Friday, September 25, 2009

Heroes goes to college

Heroes is the show that makes me feel like Charlie Brown. The series has such great character actors, high production values, and such a fun premise, that I keep tuning in again and again. Just to have the football yanked away by being repeatedly bludgeoned with plots and character actions that do not make a lick of sense.

They reached a new low for me in the Volume 5 premiere on Monday.

Claire has finally flown the nest to go to an unnamed college and meets a driven classmate who convinces her to take a placement test to see who gets into linear algebra.

Come on, linear algebra? First, this is a sophomore level course, we're not talking about the seminar in "thing-I-got-my-Nobel-Prize-in" course that only admits a few students. Every campus in the nation offers linear algebra, and it is no professor's "specialty".

Second, who goes to a placement test because their roommate told them about it? Colleges have these people called "advisors" that kind of work with freshman to set up their initial course offerings. Nobody decides on the spur of the moment I think I'll try to get in an advanced math class, one that is usually taken after the Calculus sequence.

Third, and this is what really killed me, Claire and her annoying friend arrive at the placement exam to find that it consists of solving a four equation, four unknown system of equations. Moreover, they are given 45 minutes.

This blows me away, because it reflects the sloppy nature of Heroes for the last few years. Here's the main issue: this is a linear algebra problem. You don't give a linear algebra problem at a linear algebra placement exam, you give whatever type of problem you'd like the incoming students to know. If they are passing out of the Calc sequence, you give Calculus problems.

Next, are you kidding me? This problem might look tough to someone who slept through high school algebra, but making the system 4 equations/4 unknowns doesn't make the problem conceptually harder, and forty five minutes is way to long for this travesty.

I can almost picture the email to some UCLA professor or whomever the show asked to consult: "Could you please send us a linear algebra problem that isn't very easy?" They couldn't possibly have asked their consultant for a problem that would appear on a linear algebra placement exam, because if they had they wouldn't have gotten such a joke of a problem.

If Heroes was on in a different time, such sloppiness might have gone unnoticed. But in a time where shows like Mad Men takes enough care to get the train schedules for its protagonist correctly, this shows an utter lack of respect for the viewer. Heck, even Star Wars: The Clone Wars shows more respect for continuity and its universe than Heroes. If a half-hour animated show can do it, why can't Heroes? It appears to be the one super power they have no interest in.

7 comments:

cookemeister said...

Yeah, 45 minutes did seem a little much for a linear algebra problem with dim(NS)=2. Presumably they wanted to weed out students who don't know how to deal with a nullspace. But why linear algebra is the key to becoming attorney general, I don't know.

shahed said...

Are you reading io9? I think Heroes is slowly driving Annalee Newitz insane. I'm so glad I stopped watching it after season 2!

Phil said...

I agree - the writing has been VERY sloppy in the last few seasons. In the same episode Hiro returned to his present covered in blue slushy, his sister walks into the office to talk business with him and doesn't comment on the massive amount of melting blue goo, she doesn't react or even seem to notice... despite looking right at him.

Anonymous said...

i dont know about texan education but in canada we usually finish linear algebra in gr 9/10. you supposed to start calculus in post-sec right off the bat. but like the guy mentioned before, you wouldnt need calculus for being a law attorney.

Anonymous said...

http://boards.ign.com/heroes/b10691/185454630/p1/

dumbass

Anonymous said...

Its funny cause the answer to the linear algebra problem was x=1 y=1 w=1 z=1

Jason Pestell said...

I did notice that one possible solution is (1,1,1,1), however, this is merely one of an infinite number of solutions - those that are also solutions of at least two different three-dimensional figures (planes, to be exact). Linear Algebra is touched on in 10th grade through 12th grades in the States, however, it is a college course co-requisite with Calculus (Multivariate or Differential Equations), since it develops theorems related to nxn and nxm matrices rather than the smaller numbers presented in this test.