Another in an occasional series where I freeze frame a DVD to see that the producers skimped on something they really shouldn't have skimped on.

This one was really blindingly obvious. A pretty good episode all told, full of the old style Len Deighton or John Le Carré who is bluffing who, who is real, who is not. The obvious bad guy doesn't seem to be that bad, maybe he's being framed, but Adam Carter knows him and is falling to pieces himself, so maybe Adam is compromised, etc, etc. There's even a George Smiley or Bernard Samson character seen in flashback. As I said, pretty good.

Then as a coda, after everything is wrapped up and MI5 save the day, the action slips to Brazil and the camera pans around the huge statue of Christ, the Cristo Redentor, on Corcovado mountain. A completely iconic shot and so therefore we're in:

Rio de what?

Shouldn't that be, you know, Rio de Janeiro? Sloppy, Kudos, very sloppy.

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You'd have thought producers would have realized by now that their film or television episode is going to make it onto DVD or, lately, Blu-Ray. In fact they want it to be on DVD; if only for the extra revenues. But suddenly their audience is no longer just sitting there watching it "live", unable to interact, but now have the remote control in hand ready to freeze the action so that they can take a break or answer the phone.

Or, worse, so that they can pause exactly in the middle of a fleeting one-second shot showing a newspaper, a hand-written note, a computer monitor, and actually read it. And the resolution is really pretty good so it's fully legible. Or maybe there's a car in the background in a Victorian setting. Welcome to Freeze Frame Fail: the art of the incriminating freeze frame.

In this installment, we look at Lewis, series 3, episode 2: The Quality of Mercy. One of the suspects, Emma Golding, is young, brilliant, and a complete bitch, and on a rocket to the moon career-wise. She wrote this devastating dissertation which got her her doctorate, and from which Hathaway admiringly reads the opening paragraph to the uncomprehending Lewis. The camera very briefly shows the essay on the screen, as Hathaway folds the newspaper...

Ignoring the URL (they do have a legitimate reason to invent this kind of thing), it's a really well laid out webpage. Very nicely done indeed: someone spent some time on this. But...

There's that opening paragraph Hathaway was reading, for some reason nicely delimited by quotes (maybe it was to remind Laurence Fox which bit to read):

"Those eminent men, and very occasional women, who dwell on Mount Olympus, sharing profound philosophical reflections, invariably do so with their eyes looking upwards to heaven whether they believe in its existence or not. Once in a while, why do they not cast their eyes downwards, to the shantytowns and slums clustered at the foot of their blessed mountain, from which flow their security and prosperity?"

And then we go off into the weeds:

A typical thesis has a title page, an abstract, a table of contents, a body, and a bibliography. Other components might include an introduction, materials and methods (in the case of scientific or technical thesis), results, discussion, acknowledgments, a dedication, indices and appendices, glossaries, lists of tables, images or figures, lists of abbreviations, and so on. Degree-awarding institutions often define their own house style that candidates have to follow when preparing a thesis document. In addition to institution-specific house styles, there exist a number of field-specific, national, and international standards and recommendations for the presentation of theses, for instance ISO 7144[2]. Other applicable international standards include ISO 2145 on section numbers, ISO 690 on bibliographic references, and ISO 31 on quantities or units.

(Although I typed in the first quote there from the screen, the second is copied verbatim from this wikipedia article on dissertations.)

Oops.

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