No seriously guys REVOLUTION is balls-awful

There’s been one episode. The pilot. That’s all we have to judge it. And the person running it isn’t actually Abrams but Eric Kripke, who made Supernatural which is at the very least entertaining.

I mean, the show could still turn into The Event Part 2: Alcatraz Boogaloo. But it could also be decent. Jesus people.

Reply

Well, isn’t a pilot supposed to be a good representation of a show? A big part of it is showing people why they should watch. If it can’t do that, then it’s a failure, at least as a pilot. Though, some show can improve after a while, I’d say that it’s pretty rare, imho.

Reply

I try not to think about the event.

It will only cause distress.

Reply

Pilots can sometimes be a bit shaky, and it can take a few episodes for a show to hit its “groove”… but you can usually tell if there’s any hope of that.

Everyone seemed to hate the pilot of Maria Bello’s Prime Suspect, but I thought it had promise and I stuck with it, and then I thought the show got seriously really good.

Revolution pilot seemed so-so to me, I could see it improving, but I could also see it spiralling into major suckitude. Guess I know what MGK would tell me to expect.

But… y’know… apocalypseness!

Reply

And any fule know that Giant Space Bears only eat… ASTRO SALMON (and nuts and berries).

Reply

Alright MGK, nor tell us how you REALLY feel.

Reply

i actually quite like the premise of ‘revolution’. and btw, guns still work because they dont rely on electricity. only electricity stopped working.

but yeah, the pilot sucks donkey balls, and the execution is so fundamentally flawed, i dont see this improving. the focus is all wrong, with very little follow-through on the premise, or focus on character- or world-building; instead we get yet another tired ass conspiracy-mystery. plus, the actress sucks.

Reply

Counterpoint: Most cars have these things called “batteries” and “alternators” that deliver power via electricity to things called “sparkplugs,” which trigger the controlled explosions required for a combustion system. No electrical power = no internal combustion.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but that’s true for the majority of modern internal combustion.

By contrast, guns need a flint and steel (or variation thereof). No electricity required.

Reply

I’ve never watched Parks and Recreation (SHAME) but given the glowing recommendations I keep seeing I’m planning on changing that.
Oh god, I hate that the Rick Mercer Report and 22 Minutes are our topical shows. They’re both just the most boring sort of soft, inoffensive comedy, and the fact that they’re off for 5 months of the year is bush league as hell. You don’t see John Stewart and Stephen Colbert taking more than a couple of weeks off, do you? Because they’re professionals who actually seem to care about reporting and commenting on the news in an accessible way. The Rick Mercer Report in particular fills me with shame, it should have been the Canadian Daily Show, instead (bearing in mind I haven’t watched it in years) we got a show where Rick Mercer does the occasional sketch and a weekly road trip/ soft interview with a boring politician. HATE.
Secret Princes sounds amazing though. Unlikable rich asshats with titles and money that are holdovers from the feudal systems that haven’t been relevant for decades slumming in Atlanta for kicks? Sign me up, I hope one of them gets beaten up when his handlers accidentally have him go to the wrong part of town. That would please me immensely.
Like everyone else on the face of the Earth, I have no clue why Community got rid of Dan Harmon, but I sincerely hope the new guys don’t screw things up.

PS:
@ Bret
Was that a “That Mitchell and Webb Look” reference? High five.

Reply

@Kaisius: To be fair, I didn’t see anything in the pilot that implies it’s a computer virus that caused the polarity reversal in the neutron flow or whateverthefuck. It honestly COULD be space bears for all we know.

Everyone keeps making unflattering comparisons between Revolution and the Hunger Games (because the protagonist is a young woman who uses a bow, plus it’s all post-apocalypsy and stuff) but honestly it strikes me as a weak, watered down, unambitious version of S.M. Stirling’s “Dies The Fire” series. MonkeyWithTypewriter is right when he says that the problem with Revolution is it starts out with an incredibly stupid premise and then charts a course DOWNhill from there.

Reply

Don’t human nerve signals rely on a mixture of chemicals and electricity?
I mean, electricity either works or it doesn’t.

Also Stirling Cycle engines work just fine with no electricity whatsoever: if any source of heat still exists (wood still burns, right?) then they’d work fine to power lorries and cars.

Reply

“i actually quite like the premise of ‘revolution’. and btw, guns still work because they dont rely on electricity. only electricity stopped working.”

Except that if you took away all electricity today, but the physics that make gunpowder go boom still worked? You’d still have a LOT of tech. You could adapt to internal combustion engines, steam power, etc. Hell, I’m pretty sure you’d have some maker geeks working on steam engines before planes stopped falling out of the sky.

There’s a book series that has something similar happen, called ‘Dies The Fire.’ In that series, all of it goes. Gunpowder, Steam, etc.. all of it goes away. Now.. I’m not saying the explanation for how it happens is any better (I lost interest in the series), but if you’re going to wipe away tech, you need to be consistent in terms of results. I get the feeling that they probably originally had guns not working, and got overridden by some network guy because guns are cool. Because seriously, being an amazing sword-fighter makes VERY little sense if I can still shoot you in the face with 1/1000 th of the training.

Luckily for the good guys, the bad guys are all storm troopers. So they’re accurate *once* at the very start of the show, and never again.

Reply

Apparently in the third book of the second series he provided some form of explanation, but I have not read that book. It’s also been a while since I read it, so I don’t recall exactly which other parts of simple technology didn’t work. I seem to recall steam didn’t, but not what else.

