The original post: /r/television by /u/Robert_B_Marks on 2026-02-21 16:39:13+00:00.

Been thinking about this fun little topic while I recover from some surgery…

Every now and then a show does a bit of research to be a bit more clever…but they get it wrong. In fact, they get it so wrong that it becomes hilarious to anybody who knows what they’re talking about. Two examples come to mind:

Crossbones

This was a pirate drama from 2014 on NBC with John Malkovich as Blackbeard. The plot revolved around Blackbeard’s men capturing a ship with a prototype marine chronometer, which the protagonist shoots to keep Blackbeard from using it (as well as killing the designer and destroying the instruction manual). But if Blackbeard can fix the chronometer and discover how to use it, he will be able to run rampant over the oceans and every ship at sea will be vulnerable…

So, bonus points for knowing that a marine chronometer exists, and how important it was to naval power. Unfortunately, a marine chronometer is NOT a giant table-sized device that requires arcane/specialized knowledge to use…it’s a clock. That’s it. It’s a clock the size of a dinner plate that can keep accurate time at sea. The way you use it is you take it out and wind it when it needs winding, and then you read it like, well, a clock.

(As far as I know, the principle behind it is as follows: you set the chronometer for noon at a known location - generally Greenwich - and then the difference between noon on the ship and noon on the chronometer tells you its longitude.)

So, for Blackbeard to not know how to use a marine chronometer would require him to have never seen a clock in his life, or to not know what a minute or hour hand was…or to be able to figure it out by watching it…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

A time travel episode set in 2020s Toronto (which is where the series is filmed) - what can go wrong? Well, when the writer apparently doesn’t know anything about the geography of the area, it can be one hell of a howler for anybody who lives in the area. Where to begin…

  • The historical event involves a “friendship bridge” across Lake Ontario, starting in Toronto. So, here’s the thing…the Great Lakes aren’t lakes - they’re inland seas. In fact, they’re inland seas with storm patters that can be more severe than the North Atlantic. Their bottoms are littered with shipwrecks. So, this is a bridge that, if completed, could involve cars being blown off the bridge into the water when the weather gets rough. And that’s not even considering that there’s no major towns or cities directly south of Toronto, and the nearest border crossing on land is only a couple of hours away, making the entire bridge pointless to begin with…
  • Our two time travellers, Kirk and La’an, take a quick drive (only a few hours) from Toronto to Vermont…in the middle of winter. So, if you’re really lucky, you can make the trip in only seven or eight hours…but Toronto and the East coast are rather well known for this thing called “snow”…so you’d probably want to give it at least a full day. And these are time travellers who have probably never driven a 21st century vehicle in their lives…
  • They get back to Toronto with a watch with a radioactive dial, looking for a cold fusion reactor, with the idea being that when they get close to the reactor, the tritium from it will cause the dial to glow. So, they walk along the streets, waiting for the watch to glow. Thing is, Toronto is BIG. It’s the fourth largest city on the entire continent. The main city has a area of over 600 square km (and that’s not counting the Greater Toronto Area around it, which brings the tally up to over 7,000 square km). So, canvassing the streets in the hopes of finding a secret lab using a watch dial is um…well, pretty laughable.

Those are the two I’ve got. Anybody got some examples of their own?