The best part of The Martian isn't the breathtaking rescue, nor the awe-inspiring dust storm. It's watching Mark Watney grow potatoes. Instead of freaking out over his imminent doom, Mark calmly figures how to grow plants in the Martian regolith by fertilizing them with his own poop, and watering them with a DIY device that makes water by heating hydrogen from his leftover rocket fuel, and combining it with oxygen from the Hab environment.

Mark makes The Martian a classic of competence porn by always coming up with a hackerish solution to every problem, just like James Bond or Ellen Ripley with her exoskeleton in Aliens. And he's not the only competence porn star burning up our monitors right now. From Sherlock to The Americans, competence porn is filling us with the satisfaction that comes from watching people attack problems with brains and cunning rather than fists. Well, OK, there are some fists, too.

The birth of the trickster smartass

Clever characters who can weasel their way out of any situation go back to the earliest days of western literature, when ancient Greek hero Ulysses, star of the Odyssey, outsmarted the cyclops and figured out how to listen to the sirens' song without killing himself. In the east, the character Sun Wukong (AKA the Monkey King) plays a similar role, using his trickster cunning to keep the bad guys down. Indeed, most competence porn heroes have an element of the Monkey King's trickster ways—they may use logic to defeat death, but they'll tell a few jokes and pull a few beards along the way.

Probably the most important figure in competence porn today is Sherlock Holmes, a character who was born during at the height of scientific industrialism in the nineteenth century. Like the heroes who came in his wake, Sherlock is a master of deduction, social engineering, and getting out of traps by using whatever random items happen to be at hand. He's also a smartass. It's tough to be the biggest nerd in the room, especially when you have answers to everything. So Sherlock develops a rather dry, sardonic sense of humor to cope—and to mess with his dimmer colleagues.

With Sherlock's shadow looming large over the genre, it's no wonder that many of competence porn's greatest creations are also detectives or problem-solvers of various kinds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, we had a slew of them in Doctor Who, MacGyver, The Equalizer, Prime Suspect, Aliens and of course every James Bond movie ever made. And let's not forget the 2010s masterpiece Burn Notice, which always had those incredibly cheesy-yet-satisfying voiceovers where Michael Westen explains how to use an old Commodore 64 to hack the traffic system, or a piece of gum to shut down a nuclear power plant. (OK I made those up, but you know what I mean.)

The point is, these are heroes who treat even action-packed fights as intellectual puzzles. And generally, they never miss a chance to deliver a good quip.

Kirk vs. Picard

There are a ton of almost-competent heroes who fall short of the mark. The case of Kirk vs. Picard is a perfect example. Kirk is a great hero and an inspiring leader. He saves hundreds of lives, makes tough decisions, and displays incredible bravery. But he's not a thinker. He has a crew for that, namely Bones and Spock, but also pretty much every not-Kirk person on the bridge. When Kirk needs to fight the bad guys, he relies on his team to help him strategize. You'd never catch Sherlock or Bond setting reason aside the way Kirk does in pretty much every episode of the original series. JJ Abrams plays this up even more in his Star Trek reboot, where Kirk is basically an emotionally out-of-control brawler to Spock's coolly competent hero.

Picard, on the other hand, is always pondering the many possible outcomes of any given situation. He takes the Prime Directive seriously, which means each time the Enterprise intervenes in a planetary civilization, Picard has devoted some philosophizing to it. Yes, he also relies on his crew for input—but Picard puts reason first, and emotions second. When Wesley is freaking out, Picard says, "Just do the work, Mr. Crusher." He stays focused under pressure. And maybe he doesn't have very many quips—or any at all, really—but he's going to reach for his communicator before his phaser in every situation.

Obviously competence isn't the only heroic mode. Kirk can be a great leader and still not really be competent. The same goes for heroes like pretty much anyone who has ever been in a Joss Whedon story, from Buffy to Captain Mal on Firefly. These are unarguably heroic people, but they are also broken and often do the wrong thing. They're good at leading; they're good at team-building. They will dive into hellfire to save the day. But they won't necessarily think through what might happen after the hellfire, or whether there might be more rational alternatives to the hellfire. Emotions rule their decision-making, and so hellfire it is.

