Seven episodes in and we’re finally getting some answers!  First off, it seems now like it has pretty much always been about Danny.  The child that was never supposed to be for which his parents essentially sold their souls before he was even born to bring him into existence. We find out who Randall is and he is even more evil than we initially thought! And of course we are a step closer to learning about what actually happened to the power!
 
Ok, now that I got that initial font of information out there, I can back this up a teensy bit… “The Children’s Crusade”, Episode Seven, aired last Wednesday. We got a bit more Rachel and Ben backstory.  We got what I now call our obligatory Miles weekly sword fight.  All in all, a very entertaining hour of television. Not that I was completely void of any “Really?  You’re going there?” moments.  I still had some of those…

 
This episode was written by Matt Pitts, who really seems pretty new to things.  He has six episodes of Fringe for writing credits besides this one, and he is listed as “miscellaneous crew” for Star Trek, so he seems to be a J.J. guy.  I did like that we had a lot of movement in this episode regarding story in present time as well as backstory.   There was a “heist” type plot regarding saving Peter, and we found out a bit about how the militia “manufactured soldiers” in the present time while still learning a lot about incidents happening almost twenty years prior involving the power, and the role played by Rachel and Ben in creating it.  Oh, and another plot with Monroe and “fates worse than death”.
 
The episode was directed by Charles Beeson, who in addition to directing “Chained Heat” this season, has also directed five episodes of Fringe and twelve of Supernatural, the most recent of which was “The French Mistake”.
 
 
Soldiers in the militia go by with a teenager tied up on a wagon while Charlie, Miles and the others stay in the shadows.  When the gang falls into a trap made by other children, they find out about a whole “army” of children left parentless after the militia came through many years ago and killed all the adults. The teenager they saw tied up with the militia was their leader.  Miles, fuelled by his own guilt over his role in the creation of the Monroe Militia and its practices, is easily swayed by Charlie to rescue the teenager…
 
And on to the analysis…
 
 
There is a certain storytelling technique that one of these days I’ll try to find out if it has an actual name.  If you know, please tell me.  It’s one of my favorites.  This technique I first saw, or read anyway, in a Hardy Boys book.  It is when we start right away with an action, something putting our hero in one heck of a spot that we just can’t see how he/she can possibly get out of it. Then we flash to a certain amount of time before.  Supernatural does this every once in a great while.  The X-Files did this from time to time. J.J. used this technique arguably too often with Alias, but anyway…there it is.  We started with Charlie being held down about to get the M branded on her by a John Schneider look alike (Joshua Cox).  Next, we are back two days before to Charlie and the gang in the bushes hiding from a passing group of militia soldiers and prisoners.  I always like this format and find it a very effective way of bringing us into a story because it provides for that tension and gets you immediately in the moment, without the buildup and then we are left hanging, knowing one of our main characters is in a bad place.  Now, we have to wait!  
 
 
After hiding from the passing militia, Charlie is tricked into the trap by her weakness the way that Chewy was lead into the Ewok trap by his weakness…Charlie sees a child in the road and has to stop to see why.  Miles, like probably anyone else in the world, would notice that a kid in the middle of nowhere, spread out on a street, with no one around, is highly suspicious.  But because Charlie just ran into it the way Chewy just ran over for the meat, they were captured by the lost boys…
 
How wonderful was that whole scene with the children.  Young Sam Winchester came out of the “abandoned building”, in green, with a bow and arrow…in Revolution land, Sam Winchester is Peter Pan!  Ok, I know, I’m confusing Supernatural with life again, or maybe just crossing over shows…but that boy, Michael, was played by Colin Ford who has on several occasions played Young Sam Winchester.  Michael’s older brother is the one that was taken.  His brother’s name was Peter.  He was wearing a green shirt.  He was their leader.  If you don’t get the reference, check out www.neverpedia.com  this is the Peter Pan wiki page.
 
 
When Aaron doesn’t understand why all of a sudden Miles would do a 180 on his position of “we can’t save everyone”, Nora explains that these people were orphaned on Miles’ watch. Is this really the only reason Nora thinks Miles would do this?  We’ve gotten indication from her before that it is questionable how good a person she thinks he is…I guess what bothers me about that is that we have been given the opportunity to see some Miles backstory, so we are getting the understanding that the militia was started in an effort to stop the “all men for themselves” attitude out among the masses.  Aaron said that Miles raised “dickishness to an artform”.  Nora isn’t disagreeing with him and presenting only a very logical reason why Miles might show sympathy toward these chilrden. Does anyone besides Charlie (and me) see a good side to Miles?  
 
 
I figure that Miles isn’t much into the explaining thing because he went into this wanting to help, sees that he only made things worse, and now feels he deserves the harsh treatment because of his failures.  He hasn’t been very open with his past.  He has allowed other people who give a very negative impression of him give his backstory to the group.  I feel he really wants people to judge him…hopefully Osiris doesn’t get wind of this, he’d have as big a field day as he had with Dean (I’m confusing life with Supernatural again, aren’t I?).  Billy Burke is so amazing  with showing emotion, and seeing Miles sword fight every episode serves to really make my week, but I can’t help but feel that Miles is going to have to come to terms with himself and stand up for himself and the choices he made in the past.  About the only person who seems to have any faith in him right now is Charlie.  I loved how happy she looked when Miles sided with her regarding going after Peter. That was a cute moment.  I also loved when Nora had to hold him back not to give them away when the soldier hit Charlie so hard she dropped like a sack of potatoes.  All protective Miles…
 
