Hollywood has a message for scientists: If you want something that's 100% accurate in every way, go watch a documentary. The thing is, when it comes to movies, narrative wins. The writer's job is to get the characters right, not the science, says Tse, who cowrote Watchmen, one of last year's most-anticipated superhero films. It annoys him, too, when things don't make sense. He spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a fix for a logical problem in Watchmen—that one character, Dan, uses a completely obvious password to hack into the computer of Adrian, who is supremely intelligent. But for practical reasons, that kind of problem often just can't be fixed. Maybe it would take too long, in an already long movie, or distract too much from the narrative, or cost too much to shoot. Writers have faced similar problems with the TV show Heroes. The series follows a group of characters that have acquired superpowers: one is invisible, and one can walk through walls. One little boy can control electronics with his mind, which is "completely scientifically crazy," says Joe Pokaski, a writer who has worked on every one of the show's 76 episodes. But scientific sense isn't necessarily the point. As long as things make sense to the viewer, that's good enough, and it can leave the show open to carry out its real business: exploring the characters' struggle to figure out how to use their powers. And don't even get Heroes writer Aron Coleite started on invisibility. In a scene from the first season of the show, two invisible men walked down a Manhattan street, bumping into people and things as they went. Coleite says, "We spend hours in a smelly room arguing about invisibility." Questions such as: Does invisibility extend to clothes? Should the guys be walking down the street naked? "We're demonstrating it visually. We don't bother people with saying, 'It's an invisible field around them that blocks light, and that's why Claude is wearing clothes'," Coleite says. All of this makes sense when you consider that most of these writers don't have Ph.D.s in astrophysics (天体物理学). "You asked if we had a science background," said Pokaski, "No, we have a science fiction background. The more you try to explain, the sillier it sounds."