Sacrifice play

This is sort-of a spoiler, but really you need to know the things already to recognize them.

A while back I saw a terrific little movie scene in which a character who has been set up as extraordinary only in his decency ends up on the phone with the Action Heroes as they walk him through defusing a nuke.

Absurd thriller stuff, but well-executed in a way that was legitimately moving.

As things of course go wrong, the Action Heroes look increasingly worried but put on a brave face — er, voice — over the phone to Ordinary Guy. “You’re doing great. Here’s what we are going to do next.”

When time runs out Ordinary Guy has to reach in and just pull out the nuke’s core. The Action Heroes know that they are telling him to expose himself to a lethal dose of radiation. Ordinary Guy has no idea.

I was very impressed that the filmmakers trusted the actors to communicate to us how this would kill him without putting it in As You Know Bob dialogue.

The actors delivered the goods. The scene is poignant, and the story puts a button on it when the Action Heroes finally get to the Ordinary Guy.

“Did I do okay?”

“Yeah. You did great.”

I’m not crying. You’re crying.

This story worked. The Action Heroes had to make a hard, ugly choice. The Ordinary Guy’s quiet heroism, demonstrated earlier, turns into these melodramatic heroics.

But. I felt it failed to pay off the work it had already done establishing that Ordinary Guy would not hesitate to commit his life to protecting other people. I wonder whether someone in the writers’ room wanted a different version:

We see the bomb’s LEDs counting down …

3:20	Ordinary Guy: “Whoa. That sphere is the part that explodes, right?”
3:03	Action Hero: “Yes, that’s plutonium. Now remove the casing over the bundle of wires.”
2:41	Ordinary Guy: “It’s sitting right there. Can’t I just … pull it out?”
2:28	Action Hero: “That would work, but with direct contact, radiation from the core will kill you. Tell me when you have the detonator exposed.”
2:04	Ordinary Guy: “We’re running out of time.”
1:57	Action Hero: “Relax. You’re doing fine.”
1:48	Ordinary Guy [pulls out the core]

The friend who turned me on to this story says:

ugh, yes. you know it would have played out like this. (this is now canon for me)

I was so sure it was going to show us how this was actually an easy choice for him.

“You didn’t have to do that, D.”

“M, you know that I did.”

Partly this is just me being a dead sucker for Horatius At The Bridge. Romantic bullshit that gets me every time.

Partly I think of how Heinlein did a version of that in “The Long Watch”. The internet tells me that in his novel Space Cadet, a would-be Space Patrolman argues that the protagonist of “The Long Watch” was wrong to disobey orders … but another cadet responds with a regulation, saying “the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order”. Dude’s politics were twisty.

Partly I wonder whether American popular media is too enthusiastic about characters refusing to compromise, too enthusiastic about making characters sweat tough decisions, too rarely giving us characters demonstrating who they are when they do not hesitate to accept a hard sacrifice.