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Plot holes
Just in case any of you were wondering whether I’m hopelessly out of touch, here’s your answer: I finally got around to watching Serenity.
(Spoilers: “Holy SHIT! NO! Argh! What the? A harpoon? But he was my… damn. Whedon, you suck.“)
Most of the way to the end of the movie, the film sequel to the stupidly canceled Joss Whedon TV space opera Firefly, a scenario was presented that made me groan, even though — knowing Whedon — it was probably written into the script with ironic intent. The scene involves a good guy and a bad guy, with the good guy intent on reaching An Important Switch and the bad guy intent on stopping him. Sadly, the engineers who placed the Important Switch did so, for some reason, on a pedestal in the center of an Impossibly Deep Shaft. In order to reach the Important Switch, the good guy must walk on a catwalk suspended perilously above the Impossibly Deep Shaft, providing him, as he fights the bad guy, with many significant opportunities for plummeting.
If you have watched more than one Science Fiction movie, you will likely have seen a variant of this scene. The most famous one, I believe, is actually a number of scenes — spread out over a few movies — that take place in the reactor core of the Death Star in the Star Wars franchise. But this trope predates the 1970s. It certainly dates back at least to 1956, in an almost throwaway scene in Forbidden Planet, revealing the ancient Krell civilization’s twenty-mile-deep utility shaft on Altair IV. Nothing bad threatens to happen in the Krell’s Impossibly Deep Shaft, unless you take it as a semi-Freudian metaphor referring obliquely to the later-mentioned monsters from the Id. As a literal matte-shot backdrop Impossibly Deep Shaft, it’s there solely to induce a brief moment of vertigo as Dr. Morbius shows his unwanted visitors around the Krell complex.
I’m not well-read enough in SF moviedom to know whether there’s an Impossibly Deep Shaft fight scene in any movie made in the twenty years between Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and despite my somewhat greater familiarity with 1960s-70s television SF, I’m failing to recall one there either. Aside from an episode of Batman, that is, but in that one the shaft is pitch-black — hence non-vertiginous — and the bad guy, Catwoman, is the one in danger of falling in. I won’t spoil the ending for you.
But the trope resonates so. I think there must be 1960s-1970s examples of it in pop culture — TV, movies, cartoons, comics, what have you — that I’ve missed. Readers?
The Will Smith movie I, Robot, which I was the only person on Earth who liked, had probably the most over-the-top version of the Impossibly Deep Shaft. The central computer core of VIKI, the mainframe robot, occupied the center of the 100ish-story U.S. Robotics building, and the only way to disable it with nanites — and one could write an English Masters thesis on nanites, I think — was to crawl on catwalks over the yawning abyss to the platform in the center. Scary enough, even without an Imperial buttload of robots breaking the glass above you and trying to throw you down the shaft. Smith edges into satire in the scene, asking sotto voce “What is it with you people and heights?“ It’s been a couple years since I saw Galaxy Quest, a nice satire of a lot of silly SF movie tropes, and I don’t remember whether the Impossibly Deep Shaft made a token appearance in the flick. True, much of what could be said about the ridiculous design of the Impossibly Deep Shaft applied, in Galaxy Quest, to The Chompers, a superfluous and deadly and stochastic gauntlet of pistons obstructing a crucial passageway. Namely, faced with the gauntlet, the Sigourney Weaver character summed up the Chompers, the Impossibly Deep Shaft, and lots of other questionable plot devices thus: “This episode was badly written!“
The Chompers have their own silly history, a literary catalogue well worth exploring, and it’s tempting to spend some time here examining them. But I’m talking about Shafts.
Serenity didn’t mark the first time Joss Whedon had resorted to the Impossibly Deep Shaft as a plot device. In the Firefly episode “War Stories,“ the crime boss Adelai Niska, who I’m pretty sure I had as a grade school teacher, has situated his space station’s torture room with a convenient non-safety-glass window looking out over his own Impossibly Deep Shaft. At some point during the torture of the Good Guys, the window breaks and a fight ensues with the brink as a venue. I won’t tell you how that one ends either.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Serenity didn’t mark the first time Joss Whedon had resorted to the Impossibly Deep Shaft as a plot device.
