Say NO to explanatory dialogue!

[oceana]

In another futile attempt to make the world a better place, I'd like request the prohibition of what I call explanatory dialogue. Yep, it's one of these days...

Examples:

Numb3rs, episode 2x09 "Toxin":
David (completely out of context): "So we need to find out why a poisoner is trying to find a federal fugitive."
Colby: "The better question is how he intends to find him."
David: "And the best people to answer this question are the ones who've been looking for him the past seven months."

Supernatural, Pilot: (notice how I totally don't watch this show, because I will not succumb to peer pressure and Jensen Ackles alone cannot be reason enough to watch even more TV than I already do and OMG who am I kidding?)
Brothers talking about missing Dad.
Sam: "I swore I was done hunting for good."
Dean: "Come on, it wasn't easy, but it wasn't that bad."
Sam: "Yeah, when I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a 45."
Dean: "So what was he supposed to do?"
Sam: "I was nine years old. He was supposed to say 'Don't be afraid of the dark."
Dean: "Don't be afraid of the dark, are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark, you know what's out there."
Sam: "I know what's out there, but still, the way we grew up after mom was killed and dad's obsession to find the thing that killed her."
(it goes on and on, with a memorable "We were raised by warriors" somewhere in between.)

CSIs:
Almost everything, especially everything that Grissom or Horatio say, with or without sunglasses.


All these conversations have one thing in common: The characters tell each other things that they already know, but that are new or maybe unclear to the viewer. A normal conversation between Sam and Dean could have gone like this, for example:

"Remember the 45?"
"Yeah, so what. Was he supposed to tell 'Don't be afraid of the dark?'"
"No, of course not, but still, after mom died, dad became obsessed."


This conversation would give the brothers all the clues they need to understand each other. The gun, the scary things, the death of their mother. Problem is, the viewer won't have any idea what's going on (this takes place about ten minutes into the show). Same with Numb3rs. David and Colby are FBI agents hunting for a man who tried to poison food. They know what they are doing. They know why they are going to wherever they are going (and it's not just so Colby can hero-worship Edgerton.) But the viewer could have been a bit confused by the events, unable to make the connection between the poisoner and the federal fugitive, and so it's up to David and Colby to have this useless conversation in the car. CSI, as the self-declared Forensics 101, is pretty much all about explaining to the viewer who is doing what and why, so I shouldn't even complain about all the bad dialogue in these shows.


Explanatory dialogue is annoying for many reasons:

1) It is unnatural. We know these people wouldn't usually have the conversation they are having. In TV and even more in fiction, it throws me right out of the story and makes me realize that I sit in front of the TV, wondering why the writers wrote this the way they did. It seriously lessens my TV watching pleasure, and you know how I get if you touch my TV.

2) It can be derogatory, like the Numb3rs example, because it obviously says "I think that you, viewer, are too slow to understand this show, so let me explain it to you again."

3) It is lazy. Supernatural is a good example for this. I would have loved to learn all these things about the brothers, but the writers were too lazy to show them to me, to explain them with the medium the yare using, which is a movie, albeit a 43:20 minute one on TV. So they put all this information, that would have made a good story, into a few sentences. Things I would have liked to have found out by myself, like the information that they were raised like "warriors". Which, btw, is a rather stranger thing to say about oneself. Apart from that, it wasn't that hard to figure out, with the burning woman and the baby and everything, which leads me back to point 2): how stupid do they think I am?

On TV, 2) is the more common mistake, but it sometimes mixes with 3). If you think your reader/viewer can't follow the actions, then maybe you have done something wrong before. 3) is very common in fanfic. It's okay to have SG-1 talk about their mission if you start your fic already off-world, but it isn't okay if Jack and Daniel tell each other that they have been lovers for only a month, because they wouldn't usually talk about that. Usually, I say, because you can always find a reason, and explaining things in dialogue doesn't have to be all bad. But then you need to give me a reason why these people are having that kind of conversation at that moment. If Sam and Dean had explained this to the stupid looking blond girl with the smurfs, it would have made sense, because she, like the viewer, would need the information to understand what they are talking about. As long as it's just the two of them, it's just annoying.

The Numb3rs writers, as much as I appreciate them in other ways, had no excuse at all to make David and Colby have their conversation and it annoyed me even more when I think they they could have been having sex instead.


Now I'll go back to watching Supernatural, which I don't watch, but won't judge by its first ten minutes either.