I kinda liked NBC’s Aquarius last year so I was quite happy to see it was renewed. Unfortunately, the three-hour (!) premiere of season 2 was far too slow for my taste and should probably aired in separate episodes so the viewer doesn’t get tired from the endlessly meandering plot. However, this was a problem with the first season as well – it didn’t really pick up the pace until later – so I’ll give it some time.
There’s one thing that bugged me more than the slow pacing, though. At some point, Detective Hodiak gets a message from another Sheriff’s Department. Since it’s 1969, there was no internet or email, so the message is printed on a TeleType Model 33 – basically a precursor to modern fax machines. This is what the thing looks like:
Image (c) NBC
Pretty damn ancient from our point of view, right? These machines could only transmit text at a rather slow pace (about as slow as the story moved in this episode) and they printed the document just like a typewriter.
How come then that the document Hodiak recieves contains two pictures that look just like they came out of a laser printer?
Image (c) NBC
To be frank, the entire document he’s looking at feels like it was made in Photoshop and printed on a modern printer. The horizontal lines make no sense – TeleType machines didn’t scan the document, the text had to be entered via the keyboard (that’s why they had one in the first place!) so there would be no graphical features on the transmitted document at all.
To quote Detective Hodiak:
Ah. How’s it work?
A-actually, I don’t care. Do not care.
Neither does NBC by the looks of it.
TV Fails 