I’ve been working my way through the original run of seminal cop show Dragnet, and there was one scene in particular that boggles my mind. Season two, episode thirty-three, “The Big Dance” opens with Friday and his partner Smith hanging out at Smith’s house; Smith describes Friday as one of the worst cooks he’s ever known, and paternally walks him through cooking a Spanish omelette. The basic gag of the scene is the amusing contrast between Joe’s hypercompetent policing and his complete befuddlement in the kitchen; I was thrown by his apparent belief that one skins tomatoes as a matter of course. But this was nothing compared to what came next: Joe looks curiously in Smith’s pan and says, “What are those little brown things on the si – oh, those are the onion skins!”

Now, I’m infamous across multiple friend groups for how much I despise the act of cooking, but even I know that leaving the skin of an onion on is a genuinely deranged decision. In fact, I distrusted my own knowledge enough to go around asking people significantly more qualified to make sure my initial reaction was correct, and the universal response was complete bafflement and making sure I knew this is a bad idea. I work in a cafe, and when I ran the idea past one of the chefs, he looked at me like I was insane, took an onion skin, and bit into it to demonstrate how anti-food it is.

(The things I do to my reputation for my work)

I am left desperately trying to figure out why the writers thought this was a good idea to write. Was it a writer who had no idea how to cook and just faked it until they maked it? How did it pass through so many hands – producers, directors, actors – without someone pointing out what a strange thing it is to say? Was there actually a point in history – in Los Angeles, 1954 – where it was considered acceptable to leave onion skins in when cooking omelettes? I will never have answers to these questions and they will haunt me for the rest of my life.

What moments in fiction would you describe as inexplicable? Moments where you have no idea how a human being could write them, or perform them, or even come up with them?