It seems like someone fell into the hellmouth in Buffy and had to be retrieved by a wild grab before they fell all the way, which is sort of like a modified Impossibly Deep Shaft in that the Shaft is unseen, but threatening.
Kind of like…no, never mind.
By: By Auguste on 2007 08 24
I’ve seen Serenity five times, and I’m still shocked by that harpooning.
By: By Dave on 2007 08 24
I am a leaf on the wind.
God damn it.
By: By LauraJMixon on 2007 08 24
The Chompers have their own silly history
First of all, I have to take exception to this gratuitous Chomsky-bashing. As if it weren’t bad enough that you foundation-funded liberals dismissed Chomsky’s seminal essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey in which he argued that HAL was programmed to conceal the purpose of the Discovery 1 mission from the mission commander himself! Chompers was completely vindicated on that one, people. You should all be cast down an Impossibly Deep Shaft.
Second, it has long been recognized by deep-space engineers and advanced fantasists that the Impossibly Deep Shaft is structurally necessary to the creation and maintenance of large-scale space stations and elaborate science-fiction plots. No artificial structure with a diameter greater than 3000 km or with a running time longer than 50 trillion oscillations of a Cesium-133 atom can maintain its physical integrity if it is not buttressed by an Impossibly Deep Shaft. This is why Darth Vader must disclose his relationship to Luke in an Impossibly Deep Shaft, and this is why the young Obi-Wan must defeat Darth Maul by leaping out of an Impossibly Deep Shaft after his surrogate father/ mentor is killed. It is also why Darth Maul must implant an Impossibly Deep Shaft into Qui-Gon’s body and must be killed when Obi-Wan slices him in two with an Impossibly Deep Wound.
I hope that’s clear.
By: By Michael Bérubé on 2007 08 24
The last ten minutes of BATMAN are a battle in an implausibly impossibly tall cathedral bell tower. Eventually Jack Nicholson falls to his death, and you’re suprised his body doesn’t burst into flames from atmospheric friction on the way down.
In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK a german “jeep” is escorting a 5-ton truck through Egyptian deserts and then into what seems clearly to be the swampy Nile River Delta. Indy takes control of the truck and stomps on the gas. The truck surges ahead and bumps the jeep aside, and next the jeep is seen spilling doomed soldiers as it tumbles off a many-hundred-foot sheer cliff face. Who knew the Nile Delta includes a Yosemite-sized chasm?
By: By omegapet on 2007 08 24
Speaking of natural impossibly deep shafts and recent CRN posts, I was always panicked about people who canoe in Crater Lake. 4.6 trillion gallons of water does not disqualify an impossibly deep shaft, right?
By: By Auguste on 2007 08 25
In a pivotal episode of Babylon 5 (beside which anything by Whedon pales IMHO), John Sheridan leaps into an Impossibly Deep Pit on the Shadow home planet Z’ha’dum. This is fairly transparently an homage to the Impossibly Deep Pits of Khazad-dûm in Lord of the Rings, sans orcs and balrogs, and the Zazu Pits of the National Lampoon parody, Bored of the Rings.
By: By Rob G on 2007 08 25
In Galaxy Quest the characters played by Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen have to cross a Shaft on a narrow bridge, but it is not Impossibly Deep. At the bottom of the shaft, however is a giant spinning ventilation fan. Above them, of course, is the Omega 13.
I think The Andromeda Strain (1969 book and 1971 film) has an Very Deep (but not Impossibly Deep) Shaft that the hero must climb in order to shut down a nuclear bomb that will spread The Strain all over the planet. As he climbs, he is shot at by lasers.
While not SF, I believe that The Poseidon Adventure (film 1972) has characters traversing a Very Deep Elevator Shaft.
