Revolution season 1 thread (1 Viewer)

[Lucia Duran]

Totally thought of Dies the Fire when I saw the previews for this. While I am interested in this, I'm not going to hold my breath. There have been so many shows just like this that I get invested in and boom...gone! I'll watch, but I'm not expecting anything great!

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

New poster:

I hope this is the Blu-Ray cover art when the time comes.

 

[Walter C]

Just seeing the 2012 World Series Champions sign on Wrigley Field, I can't help but think that the billy goat is responsible for the blackout. I guess the world did come to an end when the Cubs finally won it all.

 

[joshEH]

Elizabeth Mitchell replacing Andrea Roth in the role of "Rachel Matheson," the mother of Charlie and Danny:
http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2012/06/elizabeth-mitchell-joins-revolution-along-with-one-tree-hills-daniella-alonso.html
Roth plays the role in the pilot episode; Mitchell will evidently take over for the series. No reason was given for the recasting. Definitely a Roth-fan after Rescue Me, but Mitchell's certainly one helluva "get" for this show, as well (not to mention being incredibly MILF-y on top of everything else).

 

[Patrick_S]

I’ll probably give this a watch but the overall premise that if electricity suddenly was no longer available society would fall apart and over a decade later things would not have stabilized is a pretty weak idea.
What probably would happen is after a short period of adjustment society would become stable again and order would resume.

 

[joshEH]

Quite the contrary -- there have been several well-regarded, strongly-researched speculative fiction works dealing with the aftermath of technological collapse, and most government experts tend to concur that even a partial national infrastructure-breakdown could lead to the entire country reverting to a state of near-chaos within a matter of weeks if the national grid is not restored within a certain period of time.
The government would continue to function for a while, but civilian technology is largely not hardened against EMP (to use as an example). If all the cars with electronic ignition (most of them) and every communication system with solid-state components (all of them) suddenly stopped working, we'd be completely and utterly screwed.
Our whole economy involves moving lots of stuff around. If nothing else, there'd be no way to distribute food. Famine would run rampant, and you'd be looking at projected casualties at somewhere in the 100-150 million range from starvation and secondary effects just in the U.S. alone (a low-ended estimate, in fact, out of the 300+ million people currently alive in this country).
Practically all supermarkets today are dependent upon daily shipments from wholesale suppliers. When the trucks no longer run, when the food supplies run out in the major cities, once the supermarkets and malls are finished being stripped clean, and the starving populations face an exodus out to the countryside in search of food that will almost certainly quickly run out in turn...well, it's not a very pleasant thing to contemplate.
There might be grain already harvested, but without trucks and trains to move it to where it's desperately needed the most in the event of widespread famine (because there are no longer any vehicles functioning), it will likely just sit, rotting in the silos, never to be eaten except by a few people here and there in close proximity.
The old-style farms are now nearly completely gone. If something like this were to hit us now, everyone would think that people living in the rural areas are up to their ears in food ready to be given away. But the farmers today are pretty much dependent (almost fatally so) upon the supermarkets until the harvest-time, the same now as the people in the big cities themselves. Rioting and looting would ensue. Diseases such as staph, hepatitis, and cholera would make a major comeback not seen in a century or more.
In the U.S.'s biggest cities (Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia), millions would be pouring out, at best organized in some way, but far more likely in just a chaotic mass, like a horde of locusts eating their way across the landscape. And this would take place within two weeks at the absolute most; even earlier, depending upon the time of year and climate isses. Too, without air-conditioning, the cities will become unbearable in the summer, many people being psychologically unconditioned to adjust right at the outset.
We wouldn't revert back to the nineteenth century, we'd actually revert back to something closer to the fifteenth -- the people alive back during the 1800s at least had a low-tech, knowledge-based infrastructure in place, which we no longer possess. For example: agricultural/food production on an individual family-basis, steam-powered industrial equipment, folk remedies and chemistry formulas (could anyone today who isn't a chemistry major produce ether at home for a toothache that needs to be operated upon, once all the modern anesthetics eventually run out?), etc.
It would be a long, long time before such knowledge could get disseminated again on a widespread basis amongst the survivors, and we'd be looking at having to ransack libraries for old bound copies of Mother Earth News, Popular Mechanics (from the 1800s to the early 1900s), the old Foxfire books, et al, for old-fashioned, forgotten technological data, as well as folk medicine cures to fill the void caused by a sudden lack of modern pharmaceuticals and painkillers.
Diabetics, for example, would be a prime example of the second-wave dieback -- the insulin that they depend upon is produced in labs down in Arizona from strains of genetically-engineered bacteria, the glass vials made in factories in Mississippi, both separately shipped up to Washington State to be assembled and sent out to pharmacies on daily, temperature-controlled trucks...once those shipments are disrupted, we'd be looking at millions dead within weeks, and not just from diabetes.
It's easy to forget how fragile we really are -- one of the most pampered generations in the history of humanity. To put it more chillingly, everyone who should have been dead years ago from various health conditions would have died years ago without such things as beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, electronic pacemakers, sterile IVs, exotic medications...after an event like this, they'd all be dying at once.
It all comes down to the scale of social order. The larger the group, the more likely it will be that such a group will fragment under stress, with a few in power looking out for themselves first. Five thousand people, say, might be convinced to share and cooperate. A hundred thousand, though..competing self-interests, a "them-vs.-us" mentality, would begin to take over, especially with a mass breakdown in communications.
Sorry for the long-ass post, here, but if even a single EMP were to be detonated over the continental United States, we might be looking at the near-total collapse of our entire country (to say nothing about the massive damage the world economy would suffer as the result of such an event).
It's something that's dependent upon a staggerly-huge number of interrelated social, political, and economic factors, like a spiderweb. Pluck just one strand, and the entire thing will very likely unravel. To be sure, there will come eventual stability, true, but experts estimate with something of a 50-70% national-casualty pricetag attached.

