Bones of contention

[ffutures]

Something I saw in a TV show tonight boggled me slightly...

Posting as someone who has actually prepared small animal skeletons for display, the idea that someone could prepare a human skeleton literally overnight - all flesh gone, all bones dry, bleached, fully articulated and wired - is frankly ludicrous. It takes a lot of physical work to remove the flesh, combined with chemical processes that typically take several days to weeks. On something as big as a human skeleton I'd guess that it's more at the weeks end of the scale. And wiring one up as well as was shown in the episode would take a good few hours after all that was complete.

While Bones and other forensic shows use the same short cut, whenever you see someone messing around with a clean white skeleton only hours after a body is found, they don't usually put such a precise time scale on it.

The silly part is that it was completely unnecessary, they could have simply changed the plot slightly and said that the victim had been missing for a couple of weeks. Not a bad episode, except for that, but I really wish they hadn't started out with something so silly.

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Before I gave up on CSI shows entirely, I'd got to the point of almost ignoring my brain pointing out that it was ridiculous that they'd do all the CSI work in a day, when it would probably take a couple of days at least to just gather the evidence on a major case, let alone file it, examine it, and do all the experiments as well.

In the beginning, they'd only imply that things went that fast, but at some point they went from explicitly stating they did an emergency case or two in 24 hours to outright stating that all the scenes happened in one day's office hours routinely.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

More like a couple of weeks (mostly waiting for the next free slot on the mass spectrometer or whatever, to get results back from the central DNA testing lab used by a dozen police forces, etc.) in most cases.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Nod. It took nearly a week for the local police just to send the fingerprint guy around to dust my window after I was burgled.