watch legend of the seeker season 1 episode 12

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. You do not make up the rules as you go along unless you are an amateur. Deus ex machina is not dragged out as needed except by the very sloppy. Fantasy writing, good fantasy writing, changes some of the rules but not all the rules of existence, and then develops the story from there. Here's the place where someone will tell me this is fantasy, and ANYTHING goes in fantasy. 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. No star or planet can possibly pass between a planet and its moon without disastrous effects. The moon doesn't shrink in size and regrow as it goes through its phases-we see the portion lit by sunlight.

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. 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. 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.

Watch legend of the seeker season 1 episode 12