I hate idiot plots, a term which Wikipedia tells me was coined by James Blish and defined as "a plot which is kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot." It's bad enough in the ever so popular storylines where a series of horrible misunderstandings would be immediately cleared up if only some of these morons bothered talking to each other. At least with that type of story you can fall back on the fact that, yeah, plenty of otherwise intelligent people are complete idiots when it comes to interpersonal dealings. Then there are the horror and suspense stories where due solely to the requirements of the story up-til-now intelligent people decide to go off alone to investigate a strange noise or not tell anyone about the evidence they've collected before they confront the bad guy. Those are all extremely annoying and overdone, but you often know what to expect going into that kind of story and know you have to put your brain in neutral if you want to enjoy it.
What's worse is a well written story about intelligent characters who don't make any uncharacteristically stupid decisions until the very end of the story, after you've invested a lot of time and emotion into the fact that hey, these people aren't morons at all! I just read a book about superheroes trying to keep a group of people alive after a zombie apocalypse. They're doing fairly well against the usual mindless zombie hordes, because said hordes can't work together well enough to overwhelm the survivors' defenses. So far so good.
Then an extremely strong and tough super-zombie shows up who has the power to mentally control all the normal zombies. Using said control he can make the zombies act intelligently enough that they're clearly going to breach the walls and kill everyone inside if the super-zombie isn't immediately stopped. Interesting! Who are you going to send to fight the super-zombie in the climax? I'll make it simple and whittle it down to two choices:
A) Any of the extremely tough but still vulnerable heroes who would present the super-zombie with a fair fight that allows for long action scenes where we see the big fight while innocent people are dying every second the super-zombie is still active
or
B) The flying energy man who has been established over the course of the book as completely invulnerable to any physical damage and who could easily blast the super-zombie into its component atoms and end the threat immediately?
I understand why the author wanted to go with choice A. I do. If you're doing something like that, though, you have to put at least a little bit of thought into why supposedly intelligent people don't immediately go with plan B. Especially when one of your other characters is a super-genius level tactician.
Bah. Still a good book, though, overall.