 

[Walter Kittel]

If the event were confined to the U.S. then casualties might be mitigated by external assistance. But if it was a world wide event then billions would die. This was one aspect of global nuclear war that was discussed back in the day. When a disaster occurs there is help from "else where". In a global event, there is no "else where."
Technology is a two edged sword that makes incredible things common place but also creates an ever increasing dependency on that same technology. Or what Josh said.
- Walter.

 

[joshEH]

Yeah, I got pretty long-winded, there -- you summed it up much, much better than I did.
As you point out, a localized event is possibly mitigable with outside/foreign assistance, but a worldwide event (as we see in the trailers for this show)? Very different story. We'd be almost completely cut off and on our own.

 

[Walter Kittel]

No, it was a good analysis of the problems we would face if we had to go back to a pre-Electric era. I grew up on a very small, family farm and we raised a lot of our own food, but you know - we couldn't grow prescription medication for my father or mother.
I haven't seen enough of the series' promos to understand the scope of the event - global vs. continent vs. nation. My track record with serialized programming has been hit and miss but I'll be tuning in this fall. Survival stories are always popular because people identify with the protagonists; but the odds are that most of us would suffer a pretty bad fate.
- Walter.

 

[Patrick_S]

Yeah, I got pretty long-winded, there -- you summed it up much, much better than I did.
As you point out, a localized event is possibly mitigable with outside/foreign assistance, but a worldwide event (as we see in the trailers for this show)? Very different story. We'd be almost completely cut off and on our own.

I did not say life would go on after day one, there would be problems but after 15 years there would be a working governments and order.
I strongly disagree that we would revert to something like the fifteenth century and after fifteen years we would in fact be very similar to the nineteenth.
The problem with so much of the fictional writing on the subject of man suddenly losing technology and reverting back centuries ago is that it fails to remember that mankind does have knowledge and that is not lost with the turning off of a switch.

 

[Patrick_S]

Now that I think about it if the power lose is due to someone’s master plan, this show has a very weak core.
What’s the end game?
Can anyone here think of a remotely plausible motivation that an individual or groups of individuals would have for doing such a thing?
At least a show like Jericho had a core end game that made sense.

 

[TravisR]

The problem with so much of the fictional writing on the subject of man suddenly losing technology and reverting back centuries ago is that it fails to remember that mankind does have knowledge and that is not lost with the turning off of a switch.

