LOL! This thread raises a good point about when scientists are captured and held hostage in movies and then forced to build some kind of superweapon. Like… just don’t do it? Or you could go the Tony Stark route and build an Iron Man suit and hope your captors don’t notice.
That line about funding tho… *yikes* at how true that is.
(via: Just Sock Thoughts)
well marty, i took their plutonium and gave them a shiny bomb casing filled with used pinball machine parts! come on! lets go get you a radiation suit!
You took the words right out of my mouth! Doing this is exactly how you end up getting shot by Libyan terrorists.
There was a novel from the forties. where a scientist was supposed to reveal his top secret formula, as his family was being threatened, so he agreed– and made a large jar full of nitroglycerine, figuring that he could just drop it and blow himself and the guy trying to steal his formula up.
Examples of this I have seen:
-Iron Man, as described in the opening to this post. Fantastic way of doing it, really.
-Escape from Planet Earth: ALIEN scientist gets kidnapped trying to rescue his jock brother, and *spoilers* rigs the machine, which is already mostly built, to point back at Earth instead of the planet the humans were trying to destroy. No further spoilers, except that the ending is happy.
-Parks and Recreation episode: Leslie the happy-go-lucky, motivational-manager type and Ron the outdoorsman and weapons fanatic are trapped inside their office for plot reasons. Ron gets a claymore mine that Leslie once gave him off his desk, tries in desperation to make a way out, and it’s confetti sparklers as described in the post. It was a motivational thing, and Leslie is like, “you kept that on your desk thinking it was a real mine?”
More examples as I think of them.
Ooh, also: Just this once I want to see the bad guys kidnap a scientist, tell them to build whatever, and the scientist straight up says, “you’ve watched too many B-movies, that’s not how my field works at all.”
“You will build me my doomsday device!”
“uh, dude, I’m a meteorologist. I can tell you what the weather will be like when you deploy a doomsday device, if you’d like.”
“You’re a physicist?”
“Yes.”
“You will build me my doomsday device!”
“Um, I’m not an engineer, and I’m not really good with my hands. Plus, I know the theory, and all, but I have no idea how to actually build the thing.”
“You’re an engineer?”
“Yes.”
“If you were given directions by a physicist, you could build a device for me?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Great! You two will build my doomsday device!”
“Okay, fine. I’m going to need a hell of a lot of equipment, though, not just these pretty basic tools you’ve supplied.”
This was actually a plot point iin, surprisingly, the novel of Sum of All Fears. While the guy DID fix the nuke…
HE DIDN’T DO THE LAST STEP, which was ‘clearing out the gunk’…Which made the yield go from ‘blow up the city’ to ‘blow up the stadium’.