 
About Aaron.  He is the voice of reason, but just like all other characters that hold that particular position (like Hurley on Lost, or Xander on Buffy), he can be incredibly annoying.  I loved how he saved those kids and earned their respect when he took out those two militia in the lighthouse.  That was awesome.  Not so awesome was the pendant lighting up.  Talk about shining a beacon to let everyone know you have one! Quite literally to because it lit up the whole light house…get it? Shining a BEACON on the issue?…never mind, I dislike puns too…
 
 
So the fact that they have the pendant is out of the bag now, finally.  Miles knows about it and he wants to destroy it.  Can those pendants even be destroyed?  If it can, and one needs all twelve, would that mean the power is gone forever should a pendant be destroyed?
 
 
We don’t know enough yet about how or what is being used to inhibit the power.  We now know from this episode that Ben and Rachel were trying to create a clean energy source that went wrong.  Instead of creating clean energy, what they learned to do was inhibit energy…so how does it do that?  Was something released into the atmosphere somehow that has put a blanket on it?  Is it a frequency?  What is it??? How do those pendants stop whatever it is that is cutting off the energy?  Are they somehow the clean energy supply?  Will we find out that once Rachel and Ben agreed to work with the DOD regarding the weaponization of this energy inhibitor, did they continue to work on their clean energy supply?  If so, how did Randall get a hold of it?  It seems like he took Grace against her will, so it does appear he has his own agenda.  So far, however, it doesn’t appear that he is working with the militia.  Maybe he is, or maybe he is working with one of the other militias on the continent.  As of yet, we do not know where Randall’s loyalties lie, who he is working for, or what his end game is.  It is all a mystery, inside an enigma, wrapped in a conundrum. Or something to that effect.
 
 
On top of getting some back story regarding how Rachel and Ben knew about the power problem and just how deep they were in to it, we also got to see a little bit about their motivation.  It really seems like Danny is a key somehow.  (Wait, is Danny the Fifth Element?  Discuss…) In the flashbacks, Rachel was pregnant with Danny.  They didn’t even know it was a boy yet.  Rachel gets sick and they find out that Danny only has one blood vessel where there should be two, meaning that an inadequate blood supply was getting to his organs.  He did not have very good odds of survival.  It appears from what we learned in this episode that this is most likely how Rachel was sold into choosing to go along with the DOD. Mr. Randall Flynn had “friends” that could get Rachel into a study at Columbia with experimental surgery that could save him.
 
 
In current time, we found out about the tactics used by the militia to create soldiers.  We get an idea that re-education is done through fear, and potentially other means of brainwashing.  Opinions are not tolerated.  I wonder how it is that Jason is so inquisitive.  I suppose it has been allowed because his father is so high up in the militia.  I wonder if Neville was hard on Jason out of fear of Monroe hurting his son.  
 
 
The other thing we saw in present time was Monroe’s tactics on torture.  If people are unwilling to fold, then he finds weaknesses and exploits them.  For Rachel, all he needed to do was get Danny there, and she folded like a cheap suit.  She gave up her old work collegues and told Monroe about the pendant.  Clearly Danny is her weak spot.  She has been doing anything and everything to protect him since before he was born. Interesting to note how unimpressed Danny seemed with Rachel’s willingness to play along.  We didn’t really get much of Danny, but we did see that.  
 
 
From the flashbacks that Rachel was very worried about what military applications the DOD would use the technology for.  She was very upset with Ben bringing them into it.  It seemed like she would have rather the project fail due to lack of funding than allow the information to go into the military’s hands.  The problems with letting them have the technology came right away to her, but it seems like she must have just pushed all that worry aside in an effort to save her son. She did that again in present time.  It makes me wonder if maybe the plan was really to take Danny all along.  From the pilot though, it really just looked like they wanted Ben and it doesn’t even seem like they knew who Danny was.  Did Monroe just luck out in finding Rachel’s one weakness?  Again, I ask myself why Monroe all of a sudden has this push to find out the information this very minute. I guess it must have something to do with the other territories, but that really hasn’t been explained well yet.  I would think that there would be a rush to find out everything they could about getting the power back on and why the power went off back fifteen years ago. Why is this all happening now?
 
 
I still wonder about the nature of Rachel’s association with Monroe.  She is a prisoner, but she has a huge living space with a lot of things.  She has been there a while.  It really makes me wonder…
 
Pop culture references galore this episode!  Besides the homage to Peter Pan:
 
“You’ll shoot your eye out, Kid” –Miles quoting Santa in “A Christmas Story”…actually, I was just voicing my chagrin with some friends on twitter about how we will not get a very special Christmas episode of Revolution this year and how seeing Miles brandishing his sword while in a Santa costume would have been awesome.  And hot…
 
“Children of the Corn”–Aaron makes one of those creepy kids horror movie references about “the lost boys”.
 
“naked Ewoks” –Aaron apparently really doesn’t like children.  Props to Nora for mentioning that Aaron was the schoolteacher of their little “town”.
 
 
I hear a rumor that Revolution has been approved to play some Led Zeppelin.  Excellent.  I think the one thing about a post power world is that I have been unable to make a soundtrack for it…
 
Thanks so much for reading!  Let me know what you thought of the episode and where you think this is all going!  Screencaps from grande-caps tumblr.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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