connecting a Mac to it reliably. My colleague and I went to see the movie together, and realized what our problem was. We were obviously running the wrong Network OS. Macs were made to interface seamlessly with ALIEN networks, not with TERRESTRIAL ones. What were we thinking?