My overall rating of "Better off Ted"'s Season 2: 4/10.
Dr Bhamba has generally been one of the funniest characters of the series, and in this episode he is placed front and centre, and very much delivers, but doesn't quite manage to save the episode. Neither does Chet, who finally was given a chance to do some comedy and gets it done. Unfortunately, the background is one of too many unfunny and cringy scenes with a weak plot and a ham-fisted moral.
Something that irked me (although not as much as some of the other science sins of the show, including the one about Terahertz oscillators that I wrote a trivia bit about on the appropriate episode's page) is the bit about the non-geosynchronous satellite, which doesn't quite make sense. "It's coming around again in 2015" - so, provided that the episode is set around the time of its real-life release, in 2009, the satellite's supposed orbital period is... more than 6 years?.. If my intuition about orbital mechanics doesn't fail me, doesn't it taking so very long strongly suggest it's way out from Earth and there's no way it'd be visible from Stella's house?! And isn't it way more impressive to launch a satellite super-far rather than to geosynchronous orbit? At least some more reading seems to help to handwave the implication that Stella would have looked at it when it was coming over their house if it was geosynchronous - "geosynchronous", it turns out, doesn't have to mean "geostationary", and they can wander along lines of latitude.
Dr Bhamba has generally been one of the funniest characters of the series, and in this episode he is placed front and centre, and very much delivers, but doesn't quite manage to save the episode. Neither does Chet, who finally was given a chance to do some comedy and gets it done. Unfortunately, the background is one of too many unfunny and cringy scenes with a weak plot and a ham-fisted moral.
Something that irked me (although not as much as some of the other science sins of the show, including the one about Terahertz oscillators that I wrote a trivia bit about on the appropriate episode's page) is the bit about the non-geosynchronous satellite, which doesn't quite make sense. "It's coming around again in 2015" - so, provided that the episode is set around the time of its real-life release, in 2009, the satellite's supposed orbital period is... more than 6 years?.. If my intuition about orbital mechanics doesn't fail me, doesn't it taking so very long strongly suggest it's way out from Earth and there's no way it'd be visible from Stella's house?! And isn't it way more impressive to launch a satellite super-far rather than to geosynchronous orbit? At least some more reading seems to help to handwave the implication that Stella would have looked at it when it was coming over their house if it was geosynchronous - "geosynchronous", it turns out, doesn't have to mean "geostationary", and they can wander along lines of latitude.
