Indeed. (Also, copious amounts of uninteresting mammoth sex scenes.) I'm not sure whether equivalent-to-magic ability to do deterministic things with chaotic processes was a trope a few years back, it's in Robert Metzger's Picoverse as well, though not in quite such a jaw-droppingly WTF context. One the other hand, it's a Wise Mystic Neanderthal who does it, so I am not sure that's actually better.