ABC's "Impact": Oh No, Not Again!
How much more of the "Apocalyptic meteoroid-comet-asteroid-moon gonna hit the Earth/need to save us with a daring suicide mission involving nuclear weapons or a secret government project" genre can we possibly take?
Ah yes, Father's Day. Going over to see the relatives for some pleasant conversation and outdoor grilling (well, maybe if you weren't on the East Coast of the United States this last weekend), the unfolding terror and the continuing destabilization of the political situation in Iran, and a new Science Fiction miniseries about a desperate plan to save Earth from the moon which has been dislodged from its regular orbit by a chance collision with a piece of Brown Dwarf matter. Yay!
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The entire premise of the plot is that a fragment of a Brown Dwarf, a super-dense "remnant of a long-dead star" which has burnt out all of its nuclear fuel has impacted the moon during a once in a thousand year meteor shower, and has lodged itself into it, thus increasing its stellar mass by more than twice that of Earth's. Translation: the Moon has a bad case of interstellar constipation.
The net result is this has affected the gravitational relationship between the Moon and that of the Earth, causing widespread nastiness including "Gravitational Storms", tidal tsunamis, and huge electromagnetic disturbances. Now, as if this didn't bode well to begin with, the dramatic change in the Moon's mass has altered the Moon's orbit with the Earth to a stretched out ellipsis rather than a stable pseudo-circle, creating a runaway effect which will cause the moon to impact into the earth within 39 days.
You got all of that? Okay, great. Now let me count the ways in which this show was a total insult to my intelligence:
First, never mind the fact that the immense density of a Brown Dwarf is created by the fact that all the matter in it is caught in a huge gravitational field. If a "fragment" of a Brown Dwarf were somehow able to escape this huge gravitational field, it would no longer have the same density it did before. Additionally, never mind the fact that a Brown Dwarf probably isn't a "long dead star" because the current consensus by most astrophysicists is that they never had the right characteristics to achieve fusion in first place. Brown Dwarfs are currently thought of to have been "failed" stars which were never able to light up, like miniature Jupiters. Brown Dwarfs are a big cosmic "FAIL".
Of course, if we stuck to reality, we wouldn't have much of a movie left, would we?
Now, I love a good apocalyptic subject as much as anyone. There's something about them that draws me almost magnetically to the screen, as if all of the world's horrible problems briefly melt away after considering a catastrophic event that could destroy all civilization as we know it. I particularly love the History and Discovery Science Channel ones, such as "Megadisasters" and "Life After People" which details the science behind the all the fun variations on giant meteoroid impacts, Supervolcanoes, Hypercanes, 1000-foot-high megatsunamis and all the awesomely cool cosmic events like supernovae and Gamma Ray Bursts which would leave no hope of survival, not even which an expert suicide team that was emergency funded by all the governments in the world, led by a badass like Bruce Willis could stop. Or an awesome soundtrack by Aerosmith for that manner. And no, not even a giant nuclear explosion detonated in the core of the earth or at at precise point on said asteroid/comet/meteor would fix it. Or some creative variation of such, where one of the main characters dies in the process in some gallant act of self-sacrifice.
Let's see... Not having seen the second part of the miniseries, which airs next Sunday, I predict that at the end of "Impact", a crack team of super-brave astronauts flies to the moon (on the "delayed" European Moon mission briefly announced in the first minute of the show) and somehow manages to dislodge the super massive Brown Dwarf Fragment using the "failed anti gravity" technology described by the widower astrophysics professor to his very cute and perky female grad student (who keeps giving him come hither glances, who I'm sure he'll hook up with by the end of the thing) in the first 20 minutes of the first episode. But somebody will die on the space mission, as dictated by the first law of apocalyptic movie schlock. I'm hoping it's the annoying brilliant German scientist dude that keeps ditching his pregnant girlfriend.
What's your prediction for "Impact", or your favorite way the Earth is destroyed? Talk Back and Let Me Know.