That assumes that everyone would behave in a rational way and do their best to put things back together. I'm a pessimist but I think people would immediately turn into groups of scared or violent animals and that would thwart a return to somewhat modern society for decades. Just because people still know how to do certain things doesn't mean that some roving gang wouldn't come along and destroy their work because they like screwing things up for no reason at all.

 

[Walter Kittel]

The problem with so much of the fictional writing on the subject of man suddenly losing technology and reverting back centuries ago is that it fails to remember that mankind does have knowledge and that is not lost with the turning off of a switch.

Most of the people who possess the knowledge will probably die. The computer systems, and information technology which powers so much of our knowledge retention and dissemination will be useless without electricity. How many libraries will be destroyed by fire in the ensuing chaos? We will have the advantage of knowing that 'a thing' is possible, but will have to rebuild the infra-structure and interlocking scientific and technical disciplines to support technological progress. Not an easily accomplished task, nor a quick one in a post-Apocalyptic setting. The one advantage that survivors will have is that in this scenario they will not have to deal with an ecological disaster vs. something like nuclear war where the land would be blasted into an inhospitable waste land.
There may be some semblance of order after 15 years, but I suspect it will be of a feudal nature and highly fragmented (assuming the event is global in nature.)
- Walter.

 

[Patrick_S]

How many libraries will be destroyed by fire in the ensuing chaos?

Ah yes the apocalyptic library fires, we all know they are coming.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Now that I think about it if the power lose is due to someone’s master plan, this show has a very weak core.
What’s the end game?
Can anyone here think of a remotely plausible motivation that an individual or groups of individuals would have for doing such a thing?
At least a show like Jericho had a core end game that made sense.

We'll have to wait until the pilot to see. But while people clearly knew that the power was going to go out, virtually all at once, everywhere on the globe, it doesn't necessarily mean that it was part of someone's master plan. We can know that tornadoes are likely coming, and sound the alarm to evacuate the affected areas, but that doesn't mean the tornadoes are part of a master plan.
I'm mixed on the Elizabeth Mitchell casting. Everybody I know who watched "Lost" raves about her, but I've only seen her on "V" and she didn't really wow me there. The writing certainly didn't help, but I never bought into her performance on that, either.

 

[TravisR]

I'm mixed on the Elizabeth Mitchell casting. Everybody I know who watched "Lost" raves about her, but I've only seen her on "V" and she didn't really wow me there. The writing certainly didn't help, but I never bought into her performance on that, either.

She was great on Lost. If this show and her character are good, I think she'll knock it out of the park.

 

[joshEH]

Full version of the pilot is already up for viewing at NBC.com:
http://www.nbc.com/revolution/video/pilot/1415378
I think the big, Abrams-secret of this show will be that General Electric executives pulled the plug on electricity to make the people appreciate them in some sort of bizarre, "Atlas Shrugged"-kinda way.
(...Or that General Monroe is a secret Civil War LARPer, and wanted to take his weirdo obsession global.)

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

It was a nice setup. The casting of Elizabeth Mitchell as the mom means you know there's more to the mom's story than just being dead and out of the picture.
The best performance was Giancarlo Esposito as Captain Neville. He's a brutal, lethal man without remorse--but he's not a psychopath. He's doing what he needs to do to survive, and he's very philosophical about just how fragile his position is. He can be very mean, but he's no meaner than he has to be.
The lead actress Tracy Spiridakos is very very attractive, but she doesn't have much of a range. Hopefully she'll improve as the series unfolds.
Favreau's visualization of an overgrown world is one of the most compelling parts of the show. And Eric Kripke's spearheading this, not Abrams, so you know the mythology will be satisfying and the show's larger arc is planned out.

 

[TonyD]

Hey Eric, welcome to HTF.
I watched it on demand and got a good feel about it. These kind of shows are right up my alley so I'll be in for the long hall.

 

[Jeffery_H]

The whole premise doesn't make any sort of sense at all. You either have to go full Sci-Fi with some sort of plot device or ground it better with something more plausible. As the show stands now, it's neither one. Given the track record for most shows from NBC like this prior, I give it little hope of surviving long at all.