Revolution

[BossTamsin (imported)]

I'm with River on this one. There is a lot about Revolution that bugs the hell out of me, and yeah, I would love to shit all over this show. The last minute or two might make me come back to watch next week, but doesn't mean I'm gonna take things any more seriously. The show is a complete joke.

I'll be nice and avoid the low-hanging fruit of a world without electricity and most modern products still having a shocking amount mass-produced clothing, hair driers, and 'product' in general. Ok, maybe not.

1) All electricity vanishes, and apparently 99% of all modern firearms are rendered useless? Why in the HELL is anyone using a musket, especially people belonging to a militia run by a former military man.... and the militia is armed with swords, crossbows and MUSKETS??? Except of course for their captain or whatever, who has a pistol. Ooooo. A pistol. Where's the assault rifles? Shotguns? Machine guns? What the hell????

2) It's 15 years after all the electricity in the world vanished. Can you sit there with a straight face and tell me nobody, apparently not ONE person, has managed yet to walk into a library and look up the term 'steam engine' in a book? Really? We see one of the biggest cities in the country, Chicago, and no sign of anyone possessing a steam engine. Apparently people can hack together stills, but nobody can figure out how to use steam to turn a wheel. It's like there wasn't a whole big industrial revolution that was merrily taking place before electricity was figured out.

2a) All power ceases, and apparently the moment it happens, planes stop going forward and immediately start falling straight down. Spiraling in, too. Riiiiiight. Good to know there. I damn near laughed seeing that happen. (If you can, watch that scene again. The big jumbo jet you see right before the title sequence isn't moving forward at all. It's coming straight down.)

*SPOILERS* Stop reading here if you haven't seen the show and don't want it destroyed. *SPOILERS*

3) Batteries don't work, generators don't work, internal combustion engines don't work. Nothing that uses electricity in any form works. Unless you have a magic USB pendant. SOMEHOW, this magic USB pendant, and the files it contains, seems to allow computers to function! Excellent! How in the hell does this work, exactly? Does the pendant use electricity to generate the electricity-works-here field? What powers the pendant? Sure, this might be explained later, but I'm willing to bet $5 right now that it's a hand-wavy magical explanation along the same lines as any answers we were given for Lost. That is, no real explanation at all.

4) Even assuming I buy the magical USB pendant, who is she talking to? Or more importantly, HOW? 15 years after all maintenance of the system stops, she's got phone service? Wires are actually still connecting two people together? It doesn't show a satellite phone, it seems to show a modem connecting. As in an actual, old-school, listen to the tones, modem. The last command, partly obscured for some reason, seems to say "ATDT08450801000 CONNECT". Now... With the rest of the commands, she's using a modem. As for that number, that's not a US-based number. It does, however appear to have been a British phone number for Compuserve (http://info.aol.co.uk/compuserve/faq-9x-me.adp). It truly is the end of the world, if the highest technology anyone on the planet has access to is Compuserve.

*Sigh*

*Deep breaths*

Ok... I think I'm done.

[Dave (imported)]

Obviously, they don't know how to make bullets or shells without electricity. They are afraid of running out of bullets.

WOW, are they stupid, collectively stupid...

[Riverwind (imported)]

Yes they are, however in a Heinlein book a group went off world for a weekend and it lasted a few years. Guns do run out of ammo however you can make new arrows. HOWEVER, for as many guns there are in this country will all the loaders and ammo stored in private hands, there would be enough ammo to last a least a century maybe more because its not that hard to make black powder.

Sigh.

I had forgotten all about this show until you guys brought it back up, If I miss it Monday I know I will be disappointed for at least a second maybe two.

After careful thought and consideration I give this a -3 on a 1 to 5 scale.

River

[MacTheWolf (imported)]

A) The BOOK OF ELI wasn't terrible, it just was one big fight seen with a set of ideals, very altrusitic ideals. Worth the cheap rental rate of $3.99

B) REVOLUTION... I'm not going to poo all over on the first night BUT,

I was reminded of an old ERROL FLYNN movie with sabers and pirates and swordplay. I was hoping for sailing ships and exalted dialog between the good and bad guys. The dialog was childish even for two dozen monkeys hacking away at typewriters puerile and hackneyed.

.

Pirates and sabers wise, i liked Errol Flynn in Captain Blood

[Losethem (imported)]

I don't buy the scientific premise of this show. Somehow nothing with electricity works? How about thunderstorms - no more lightning? After all, nothing using electric works, and it's global, so something must be happening to prevent the phenomenon of electricity globally. I could get all power plants not working, but no batteries, no generators, no nothing in the immediate aftermath? Seems odd. What did they use to bust up the asphalt in the culd-de-sac where they were growing the crops, and the concrete curbs were still there AFTER they did all that manual labor?

No steam engines or water wheels? Of course, seeing how education is valued today, I'd expect nothing less out of most people. Still, if that's the case they shouldn't be alive 15-years later. They should have all died of starvation while holding their iPhones in the their hands wondering why Angry Birds is no longer working.

They better get to telling us what happened, beyond "all the lights went out" by the end of episode 2 or I'm outa there.

--LT

[moi621 (imported)]

I watched it Monday and the repeat Wednesday.

I look forward to the explanation of why electricity doesn't work anymore.

Maybe without a sufficient planetary magnetic field,

electricity can't flow no how, but

then it would not flow on the Moon.

Moi

This show has feet.

Good cast except the asthmatic douche bag.

[curious_guy (imported)]

2) It's 15 years after all the electricity in the world vanished. Can you sit there with a straight face and tell me nobody, apparently not ONE person, has managed yet to walk into a library and look up the term 'steam engine' in a book? Really? We see one of the biggest cities in the country, Chicago, and no sign of anyone possessing a steam engine. Apparently people can hack together stills, but nobody can figure out how to use steam to turn a wheel. It's like there wasn't a whole big industrial revolution that was merrily taking place before electricity was figured out.

I think it probably would be easier for them to get diesel vehicles running than to make steam engines. All they would have to do would be to pick vehicles with mechanical fuel pumps and equip them with compressed air starters and air compressors.

[curious_guy (imported)]

Yes they are, however in a Heinlein book a group went off world for a weekend and it lasted a few years.

I think the Heinlein book you are thinking of is Tunnel in the Sky.

[Riverwind (imported)]

You could be right, its been at least 40 years sense I read it. As I remember it was a good story but its just been so long as to remember much more about it.

River

[Slammr (imported)]

In thinking about writing a similar story before, I proposed a supernova exploding close enough to us to bathe the world in gamma rays and effectively knock out all the world's electronics. In 1962, the USA exploded a 1.4 megaton weapon in space which knocked out 300 street lights in Hawaii, set off burglar alarms, and damaged a microwave telephone link, so a nearby (relatively speaking) supernova could certainly do it.

S.M. Stirling in his novels starting with Dies the Fire proposes a world similar to the one in Revolution, without explaining how it comes about either: suddenly one day, all engines and electronics stop working; cars stop, and planes fall out of the sky. I believe in his story gun powder no longer explodes either, effectively throwing the world back into the dark ages. I liked his premise, but I wasn't that fond of his ability to tell a story. The first book wasn't bad, but I lost interest by the third book or so.