in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude
eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancy looking
i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought
every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?
Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?
Somehow this reminds me of the episode of Numb3rs where the bad guy tries to force the mathematician to try and solve the Riemann hypothesis or something, and he honestly tries because there’s a little kid held hostage or something, but he can’t, because it’s a super hard problem and he’s a great mathematician but not “solve the Riemann hypothesis in a day under life and death pressure” level good, and he’s on the verge of despair, when his brother (who’s a normal guy and not a mathematician) points out that the mathematician’s close-but-failed attempt to solve the problem is probably pretty indistinguishable from an actual solution, from the viewpoint of a villain who would try this kind of shit, and so they use the failed solution to buy him time to escape and it totally works.
Which also reminds me of that thread where a bunch of smart people deduced the most likely combination on a lock based on which buttons had the most wear, and then the last person pointed out it was unlocked already, and then the conclusion was agreed to be “this is why Holmes needs Watson”