The trouble is, this could never happen in this day and age
That many comas from the same hospital in such a short amount of time would set off alarm bells all over the place, from the board of ethics to the CDC.
shareyes. that's why it's sci fi. the FI part being FICTION. ;-) just sayin'
shareThere needs to be an element of sense in the fiction though. Fiction doesn't mean they can run roughshod over everything. Creating a believable story, with a reasonable suspension of disbelief for the context, is part of making that story work.
Coma failed miserably at this. There are many ways they could have gone about it to bring even an ounce of believability to the scenario but they chose to disregard reason entirely. The experimentation occuring in a more remote area or even another country with no oversight, targeting less high risk victims(easier to hide away a homeless guy than teenagers with parents hovering), or any number of conspiracy cliches such as covert military or government involvement.
It was just all around sloppy, fiction or not.
I agree, dmfaust. I am willing to suspend disbelief if I am given the proper frame work, but there is simply no way Susan would be the first to know about what Jefferson does when it is obviously a long-going and massive operation right there in the community in a huge, architecturally sumptuous building.
Furthermore, the Ellen Burstyn character is an over-the-top religious nut case. No way the profit-hungry hospital suits are going to leave her in charge. Add to that that they didn't kill Susan at the first chance and that they somehow recovered the James Wood characters's body after the super public car "accident" and gave it a place on the body factory assembly line. Please.
You are right that with a little effort, they could have made the story plausible. I am disappointed that a number of fine actors signed on to this badly conceived project.
" they didn't kill Susan at the first chance"
as my wife always says in suspense movies where the good person shoots, stabs, etc the bad person they always stop short. Then what happens? The bad person gets up. That's why my wife says an ax to remove their head or emptying the clip between their eyes or over their heart is the only way to do it. (Yes I sleep with one eye open).
and that they somehow recovered the James Wood characters's body after the super public car "accident" and gave it a place on the body factory assembly line. Please.You missed a detail there. Stark was the patient in OR8 when we were led to think Mark would be, as Lindquist said he was right for the study and it would solve some of their problems. They put Stark in a coma so he would end up at Jefferson as the replacement test subject Lindquist needed.
"Importance, necessity, value, purpose... all the human lies!" share
But that was what made Micheal Crichton's work so great: all of it was plausible. Hell, the man conceived of a computer virus before anyone else, he coined the phrase in "WestWorld." While Cook's original novel, as well as Crichton's film adaptation, was completely plausible back in the 70's before we had the sort of digital record keeping that exists today, the very existence of such systems destroys the plausibility of "Coma" in 2012. Instead of acknowledging that, and even attempting to find a work around, they ignored it and pretended the medical world is still the same 35 years later.
The Island was more plausible than this adaptation. Think about that.
It was very plausible in the 70's and 80's, especially since there was a hospital in Massachusetts that admitted only coma patients. There was a waiting list of nurses trying to get a job there. I know because I tried.
But about your digital record keeping, I accidently killed off 23 patients with a stroke of a computer key. It took two days to "revive" them in the system. Often the harder we try to make things secure the easier it is to hack the security.
There's a huge difference between human error on a computer that can be fixed and real data coming out that says 400 people went into comas in your hospital last year.
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<sniff> <sniff>
I smell ice cream!
I'm not familiar with what stats that hospitals and health care have to report (had some exposure over 25 years ago), but I know stats. It may be slim, but I'm confident that if familiar enough that someone could massage the #s to make them appear as an outlier vs being a stick in the eye.
And some hospitals specialize in certain areas so are more likely to have certain instances of certain things that may be high but explainable. For example, when I was an undergrad I worked for a medical prof that reported stats on NICUs. In the entire state there were about 10-12 that took high-risk mothers. Their #s for deceased babies (not really sure how to nicely put it) were very high but for obvious reasons. So assuming wanting to do something like to infants no one would give a second look at their #s because they would get lost in the background.
The example you give is 400 people into comas. I don't recall a whole lot from the movie, but I seem to recall there were 8. If that hospital does lots of surgeries on a % basis 8 may not be a high blip.
Again, if you have personal/professional exposure to the #s I'll bow to you; but if not all I can do is suggest some possibilities where it could happen. I've not read up on the NIH tracking down that superbug they had, but it took them some work and I believe a year to find it. I don't recall reading anything about how they caught on to it being present.
Stats can be used to lie, and all politicians use stats. Draw your own conclusions.