TV Rambles: My Thoughts on the Premiere of Revolution

****Contains spoilers. If you DVR’d this show, don’t let me ruin it for you.****

 

Okay, warning is made.

 

 

 

 

The world goes dark. Now how do people survive?

The premise sounded pretty awesome, and it got my fiancé’s attention. He loves the post-apocalyptic shows like Jericho, even the Luke Perry show Jeremiah, so Revolution was right up his alley.

We settled down on the couch last night, and as the show started, I was holding out hope.

It started off showing a little girl named Charlie who was too engrossed with the television to say hi to her grandma on the phone. Then her dad comes home, freaking out, downloads something to flash drive, and calls his brother. The conversation tells me he knows what’s going on. The power goes out. Now we’re getting to business.

We jump 15 years into the future. The dad-who-knows-all has helped set up a nice self-sustaining village.

And then for the rest of the show, I bit my tongue.

Let’s go back to the village. It’s a nice set up. They’ve got small crops and goats, so they’re doing all right. So why are dad-who-knows-all’s kids hunting? Oh, so the boy, Danny, can have an asthma attack so it can be used as a plot device later. Um, okay.

And here’s where the ridiculous comes in. The militia is looking for Charlie and Danny's dad. It just so happens, he passed off his very-important-flash drive to another guy in the town just before the militia shows up. He gives the men his name (why?), and when they tell him to come with him, Danny pulls out a crossbow. Now, no one had laid a hand on the dad, no one apparently knows what he had besides the militia and him, so it didn’t make sense for the scene to turn into Dodge City. And of course, stupidity ensues, dad gets shot, Danny gets taken, and his sister, Charlie, who was out sulking in an old fairground, has to come to the rescue.

The show might have still been redeemed at this point. But then they decided to do ALL THE THINGS.

Not sure where in the world they are, but the trip between their little town and Chicago to find Charlie’s badass uncle gets rushed through find a stranger, get attacked by the baddies Daddy warned her about, saved by the stranger, betrayed by the stranger. Meanwhile, Danny is doing his own escape bit, but dontcha know it, that darn asthma kicks in.

But never fear, the farmhouse is lived in by a lady who just happens to have an asthma inhaler. Oh, but she’s going to betray him, too. Why? Because she’s got one of those special flash drives, and it just so happens that little thing can power a laptop in a scene rather reminiscent of the hidden computer communications in Jericho.

As a writer, I often see advice to know where my story starts and start there. Revolution missed the mark. This episode could easily have been spread out over a couple instead of crushing everything into 45 minutes. I, personally, could have waited to discover the uncle and the power-supply flash drive.

The weapons made no sense. The bows were all modern, complex pieces of equipment that couldn’t be easily repaired if broken, and the few guns were unnecessarily old. Even the militia, except for the head henchman, lacked modern firearms. It’s been 15 years. Why the hell are they reduced to muskets and swords?

Overall, I think it tried to do too much at once. And because they did too much at once, I wasn’t buying it. If my fiancé wasn't determined to watch the next episode in hopes it gets better now the back story is done, I’d already have taken it off of the DVR schedule.