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Tonight I watched another X-File episode.
The story involves a "Control Operating System" which fully controls all electric and electronic functions in an office building.
One day the COS, devised by a "garage genius"-type digital wizard, uses its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to take over the building and kill a number of human adversaries. Why kill? Quite simple: American viewers expect advanced AI to include murder.
The next man on the list of victims is trapped in the toilet*, where the sink threatens to overflow. How a "Control Operating System" can manipulate a faucet is anybody's guess, but what really got me was when he had to pull the plug by groping with his hand for a 1935 - style rubber stopper!
Remember this story is taking place at a time when artificial intelligence controls buildings à la Bill Gates'.
The mockery on viewers' intelligence gets worse:
In order to open the toilet door from inside the man uses his identity card on a 1997 - style security lock gleaming with buttons and coloured lights.
This futuristic film has it all in one scene and one room:
A washbasin with a rubber plug and a security system to get out of the toilet.
The flow of inconsistencies continues:
When the amok-running computer makes the office building's lift** malfunction, its cabin descends at breakneck speed, indicator digits flashing from floor 37 to 0 in seconds...
and the victim STRUGGLES ON THE FLOOR, unable to get up!
On the floor mind you, not the ceiling.
In the same episode, Mulder uses a DAT-tape recorder which squawks the recorded voice at high speed when rewinding.
All the world's tape recorders are muted during fast rewind.
Is the TV public really so stupid, that they need an acoustical cue to tell them that now a recording is being rewound?
(* Americans, in their characteristic puritanism would call it a "restroom" or even a "bathroom"!)
(** elevator for Americans)