World War II Is Full of Plot Holes, Fire the Writing Staff

LiveJournal user squid314 has posted a great rant. He loves Babylon 5 because the story is pretty consistent, but hates Doctor Who because it isn't. He rips into Doctor Who good and hard, but reserves his harshest criticism for the writers of World War II:

So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".[...]

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

Link via io9 | Photo: National Park Service

And there' s the incredible plot about the war in Europe ending by conventional means even though the Allies supposedly had this "superweapon" already in their hands.

Then you have this Hitler supervillian who "commits suicide" rather than having him escape and plotting for another day which is standard supervillain fare. Were the writers stoned when they came up with that one?