March 14th, 2021
I recently experienced something that clearly illuminates a critical truth about storytelling. My wife and I started watching a Netflix series called “Frequency”. This series begins by setting up the characters and then offering the underlying ploy: a lightning bolt hits the antenna of an old ham radio. The electricity travels down the wires at a speed of, oh, maybe one meter per second, which is considerably slower than the speed of light at which electricity normally travels. Upon reaching the old ham radio, it lights up the radio and turns it on.
The ham radio had been the property of a detective who had been killed in the line of duty. His daughter is now a detective and owns the property. Somehow she wanders in, notices that the ham radio is turned on — and then magic happens. Somehow she ends up talking with her father, who is using the same ham radio sixteen years earlier. Presto-chango: they can communicate across the years! They then play all sorts of time tricks, saving her father’s life, etc, etc.
I had no problem accepting this egregious violation of physics. After all, it’s a story, and stories are allowed to violate the laws of physics.
But then came a critical moment in the story: old-time dad gets old-time mom on the radio to talk to modern daughter. It is absolutely imperative that modern daughter confirm to old-time mom that this time-travel stuff is for real. All she has to do is say to old-time mom, “Hi mom, this is your daughter!” She could have said almost anything. But no, the writers decided to wring some extra drama out of the scene (and prolong the story by a few more episodes) by having modern daughter suddenly get tongue-tied. She sits there silent as old-time dad begs her to say something. After a decent period, old-time mom gets mad and storms out, rejecting old-time dad’s crazy claims.
This is a gross violation of dramatic law. People must behave in a believable manner. The story asks the viewer to believe that modern daughter would somehow be too tongue-tied to save her mother’s life by speaking up. That’s preposterous. We stopped watching that series.