I’m fine with the clothes issue, because as you said, in the end we would lose a lot of people in the direct days after the loss of power, and eventually someone would find the amazon and walmart distribution centers.

But in Revolution, where gunpowder still works? Water, Wind, Steam, and certain gases (like woodgas), should all still be incredibly effective and would keep civilization from completely devolving.

Also, while it’s hard to make new modern guns without electricity, it is not necessarily hard to *maintain* them. There is also a gross-metric ton of modern ammo out there.

Lastly:
1 – I have a magic USB Dongle that lets power work.
2 – You have a magic USB Dongle that lets power work.
3 – So we can communicate.

Except:
1 – Where are you getting the power from? (Let’s assume gennie or battery or whatever)
2 – Are you always online just waiting for me to turn up? 24 / 7 / 365?
3 – How exactly does the signal get from me to you. Are there a series of magic dongles for DNS servers, Routers, Repeaters etc? How has noone noticed this?
4 – Is our line a magic dongle? Because otherwise shouldn’t the signal die once it gets out of dongle range?

Is how much I enjoy saying dongle, as stupid as that whole concept? And do we really need another series where characters in the know will refer to things in the most obscure ways so that the viewers are kept in the dark? ‘Did they find it?’ ‘It’s happening!’ ‘You know what happened!’ ‘You know why he wants to see you.’

Reply

Eli — that would be an awesome scene I think, to have Katlistless scuff her feet on a carpet to try and shock her brother, and then… nothing happens, and the physics guy says “wow, that’s thorough”.

But it’s pretty clear to me that some equivalent of Magic Space Bears are behind the premise of Revolution, so anything inconsistent will be lumped under the umbrella of “because Magic Space Bears”.

Reply

So. . . All the electric eels died off pretty darn quick?

Reply

The producers are claiming that they’ve had their premise looked at by physicists who said it was possible:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tca-revolution-jj-abrams-eric-kripke-jon-favreau-353668

I’ve only had the one episode to go by, and compared to other post-apoc shows, it’s better than nearly all of them thus far apart from Jeremiah.

It’s also got better writing/acting per square foot than Jericho did, and will continue to do so unless they also start making their show into the apocalypse by way of the Hallmark channel.

Reply

but i dont see how “electricity stops working” as a concept is any more stupid than “disease turns people into zombies”, or “all carriers of a y chromosome die”.

I don’t think any of us are attacking the concept. I like the concept, but the show is not good.

Reply

People were talking about the gun issues over at The A.V. Club.

Basically, there is absolutely no good reason for the evil militia guys to not have modern assault rifles looted from military bases or the homes of gun nuts. The low-tech weapons are a deliberate style choice.

Apparently, the producer went with the flintlocks because the name of the show is “Revolution” and that would make people think of the Revolutionary War.

Okay, I guess… And one could even make an argument that it’s good science fiction to go with something that would be a lot easier to make more black powder and ammo for. However…

Like Kai and Socraticsilence have been saying, there would be a ton of guns just waiting to be discovered and plenty of ammo for the small fraction of the population that survived until 15 years later.

And it doesn’t really make sense that the militia has craftsmen who can make nice reproductions of old weapons with engraving and everything.

Or that the civilians who have guns either have flintlocks or old-timey double barrel Elmer Fudd shotguns…

It would make a lot more sense to me if people still had some modern-style guns they managed to hide from the militia, but they use bows and crossbows to A.) save ammo and B.) not let the bad guys know they still have a few hunting rifles and things just in case.

People were talking about how much they liked that cheesy sword fight in the pilot over at The A.V. Club. I would have been more impressed if the cranky uncle had pulled out a Beretta M9 and just shot a few of the guys with those funky short swords.

Reply

Yes, I did.

I love sword fights, but watching Bella Swan’s dad win basically because the bad guys used stupid tactics was no fun at all.

That whole sequence really drove home that watching people fight with flintlocks does not make for exciting television.

Especially when the battle is staged in a way where Secretly Badass Uncle doesn’t have to work all that hard to stay alive. The creators of the show need to spend more time watching Chinese action movies and getting inspired if they’re going to insist on staying low-tech.

I thought they did a nice job of showing the limitations of the teenage heroine’s crossbow (she needs a backup weapon to increase her odds of not getting raped and/or killed). But Secretly Badass Uncle should have been toast.

Reply

[…] but it’s no more ridiculous than countless other starting points for SF series. As this discussion at Mighty God King points out, however, the execution isn’t particularly logical, which bugs […]

I think in the show, the dampening of electricity is definitely artificial as the main knew it was coming. It must also have limits. It still allows high frequency EM waves to exist, i.e. light and heat. So it has an upper frequency limit. And, to allow chemical reactions to occur and nerves to work, it must require a threshold of either voltage or E field strenght to kick in. If i were in such a situation as this show i would start running some simple experiments and observations. Like, is there still lightning? I’d get a compass, a magnet and some wire. Make a coil out of the wire and run the ends some length away from the coil and tie them together. Then i’d set the compass by the wire ends. I’d go back to the coil and fun the magnet through it, perhaps on a rotor attach to a gear box to get the rpm up. I’d see if there was any affect on the compass. I’d also see if it was harder to rotate the magnet when the wires were shorted as compared to not being shorted (If it is, where is the energy going if not into electricity?). The list can go on.

Reply