By: By John on 2007 08 25
The Chompers have their own silly history, a literary catalogue well worth exploring, and it’s tempting to spend some time here examining them. But I’m talking about Shafts.
Snerf.
By: By Brooklynite on 2007 08 25
The travelers in Time Bandits find themselves in cages dangling above the Void, which is Impossibly Deep but perhaps not a Shaft in a technical sense.
IRL, news just this week, there is apparently a chunk of nothing 1 billion light years wide out there, somewhere.
By: By black dog barking on 2007 08 25
Do you think FIREFLY is sexist?
Me and Mr Daisy are locked in an epic battle over the subject, which threatens to go on as long as the 30-Years-War.
By: By Daisy on 2007 08 25
I think everything on television is sexist, including the white noise and the test patterns.
I think Firefly is in some important ways LESS sexist than the norm, two major reasons being:
1) an emphasis on strong women characters, and
2) the explicitness of the threat of rape being leveled at everyone regardless of gender.
But sure, there’s sexism in Firefly, some of it arguably intended by the writers and some of it almost certainly unconscious. The dynamics among major characters offer a lot of examples.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 08 25
Didn’t metropolis and a great many silent movies have improbable drops? Charlie chaplin did something like that so it was definately around in the silent era - it’s also used in james bond movies and the old swashbucklers (though it was more a sea full of sharks than a bottomless pit).
Was it ever used in OST star trek though? That was very derivative usually, but I can’t remember them using that particular cliche.
This is why Darth Vader must disclose his relationship to Luke in an Impossibly Deep Shaft
Well obiwan had to dissolve the polarity on the deflector harmonics for the first death star over some bottomless pits, and during the big swashbuckling escape there’s about five different and completely unconnected bottomless pits shown.
The death star was less an artificial moon, and more a series of bottomless pits held together by suspended walkways and plagarism
IRL, news just this week, there is apparently a chunk of nothing 1 billion light years wide out there, somewhere.
{insert snarky bush administration policy joke here} *rimshot*
By: By R. Mildred on 2007 08 25
Didn’t Tron have some sort of Impossibly Deep Shaft around Master Program Control? I don’t think it had a catwalk, or that anyone fought on it, though.
And 2010 had a wonderfully done, dizzying, vertigous scene of a catwalk extending slowly, ever so slowly, across the Impossibly Eternal Pit of Space, connecting the Leonov to Discovery. Nobody fought there, either, but John Lithgow did a great job of conveying his fear of heights while crossing it.
IRL, news just this week, there is apparently a chunk of nothing 1 billion light years wide out there, somewhere.
I read the story. Obviously, the astronomers’ signal hit a patch of space where the Dominion has a monopoly on bandwidth. Since the astronomers aren’t subscribers, their signal didn’t go through:
“Can you hear me now?“
“Sorry: network not available.“
“Um… what?“
“Press 1 if you are a subscriber and experiencing technical difficulties. Press 2 if you are not a subscriber and want to hear about our new low-cost package that’s perfect for whatever shape you’re in.“
By: By CaseyL on 2007 08 25
Roadrunner cartoons qualify as Sci-Fi (not SF), no? I need say no more, except perhaps “Beep-beep!“ Although one could go on about the cultural ramifications and subtext of Wile E. Coyote and his difficulties with technology as background for CRN, if one so desired.
By: By Fred Levitan on 2007 08 27
i felt intensely jealous. what an incredible high to be on just prior to shuffling off. lucky bastard!
By: By buck on 2007 08 27
Was it ever used in OST star trek though? That was very derivative usually, but I can’t remember them using that particular cliche.
Yup, it was at least once, in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?“, featuring Michael Strong as Dr. Korby, Ted Cassidy as Ruk, and Sherry Jackson as Andrea. Y’know, makin’ androids down in the caverns.
“It all came back to me, like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist…“
By: By ALotOfCatsAroundHere on 2007 08 28
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