That's Impossible (History)

The show's producers have tracked down some of the world’s top scientists, and it’s fascinating to watch them demonstrate truly amazing breakthroughs. But the show wants to go further; instead of seeing, for example, a cloak that uses advanced photographic technology to simulate near invisibility in a lab, it tries to convince us that true invisibility may already be possible.

In this, it reaches too far. Much of the show's speculation is based on rumors about secret military projects, some still secret. As a result, the show has little to go on, and the experts can only skim the surface of these concepts. Hearing some talking head tell thinly substantiated stories about a classified effort to make a tank invisible isn't compelling. Frakes repeats the experts' claims, sometimes more than once, using tepid computer animations ... but no real evidence. Hearing wild assertions repeated feels like padding. We don’t need an expert to tell us that rendering soldiers and tanks invisible would give an army an big strategic advantage, and we certainly don’t need them to make the same obvious point over and over.