The New Stupidity Zone...
...Even more fucking stupid than the original Rod Serling pile of videographic shit.
Click to viewHow does Marilyn Lee Cross manage to sneak aboard that ship in the first place? How is it that the excess load isn't discovered until the end of the trip and not before launch? Was she in that compartment, for how long until Barton discovered her? Days, weeks, months? Must've smelled lovely. Barton informs us that on an EDS there's not one kilogram of excess, unnecessary equipment, but these EDSs come equipped with hidey holes for stowaways. How thoughtful of them!
And they have a very specific protocol to follow in cases of stowaways. They can't seem to be able to keep them off their damn ships! Now there's a lovely thought: TSA still exists 100+ years from now, and they are as incompetent as ever. Now there's something to be optimistic about for the future... NOT! And it comes as a major surprise to Marilyn. She never heard stowaways get chucked over board? The news media never thought to warn folks about that? There weren't any signs at the space port warning of this? REEEEEALLLLLY!!!!
"45.369Kg", and there is "insufficient fuel"? REEEEALLLLY!!!! Take a look at that f'kin ship: that goddamn thing has to be several tens of metric tons (The space shuttle is ~one metric ton). All that to deliver serum to 35 colonists that could fit in a brief case. Pretty damned inefficient, wouldn't you say? Marilyn's 45 kilos can't amount to even so much as 0.01% of the total mass of that ship and its contents. Haven't they heard of Margin of Error!!!!!
Then there's that margin of error again: why doesn't Barton just come in hot? So what if the ship gets a little banged up in the process. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, even if the resulting structural damage made it space unworthy. It's just a tiny fraction overloaded, so it would be highly unlikely there'd even be that much damage. Furthermore, they off loaded some stuff, so the overloading was reduced anyway: to 24.407Kg. That's just a little over 53 pounds for a ship that probably weights at least ten tons. Barton isn't good enough to manage a somewhat very slightly hot landing? REEEEALLLLY!!!!
T-3 minutes until a critical maneuver is coming up: does Barton look like he's up to that at the very end? He said before that the ship was not equipped for auto-landing, and he is in no condition to pilot it. He's now a passenger. Barton's already told us: "You don't think I'm gonna have to live with this the rest of my life. When you come to me every night in my dreams" Yeah, he made his choice: die in the inevitable crash.
As for myself, I would refuse to live with that. I wouldn't have to do that because I'd come in hot, and I'd succeed.
Then I'd have more than a few choice words for my so-called superiors about Margin of Error. Barton also contradicts himself, as he does mention "extra fuel" for cases of atmospheric turbulence. PROBLEM FUCKING SOLVED!
That ship is going down, so basically he killed Marilyn for absolutely nothing. Better to have told her he wasn't gonna eject her, let her have hope until two seconds before the inevitable auger in.
The New Twilight Zone has managed to surpass the old one in pure stupidity. Oh, and this was from an old short story. How does shit like this ever see the light of day? If I were a publisher, I'd take one look at it and sent it to the circular file.
This is an absolute shit-fest of idiocy. The only reason to look at the f'kin thing is to remind folks of just how terrabad TV can get.
This dumbassed story was by Tom Godwin, and he plagiarized the damn thing:
Some sources, including Kurt Busiek, have alleged that Godwin essentially took the story from a story published in EC Comics' Weird Science #13, May-June 1952, called "A Weighty Decision", scripted by Al Feldstein. In that story there are three astronauts who are intended to be on the flight, not one, and the additional passenger, a girl that one of the astronauts has fallen in love with, is trapped aboard by a mistake rather than stowing away. As in "the Cold Equations", various measures are proposed but the only one which will not lead to worse disaster is for the unwitting passenger to be jettisoned. Algis Budrys said that "the Cold Equations was the best short story that Godwin ever wrote and he didn't write it".
Clicky
If you're gonna plagiarize, at least plagiarize something good.
Critic Gary Westfahl has said that because the proposition depends upon systems that were built without enough margin for error, the story is good physics, but lousy engineering. He said that he himself was an engineer and he was so frustrated with the book, he said these words, "To hell with it, the book was not worth my time. Very poor Engineering."
Yeah, me too. I'll stick with Digimon reruns, thank you so very much.