TV: Revolution

TV: Revolution

This is a difficult show to commit to. I like it; it has an intriguing premise and a fast moving, absorbing plot. But it also poses serious questions with no likelihood of answering them. It's the fallout from Lost, i guess, plus Galactica, The 4400, and other shows. If you make a big mystery the motivation for a show, you should reveal it by the end. In this case i don't think the writers can.

Revolution begins sometime in the near future when in the space of maybe 2 minutes, all the power goes out. It's not that lines have been cut and it's not that power station have been shut off. What it is, is: electricity has ceased to flow.

Fast forward 15 years. We meet the main characters in Chicago, but never mind that, they soon leave. Mainly we are left to imagine the chaos, mass starvation and so forth that must have happened. We just see a microcosm of the end result, a group of just a few intact houses arranged in a horseshoe. Obviously the remains of a culdesac. No ruins; the other houses are completely gone, replaced by cornfields. Middle class suburb to peasant village in one easy step.

Well there are some questions right there. Why go to the trouble of completely removing the other structures, especially when you have to do it entirely by hand? And also, why remove the road? There's not a speck of asphalt to be seen. But guess what, those are not the questions i was referring to earlier and i'm going to let them slide.

What does concern me is first of all why is anyone alive? If there's no electricity, there shouldn't be any metabolism. And nerves aren't even the beginning. How about the ADP<>ATP transition? But let's say that somehow, only actual currents are affected; then the next question is why is there no replacement technology? Whole lot of engineers with lots of time on their hands, why haven't they come up with some machines based on sequential chemical processes like the ones in living organisms? And what about steam? No sign of that. In fact several episodes into the season, the reactivation of a single steam locomotive from a museum is treated as an iffy proposition. Don't the writers on this show know how many steam train hobbyists there are?

The other reason for starting in Chicago is to show us the long reach of the Monroe Republic. We soon discover that Monroe is a warlord who controls most of New England and parts of the midwest. Oh, and most of his troops have muskets or bows. Which brings up the next question: how does America run low on bullets in just 15 years? And if you've reached the point where you can no longer equip your entire army with assault rifles, why go all the way back to the Brown Bess? Yeah, muzzle loaders, when there must be plenty of single shot rifles available. Maybe you can't make new shells, but you can you can reuse the old ones. I'll pass over the fact that the Monroe Militia seems to have plenty of horses, since i honestly don't know how long it would take to breed them.

And then there are the magic amulets. They restore the laws of physics in their vicinity. How? Tiny tuning forks that change the vibrations of cosmic strings? Gears made from dark matter? Whatever it is, they don't just make it possible for devices to work, they power them up too, somehow inducing a current with the proper voltage and amperage-- the ultimate pull up power supply.

Monroe has established his capital at Philadelphia. His headquarters is Indepedence Hall. He's making plans to take on Georgia, which seems to now include all of the old south, and the "plains nation", which includes most of the midwest. Eventually he wants to conquer all of North America. But first he needs to rid his own territory of a stubborn rebellion, which naturally calls itself "The Resistance". There's a gang war element to this. Monroe brands his people with his logo; the rebels sport american flag tattoos.

We learn through flashbacks that the power shutdown method was discovered by accident by a company trying to invent something else. Apparently the amulets were made for the development team. Which included Rachel, one of the main characters. Monroe didn't know the details but he did know that she was involved somehow, so he captured her sometime in the past. A few episodes in, he captures her children. Finally he has leverage to compell her to talk about the project. She builds him an amplifier, a roughly water heater sized device with a range in the hundreds of yards. She and the children eventually escape and rejoin the others. Monroe uses the amplifier to resurrect two attack helicopters and start snuffing out rebel bases.

Really? Two military grade helicopters that haven't had full maintenance in 15 years. But they work fine. You know, the propellors aren't made of metal anymore, they're made from a flexible material that depends on centrifugal force to maintain rigidity. After 15 years of stillness, hanging by their own weight, they should at least be bent. But no: propellors, engines, radios, gatling guns, rockets, all as good as new. Fortunately Rachel manages to find another wizard, er former colleague, in hiding and use his amulet to power a bazooka. Which her son uses to destroy the chopper with the amplifier in it. That makes the other one crash as well, of course. He gets killed in the process, but that turns out to be an important plot development, because it means that Rachel can reclaim a special advanced pacemaker that was put in him when he was a child. It's apparently made with the same technology as the amulets.

It's been pretty obvious from early on that the current state of things is being maintained by some sort of engine, let's call it the Nullifier. Extrapolating from the size of the amulets and the amplifier, it must be huge. And immobile. And if i were one of the warlords, or better still, part of some group that still believed in democracy, i'd be looking for it. I suspect that it disturbs Earth's magnetic field, so i'd find a geomagnetic survey map and a compass, and take readings until i found significant variances. Then i'd follow those. No one appears to be doing that. However, in the flashbacks we meet Russell. He was a Defense Department contact person who was the first to be officially told about the discovery. He in turn, sold the Pentagon on the idea of the Nullifier. It would be used to target specific areas. Yeah, what's better than drone to ground combat? Drone to ground combat on an enemy with no working machines or communication. There is reference to a place called The Tower, apparently the location of the Nullifier.

Then the Bad News Officers showed up at Russell's door. His son was not coming back from Afghanistan. Russell became obsessed with the idea of putting an end to modern warfare.

It has not yet been made clear to what extent the developers were in with Russell, but they were at least aware of what was coming since they made the amulets. We see in the flashbacks that Rachel's husband, also a developer, updated his amulet (they are part flash drive) just before the blackout. But it seems that neither he nor any of the others warned anyone that famine and disease were about to take three fourths of the world population. Why didn't they? What is clear is that they never anything afterward either. and instead just tried to live anonymously, occasionally checking in with their hidden computers. But Russell seems to have a new plan that involves collecting the researchers (which he can because he has working devices that track the amulets) and coercing them to work for him. And he just showed up at Monroe's headquarters. In a car.