Edge cases

Other characters in recent series hover right on the edge of becoming competence porn stars, but they lack something essential. You might think House would be a great example of competence porn, with its hat tips to Sherlock and hyper-rational hero. But Gregory House, unlike Sherlock or Mark Watney, isn't a generalist. He's an expert in one thing, which is solving weird medical cases. Whenever he steps outside that narrow area of competence, he's a giant mess. He has no social skills, no "let's build a robot dog out of pushpins" savvy, and he basically can barely tie his own shoes. Same goes for Temperance Brennan in Bones. She's a master at solving forensics cases, but she can barely talk to other people and would definitely not be able to figure out how to jump out of an airplane without a parachute and land safely.

Remember, competence porn stars have to be social engineers. They can't rely on other people to translate the geek talk into human talk for them, or they aren't fully competent. Heroic and smart, yes. Competent, no.

Another perfect example of a near-miss is Olivia Pope in Scandal. Like many other stars of the genre, her job is to get people out of messes. And she's definitely a generalist, as well as a scarily brilliant social engineer. The problem with Olivia is that she's morally compromised. She isn't fighting to save the innocent, nor is she out for great justice. I mean, she's happy to do justice when she can. But she's also happy to cover up a murder, or her own affair with the president. Olivia's competent but often verges on being an anti-hero.

Then there's Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games, who is a fantastic social engineer and able to defeat every trap the Capitol throws at her. But she's such a shell of a person that by the time the series is over, we're not sure whether she's able to think clearly about what she's doing. It's as if she makes the right choice based on lucky instinct, rather than anything even approaching rationality. Like the titular character in Jessica Jones, Katniss saves the day with half-mad violence. She's my hero—in fact, Jessica Jones is my everything—but I would never call her competent.

As my last several examples make clear, it seems harder for women to get cast as competence porn stars than men. Olivia, Katniss, Jessica Jones...their capacity for reason is nearly destroyed by the demands of their jobs, and they hover on the verge of madness. Spycraft genius Carrie Matheson from Homeland, who is so badass that you'd be nuts not to recruit her to your side in a war, is literally schizophrenic and has several breakdowns during the course of the series.

But this no-girls rule is already starting to change. There are obvious counter-examples in Ellen Ripley from the Alien series, Sarah Connor (who got her own Terminator series in the 2010s), and Jane Tennison from Prime Suspect. I also think we're seeing the birth of a new competence porn star in Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. After living on her own for years as a scavenger, she's become hyper-competent with every kind of technology, completely cool under pressure, and she's good with a ray gun too. There is no problem she can't tackle with her brains, and she's got a million MacGyver tricks up her gauze-bandage sleeve things.

The price of competence

They may be good at social engineering, but most heroes of competence porn have to sacrifice their social lives on the altar of reason in order to get the job done. The Doctor in Doctor Who will never find a companion like those he lost on Gallifrey. I don't care how many Sarah Janes, Roses, Captain Jacks, and River Songs you throw at the guy, his two hearts will always pretty much be broken. He seeks out companions to ease his galactic loneliness, but they never quite ease his melancholy. Similarly, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes seem doomed to be loveless, though Bond has M and Sherlock has Watson.

There's a good reason why, too. Just take a look at the Jennings' lives on The Americans. They couldn't possibly be more competent, but they are often hobbled by their growing emotional intimacy with each other—not to mention worry over their two children, who have no idea their parents are Soviet spies. Emotional connections can be a powerful motivator for heroes, but not for competence porn stars, who have to keep their heads.

Every time Picard has to leave someone he might love behind, or when Jane's husband dumps her in the first season of Prime Suspect, you're witnessing the price these heroes pay for their competence. There's a reason why so many competent heroes drink booze all the time, or snort coke. They have to shave the edge off their feelings or they won't be ready for the next clever curve ball from the bad guy. Competence porn stars see the world as a giant chess board, and it's hard for them to relate to other human beings as anything but pawns. Sure, they want to save those pawns from certain death. But they can't get emotionally attached. That way, madness lies.