Wah lau eh
April 19, 2017 8:27 AM   Subscribe

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders set an episode in Singapore. It made Kim Huat angry. Twice. [DLFBV]

Explicated in regular English text here.
posted by destrius (24 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
"lot of crime"

Singapore

Lol

Yeah, one of like 3 places on Earth where I felt safe walking around at 3am in the seedy parts of the city, incl. Geylang. There is a legal red light district there, tho, I guess
posted by hleehowon at 8:52 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


Fun, thanks!
posted by languagehat at 8:55 AM on April 19, 2017


senior supervisory special agent, and also linguistics specialist and cultural anthropologist

Oh, oh no -

I enjoyed earlier episodes of Criminal Minds; they were bonkers, but surprisingly well crafted for a disposable police procedural. But it really went off the rails. I think I switched to mostly hate-watching around the episode that the serial killer of the week was using tornadoes to cover up his crime scenes. If they can't even handle the Midwest how can they handle a different country?

The "linguist" they brought on for the main show was the real breaking point. She was terrible. Daniel Jackson was a more realistic linguist.

This mini-rant about Criminal Minds is brought to you by my horror at there being a spin-off set in other countries where one of the character is a "linguistics specialist" and "cultural anthropologist" because I cannot imagine that going well.

Not being familiar with Singapore, I can't really tell what is wrong with some of it, but it is apparently exploding across the internet. A search for "criminal minds beyond borders" brings up a bunch of articles about how people are really, really angry at the Singapore episode...
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:57 AM on April 19, 2017 [5 favorites]


What most Americans know about Singapore:

* It's far away
* Spicy noodles
* If you break the law, they'll cane your ass
* Captain Jack Sparrow saw corsets there

So no surprise that the showwriters figured they could get away with it.
posted by delfin at 9:06 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


Isn't it also kinda like Disneyland, only with the death penalty?
posted by acb at 9:15 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think I switched to mostly hate-watching around the episode that the serial killer of the week was using tornadoes to cover up his crime scenes.


Yes- that seems, um...completely implausible.
posted by Alexander J. Luthor at 9:26 AM on April 19, 2017


the serial killer of the week was using tornadoes to cover up his crime scenes
Oh, man, I had forgotten about that episode. That was bad. At this point, I only watch either of the Criminal Minds because my wife enjoys them, and if I'm reading on the couch next to her while she's watching TV, well, at least we can snuggle. But Beyond Borders is really too distractingly bad to effectively read while watching. There was a recent episode where street kids were blowing scopolamine powder in tourists' faces, and then ordering them to empty their bank accounts and kill themselves. I had to leave the room.
posted by curiousgene at 9:27 AM on April 19, 2017


Sentosa is Disneyland like, geylang, little India, etc orders of magnitude less.

The reason for the city's existence has always been the strait of Malacca, through which like 30% or something ridiculous of global trade comes through eventually. So that gives it sort of a weird trade focused Dutch disease, where trade and trade related finance and things is basically what the city can do, and it can't do shit else, but that's ok if you're just a city. But that also means they really have to not trade drugs, and that along with other reasons led them to basically give the death penalty for the drug trade.

No jury trials, but in nearly all other ways it's just a Commonwealth legal system
posted by hleehowon at 9:27 AM on April 19, 2017


Interesting fact about hawker centres (which look way more like cafeterias with independent vendors than street stalls or something): their usual spend on ingredients is expected to be on the order of 55 to 65%. (http://sethlui.com/things-opening-singapore-hawker/) This is from government poking about and subsidies and things and comes with strings attached, but compare that to the Western restaurant rule of thumb that food + labor combined add up to 65... This is why that hawker stall guy has a Michelin star, basically
posted by hleehowon at 9:34 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


A number of these are the same kinds of things that American TV shows set in American cities routinely get wrong. Or Canadian shows set in Canadian cities.

Torontonians love watching movies that are shot here and are supposed to be New York -- "how are those street cars working out for you, New York?" we'll say to an establishing shot in our Chinatown with our streetcars in the background. But then when they made Flash Point here and it was actually supposed to be set here, and the geography of the show was all completely wrong. They'd be talking about what highway they were going to take to get from one place to another place and it'd be like a) those places are like 6 block apart and you could probably job faster than you could go get in your cars and motorcade over and b) there's no highway between them. I don't think they're mistakes in the sense of "things they accidentally got wrong" so much as they are "things they didn't give a shit about" or "things they researched but which sounded better this way".

There's probably an extra-lot of them when dealing with a foreign city because there's more for them to not know off the top of their heads and more for them to assume few in the audience will care about but it's not just a problem with foreign locations.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:43 AM on April 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


Singapore is totally safe, unless you're a foreign worker who gets run over by a bus or a live-in maid who has her passport confiscated to prevent breaking contract. There are lots of problems there, just not necessarily Criminal Minds-worthy ones.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:58 AM on April 19, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'll admit that I've never watched an episode of Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders but the previews and commercials for it, which took "let's demonize the Criminal Others you are supposed to be afraid of in your heavily-protected suburban home" and made it "less American because that's scarier", always felt like some sort of brilliant read of the stereotypical CBS demographic. I'm glad to have my preconceived notions justified (which I recognize is funny based on the topic).
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:06 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


Never forget that the Criminal Minds franchise almost took Mandy Patinkin away from the world of television:
“The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do Criminal Minds in the first place,” he says. “I thought it was something very different. I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year. It was very destructive to my soul and my personality. After that, I didn’t think I would get to work in television again.” [via: New York Magazine]
It's classic cheeseburger television. It's easy to consume and you know what you're going to get. That being said, eating cheeseburgers day after day after day is not very healthy. At least not for me.

An ex-gf of mine once made the comment: “You don't want to be a woman in the first 2 minutes of this show. Ever.” The amount of sexual violence and physical/emotional trauma that is on display in this show hurts my brain. It is actually exhausting to watch the show.

Thus ends my rant on why I do not watch this television series.
posted by Fizz at 10:09 AM on April 19, 2017 [6 favorites]


There has always been only one reason to watch Criminal Minds.
posted by maryr at 10:52 AM on April 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


There's a reason Mandy Patinkin ditched Criminal Minds.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 11:16 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


...which was said approximately one post before that one
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 11:19 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thank you for posting this. I could not pin down what was bothering me about the show when I watched it.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 12:18 PM on April 19, 2017


acb - are you trolling?
posted by jkaczor at 12:21 PM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


street kids were blowing scopolamine powder in tourists' faces, and then ordering them to empty their bank accounts and

I liked that better when it was a trippy Shane Carruth film.

It's been a while since I was in Singapore, but isn't there basically no litter anywhere? That jumped out at me from the screenshots.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 12:46 PM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


(I'm also laughing that they got the police uniforms wrong, because I always describe the police as "hipster cops" when I tell the story of how we almost got picked up at Changi for some accidental weapons smuggling)
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 12:48 PM on April 19, 2017


If you want a legit Singapore crime drama, you want Police & Thief.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:04 PM on April 19, 2017


accidental weapons smuggling

sure, sure, as one does
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:12 PM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


I spent the whole day yesterday killing myself laughing at these videos, totally grateful that he took the bullet for all of us. And yes, this whole idea of Singapore = little China is just gd infuriating. Southeast Asian Chinese diasporas are their own thing, and just like that guy, I'm always ??? at this presumption.
posted by cendawanita at 8:20 PM on April 19, 2017


All that BS about migrant workers and an "Orwellian" government agency. Like we have a bubblegum and candy canes migrant system in the US.
posted by Brocktoon at 11:42 PM on April 19, 2017


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