Dear TV: Stop Telling the Techno-Babbling Character to 'Put It in English'

Dear TV,

Sometimes your scenes involving supersmart characters take dumb, expected turns.

I’m talking about when a smartie’s outburst of techno babble is met by his or her layman colleagues with glazed eyes and dropped jaws, followed by the inevitable variation on, “In English, please?”

Take, for example, this recent episode of Arrow, where on three different occasions — all within the same 42 minutes, and sometimes just scenes apart — a tech genius failed to dumb things down enough for the room:

TV, I am not here to begrudge you the brandishing of brilliant minds on shows such as Arrow, Criminal Minds and Scorpion. Far from it. Lord knows, Jack Bauer would have died 10 times over had Chloe not known how to open a socket and upload a terabyte widget into the ethersphere. Rather, my point is this:

When you get to one of those scenes, keep in mind that these people almost always have worked with each other for years. So at some point, didn’t Alias‘ Marshall or Bones‘ Brennan realize that to launch into a techno babble-heavy dissertation would, without fail, result in someone asking for it “in English”? And then they’d have to basically repeat themselves?