Revolution Season One: The TVFTROU Roundtable Analysis

 

Nicole:

I had so much hope for the younger actors, and I understand their importance to keeping a young audience, but I feel that they are a huge weak spot.  Graham Rogers (Danny) seemed like sloppy casting.  Not that he isn’t cute, but dude looks like a gladiator and I have a very difficult time seeing why some muscular, six foot hot man needs some 5’7″ skinny chick taking care of him.  I just don’t see it.  I couldn’t see it. I was also not happy with the Nora character.  They could have made her a wonderful character, but instead they used her as a plot device and then killed her off utilizing emotional manipulation by creating a relationship between her and Miles I just couldn’t see prior to those last couple episodes.  I didn’t see it in the writing, in the way they reacted to each other or the chemistry between the actors.

The blackout was a major issue of mine.  I knew  a lot of people in college who refused to watch The X-Files because they didn’t think the science worked.  I would say that I NEVER watch courtroom dramas because they don’t seem real to me…but this was so crazy at times that I had a problem with it…and I loved The X-Files.  Kripke said they put the idea by scientists who said it was plausible, but I think they only mentioned electricity….some of my major problems:

– Areas of Vermont still use GASLIGHT.  Why wasn’t that working and why wasn’t that widely used?  We didn’t even have electricity in a huge way until about 1935 or so…so what the hell?
– What about solar power, geothermal power, nuclear power?  Do the nannies eat everything?  They eat lighting storms and are in our blood but they don’t take us out?  Why does steam work in the South but not up North?  Why did batteries stop working?  and Why do things that haven’t been used in 15 years work at all????
–  I CANNOT believe that the North, with all our education, would be thrown into the dark ages during a blackout like this.  I also don’t think that Massachusetts, the place that STARTED A REVOLUTION WITH THE BIGGEST EMPIRE WITH THE BIGGEST NAVY IN THE WORLD would bow down to a despotic leader.  Boston would have told Philly to f*** off.  And Georgia?  please, they wouldn’t even have any dairy products because of lack of refrigeration, I can’t believe their society would look that awesome.  AND WHAT ABOUT FRANCE? France is solely nuclear power.  did the whole freaking country become a nuclear wasteland?

On a side note, I saw on twitter Revolution retweeted someone going on about after the finale wanting to chant USA.  Really?  Because they seemed like the BIG BAD for next season.

Bookdal:

I hate to say it, but the younger characters like Charlie and Jason still have not rung true for me. I can’t help but feel they are tangential, at best, to the more crucial storylines.

I also think that the first half of the season boxed the show in for a lot of reasons and although they have worked themselves out of some of those corners, I think the show still needs more focus. The landscape was filled with too many characters, a criticism I had from the very beginning of the show. Kripke’s strength is in relationships, not singular stories. It relied too much on the LOST formula, but as Lindelof and Cuse noted in their own case, they wrote the show towards a character end, not a story end. And even that show had to trim the fat of characters in its first two seasons. Serialized television cannot generally sustain a huge cast of characters. That was a rabbit hole for this season, but at least it’s moving away from that, or so it seems.

Far Away Eyes:

Too many characters. Kripke is not an ensemble cast kind of guy. I know he wanted to be that here, but there were just too many characters on the screen to keep track of and remember and care about. And that caused a lot of the characters to suffer greatly because they didn’t have enough story or enough emotional depth for me to care if they lived or died or just never showed up again. By episode five or six I wanted to weed out about half the cast on both sides—rebels and militia—and say “These are the ones I want to see. The rest can go.” 

I think we also saw a problem with going from at the beginning guns and ammo being a premium, hard to come by, precious, and used only when necessary to being the primary weapon of choice. We went from crossbows and swords to outright AK-47 shoot outs in the back half of the season with little explanation of why both sides had so many weapons suddenly and why firing recklessly and without abandon was okay. 

I also think that the mystery of the power was turned around so many times that we’re still not entirely sure how or why it went out. It did. We covered that so quickly so we could rush to the Tower and turn it back on without knowing why it broke really. We need a much better explanation to sell us on this concept to make it easier to suspend our disbelief that this could possibly happen.

There’s only one, the writing.  Bad, bad, bad from beginning to end.  It failed on so many levels.  Story telling and characterization were awful.  The dialogue was often cheesy and prompted many eye rolls on my part.  Plotting was also all over the board.  They developed these great characters, with great actors to fill these roles (for the most part) and the writing often didn’t do any of them justice.  They floundered directionless for most of the season and were wildly inconsistent in their actions from one week to the next.  Actually, all of the episodes in general were like that.  Then, on top of all that, the second half of the season the writers shifted gears, and pretty much invalidated the entire first half of the season.  It’s like the writers halted everything and screamed, “Do over!”  The two halves didn’t tie together at all.  

I found myself wasting a lot of energy during the season identifying plotting inconsistencies, scene implausibilities, and just plain bad science rather than enjoying the story.  The way a lot of those battle scenes were setup often didn’t make any sense strategically let alone plot wise.  The first half of the season it was lots of sword fighting, and then the second half were tons of guns and ammo, even though we learned earlier there was a severe ammunition shortage and they had to revert back to swords.  In the second half there was no shortage of bullets that I could tell. (Do over!) The big confrontation scenes were contrived most of the time.  I ended up practically doing a drinking game on the amount of times Charlie was hit by someone or when some heartless bastard shot someone for no good reason.  Was that supposed to be entertaining?  Shocking?  “Ooh, some random stranger just shot another random stranger.  Alert the media!”