When a planet or star is temporarily obscured by the moon, occultation of that planet or star by the moon is said to have occurred. What can NEVER occur is for a planet or star to appear IN FRONT of the moon in the shadowed portion of the moon, only to disappear behind the portion of the moon in sunlight.
Which is what happened in this episode. And every time it did, I was reminded that the writers and anyone else who saw this script failed to see a problem with something they should have known about by the age of 12 or much earlier. The moon doesn't shrink in size and regrow as it goes through its phases--we see the portion lit by sunlight. No star or planet can possibly pass between a planet and its moon without disastrous effects. Planets, even a smaller Mercury-sized one would have cataclysmic gravitational effects, and stars, even the smallest white dwarfs, even more so--and this episode had THREE such objects posed between the planet and the moon.
Here's the place where someone will tell me this is fantasy, and ANYTHING goes in fantasy. Wrong. Fantasy writing, good fantasy writing, changes some of the rules but not all the rules of existence, and then develops the story from there. Deus ex machina is not dragged out as needed except by the very sloppy. You do not make up the rules as you go along unless you are an amateur.
We live in a world dependent upon a complex network of communications satellites, and yet, there would seem to be scant understanding of basic--very basic--essentials of space science. Every time the three or fewer stars were shown vanishing behind a crescent moon, I was reminded of the uninformed nature of what had to be dozens of people, I was startled right out of the story and again left wondering how something so basic could have slipped past so many people. Good writing does not jolt one back to reality.
By the way, it's a clip show.
Which is what happened in this episode. And every time it did, I was reminded that the writers and anyone else who saw this script failed to see a problem with something they should have known about by the age of 12 or much earlier. The moon doesn't shrink in size and regrow as it goes through its phases--we see the portion lit by sunlight. No star or planet can possibly pass between a planet and its moon without disastrous effects. Planets, even a smaller Mercury-sized one would have cataclysmic gravitational effects, and stars, even the smallest white dwarfs, even more so--and this episode had THREE such objects posed between the planet and the moon.
Here's the place where someone will tell me this is fantasy, and ANYTHING goes in fantasy. Wrong. Fantasy writing, good fantasy writing, changes some of the rules but not all the rules of existence, and then develops the story from there. Deus ex machina is not dragged out as needed except by the very sloppy. You do not make up the rules as you go along unless you are an amateur.
We live in a world dependent upon a complex network of communications satellites, and yet, there would seem to be scant understanding of basic--very basic--essentials of space science. Every time the three or fewer stars were shown vanishing behind a crescent moon, I was reminded of the uninformed nature of what had to be dozens of people, I was startled right out of the story and again left wondering how something so basic could have slipped past so many people. Good writing does not jolt one back to reality.
By the way, it's a clip show.
