The Ineffectiveness of Explosions

Only in television and some movies do explosions do nothing more than show destruction but not actually harm people. You see this so many times that it is annoying. Pretty much any time an explosion happens, anyone caught up in them is almost certain to survive them. What’s up with that? Why would there be something as horrific as an explosion going on but people survive them?

It seems like the most common show to use the meaningless explosion trope is Power Rangers. They use explosions a lot and they are always for show. These don’t often even do damage. Often they are shown behind the rangers when they morph the first time and often some other times. We see them so many times that we know that not much is going to happen with them other than seeing something in the background going on that looks cool but means nothing in the end.

Sadly, many other shows have followed that some trope. King of the Hill put some characters in a building that exploded and only one of them died. Of course, that was undermined by having one of them be the main character that wasn’t likely to die at all.

NCIS had the very headquarters that the show took place at blow up, an ending picked with all of the main character’s lives in balance due to all of their contract’s being up for renewal, with all of them surviving and the headquarters being shown as the same later in the future.

Arrow had another season finale cliffhanger where a lot of people were on an island that blew up and most of them were all fine. They even show a point of view where it seems like they were just fucking with the audience by showing what all went on that might have been a flashback after the characters were already revealed to be okay.

The Pretender did this season finale cliffhanger not once but twice. They showed people caught up in an explosion and they are completely fine without the need to even be hospitalized. In fact, they skipped what even happened most of the time and just went to the next thing.

Honestly, if I wanted to see fireworks, I would watch that. If explosions are to be done on TV, they should mean something and not just be a showy thing that ultimately means nothing in the end. Why would explosions be ineffective if they are supposed to mean something?