Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-98.231.46.205-20151112031449/@comment-92.234.82.49-20180106151041

I thought the political science fiction elements were pretty good myself. The Grounders are a martiarchal society (men are called something like "Hefters" and women "Planners" in Grounder), the Arkers are more like a time capsule of 21st century people, who, while not exactly matriarchal, tend to practice more equality of the sexes, so it's not unreasonable that they would have female leaders and warriors.

My only complaints on the political science score are that sometimes characters don't take a lot of persuading to "come around" and seemed a bit too quick to change their tune generally for the sake of plot development.

The biggest problem I have is the liberties the show takes with physics and biology - nuclear radiation doesn't quite work the way the show makes it work, and it's unlikely that people would simply evolve to become that nuke-proof that quickly, unless they ended up with a ton of body fat that was never metabolised, or something else that would act as a barrier to radiation, perhaps scar-like tissue?

The Primefire episodes are particularly bad - the fallout from multiple plant meltdowns is shown as a firey "death wave" like that from a nuclear bomb, but that just wouldn't happen, certainly not over such a wide area. Also, a relatively tiny annoyance, plant leaves go red in the presence of high radiation (we know this from Chernobyl).

On the plus side, I did enjoy them having the nuclear wasteland grow into a forest type environment, it's a lot more interesting than the usual endless deserts.