Oh, not mine. Although it’s possible I had one many years ago when a (white, blond) lunatic dressed in military camo punched me in the face on a bright sunny day at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and I landed on the sidewalk, but if I was concussed it was never officially diagnosed. (BTW, black eyes are not as glamorous as I would have imagined.)
I do worry over my football players but theirs aren’t the concussions I’m concerned with here. No, I’ve gotten concerned over undiagnosed fictional concussions.
I say this with a quality of (lightweight) guilt and (a smidgen of) regret: I’ve been watching many, many crime series on a mix of streaming services. About the only benefit this has conveyed upon me is the dubious ability to get annoyed at certain aspects of fictional crime shows.
I’ve become so damn experienced with these series, I will occasionally say a line shortly before the character does — as if I’ve co-written the episode — and have appointed myself a consultant as to certain irritating movements within the dramas. How many times do I murmur at my TV, “No, if there’s a dead person lying on the floor, blood still wet, you do not go up the stairs, no. You leave the house immediately and call for help.”
Or, “I told you not to drink the tea/whiskey/coffee/milk/water just offered to you by the villain, even if you’re not sure he is the villain, not yet.” Happens all the time. Happens to detectives, i.e., the central crime solvers. I mean, don’t they know what I know? Aren’t they slightly suspicious, especially after they’ve eliminated a slew of red herrings and the only herring still standing is offering them a drink?
And let’s not go into the number of times the protagonist has his gun grabbed by a bad guy because he gets too close to the aforementioned bad guy. Most of these shows are European so maybe the scriptwriters are not as immersed in melodramatic gun culture protocols as we Americans are.
But the repeated action giving me the biggest headache is how the protagonists manage to get themselves hit over the head and knocked out. Not to blame the characters themselves; they’re not hitting themselves over the head. No, a villain has hit them over the head.
How could this happen? Over and over again? Here we have a character, the designated crime solver — usually a cop but sometimes a person accused of a crime impatient over the police investigation so he has to investigate the crime himself — who…doesn’t hear anyone creeping up behind him. Huh? This person is at the least a professional paranoid and doesn’t hear a footstep, a crackle of dead leaves on a forest floor, heavy breathing?
I’ve just lived through the entirety of a Spanish mystery series (which wound up being 13 very slow, overextended episodes) during which I had to watch the protagonist get whopped on the head so frequently (because that one whop was itself repeated over and over) I stopped counting, especially since that whop produced total amnesia about the events during one crucial night.
Too many concussions. Yet these characters come to, maybe with a bloody cut on the head, get themselves up and go back to detecting without — or so they claim — even a headache.
Listen, scriptwriters. If you want to conk your characters on the head, have the grace to declare them hors de combat for a day or so due to concussion.
If football teams have neurologists on staff to make such determinations, you can write some sort of quick analysis into your plots and address the problem. I mean, you have the advantage of creating the passage of time in a split second in the editing room.
Either do that or stop having your characters bopped on their heads. Don’t you realize they could become permanently disabled?