A Sentinel is Not a TV Set
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| Title: | A Sentinel is Not a TV Set |
| Creator: | Rat Creature |
| Date(s): | November 24, 2000 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction, The Sentinel |
| External Links: | A Sentinel is Not a TV Set/Wayback Machine |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
A Sentinel is Not a TV Set is an essay by Rat Creature.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
One of my major pet-peeves with fan fiction for The Sentinel are 'sensory shortcuts.' One might expect Sentinel fiction to be full of lush sensory details, but unfortunately that isn't the case. The mostnotorious shortcut is "he dialed ...(insert any sense here) up/down." This description, or rather non-description, makes it sound as if a sentinel had real knobs inside his head. A sentinel is not a television set. Admittedly, the dial concept is canon, but not in this way. In canon, IIRC, dials are mentioned three times in two episodes: In "Out of the Past" Blair shows Jim to use the image of a dial to control pain which possibly caused the side effect that his other senses are also dulled (though that could have been also simply exhaustion). In "Love Kills" when Simon is worried that Jim is incapacitated by his memory related sensory spikes, Blair explains to Jim "We're talking about your senses here. They're to protect you and the tribe, all right, and you can dial them back. And I can help you." and later he uses the words "Come on, Jim, dial it back. You can control this. Dial it back." as Jim tries to control a sensory spike. We never see that Jim uses 'dials' to control his senses in a normal situation, in his everyday use of his senses. Just in extreme situations like pain or sensory spikes. Far more often we see him using breathing exercises, or no apparent special technique at all.