There is a scene in next week’s Radio Cataclysm (this week’s, if you’re subscribed to the Patreon) that is quite silly. This episode covers part three of Zeck, which starts with two characters remotely hacking an enemy airship in order to reverse its tractor beam and stop them from abducting an unconscious prisoner who may be a supersoldier. That’s not the silly part.

The silly part is that the two hackers are using the same keyboard to type, and shouting technobabble that could generously be called nonsense. Before I get into the reasons this all made it through the final draft of Zeck, I’d like to introduce you to the scene that partly inspired it. Now, I’ve never watched NCIS, but I have seen one clip from the show numerous times (I dunno, more than five and less than twenty). When I first watched it, I thought I hated it. I was mistaken. There are a few versions of this uploaded, but this is the oldest I could find, and probably the one I first saw over a decade ago. It’s been simmering in the back of my mind ever since.

Incredible. It takes under a minute, but there’s so much packed in there. The only character whose name I would know otherwise, Abby the goth lab tech, discovers they’re being hacked. She starts typing furiously as pop-ups bloom like mushrooms after a spring rain. The hacker is too fast; she can’t keep up. Another character in a brown suit comes over to help, placing his hands on the same keyboard. There’s no time to question this as their twenty fingers dance a tarantella while they shout technobabble that puts Star Trek to shame. Two men walk in. One holds a sandwich and asks if they’re playing a video game. “No, Tony, we’re being hacked.” The other man casually sips from a fountain soda. This is the silver fox who’s on all the DVD covers, so I’m assuming he’s the boss. While Abby and McGee (when did I learn his name?) continue pounding away at the keys, the boss calmly walks around to the back of the machine and pulls the plug. It works because of a single line that’s easy to miss: the hacker was only targeting Abby’s machine. They need to stop them because the whole NCIS network will be next. Is that how it works? Don’t worry about it. You don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy for medical advice, and you don’t watch NCIS for InfoSec training.

If, like me, you’ve never watched this show, you can learn so much about it from this one clip. Abby is a lab tech who also has computer skills. McGee is a suit of some variety, possibly an agent or bureaucrat or something, and he also has computer skills. Tony is a meat-and-potatoes guy who’s more street smart than book smart. Soda guy is in charge, he’s calm under pressure, and he’s the boomer who knows better than the young characters. They all work for the government. For fifty seconds of television, that’s a lot of information. That’s not what makes it good, though.

It’s tempting to assume that the writers of this scene have no idea how computers work. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t, but you cannot make that determination by watching this scene. This video made the rounds back when it debuted, and it was popular to dunk on it as an example of how clueless Hollywood is when it comes to computer technology. There are still Reddit threads about it. Read those threads, or the comments on the YouTube video, and you’ll see an occasional claim to the contrary- that the writers of NCIS, CSI, and other procedurals had an unspoken competition to see who could get the most ridiculous computer scene on air. I can’t find any real confirmation of that, but it seems closer to the truth. It seems unlikely that anybody would really believe that two people could use the same keyboard at the same time in a situation like that. It’s like painting over Cesar Romero’s mustache with Joker makeup. They know how it looks. It’s a feature, not a bug.

None of that is the reason this clip has been firmly lodged in my brain, bubbling up from time to time to time like a bay leaf in a stew. The reason it sticks with me, and the reason it clearly inspired the tandem hacking scene in Zeck, is that I can’t help wondering what it would be like if the unrealistic was real. If two people could just hop on the same keyboard in order to hack faster, how would that work? What if tandem hacking is a technique you can learn? What if the technobabble they’re shouting only seems nonsensical to the untrained ear? Perhaps it’s a coded language that hackers use in meat space, so they can talk to each other without the people around them clocking what they’re saying?

To be honest, none of that really made it into Zeck, so the silliness of the scene as I wrote it kind of has to stand on its own. I’m okay with that, because the Zeck series takes some of its inspiration from old pulp sci-fi, and there’s plenty of weird silliness to be found there. I will be exploring those ideas in Fortune’s Landing, which has a slightly more serious tone than Zeck, and features computer technology and hackers a lot more prominently.

I said above that I used to think I hated that NCIS clip, because I thought it showed the writers not caring at all about something. I learned I actually love it, because I realized that sometimes I care way too much about the dumbest things.