Technology in TV plots, and Bent Pins

I meant to do a post this weekend, but alas, Super Mario Galaxy took precedence :)

Besides Super Mario Galaxy, Erin and I saw the Disney movie "Enchanted" on Saturday, a very fun and happy fairy tale movie. It was completely predictable, but still fun to watch, great for kids and adults. Also did a bunch of shopping, got a Good Food Store co-op membership, and went to the gym. Sunday night, unfortunately, I did a stupid thing. The fan on one of my PCs has been running very loudly lately, making it annoying when watching TV (or doing anything for that matter when it's on). So I finally took it apart to try and either fix the problem or determine what kind of new fan to order. In the process of checking each of the fans, I accidentally pulled the processor/heat sink out of the socket, which is a bad thing when you haven't released the processor from the socket. The result - several bent pins, too many to really fix (at least with my limited tool set). So it's newegg.com and $60 later and a new processor is on its way :(

SO, the story behind the blog title. As I've mentioned in past blogs, for whatever reason I am hooked on the hit 80s TV show "Dallas" and the SOAP channel is now on season 7 of the reruns. One of the big storylines this season is a man that comes to SouthFork and claims to be Jock Ewing, the father and husband of the Ewing family, who died 5 seasons earlier in a helicopter crash in South America, where his body was never found (yes, typical soap opera storyline). (The actual reason the writers had to write him out of the storyline was that the actor, Jim Davis, died in real life). Anyway, a man named Wes Parmalee comes to the ranch and is hired as the foreman to replace Ray who was starting his own horse business. Miss Ellie finds him in possession of a bunch of Jock's old things, confronts him, and he tells the story of how he was found by natives, he had amnesia, and all he wanted was to be close to the family again, but hadn't intended them to find out. He conveniently had plastic surgery, had all his teeth replaced because of the accident, and had some sort of virus which altered his voice. NOW, this season happened in 1986-87, and the character's original death in 1982-83. I was thinking about how they couldn't have done this storyline now with current technology (both the death and the resurrection). Now, they would have had satellite phones and GPS to track the helicopter and have been able to find him or his body when the helicopter crashed. And DNA testing would easily have proven who he was/wasn't. So is technology messing up the storylines available to TV? If you think of other examples, I'd love to hear them :)