In which I talk about the show I'm currently watching on Netflix.
Revolution
I am a SUCKER for anything even mildly SciFi, throw in post apoc or dystopia? You cannot keep me from watching it. That being said, this is not one of the worst shows this obsession has led me to. It's a weak 2/3 on the eris!Scale of ratings, but I am incredibly entertained. Now we shall proceed in list form.
The things I LOVE about this show:
GIANCARLO ESPOSITIO: He is such a bloody magnificent bad guy. He has presence, he lends gravitas to dialog that would sometimes otherwise fall flat. He QUIETLY DOMINATES.
Twilight!Dad. Billy Burke is FUCKING WASTED on the Twilight series. This man is talented, he's sexy, it's possible he has a limited range but he owns it. Also he is incredibly good at displaying a wide range of emotions, excellent manly tears and angst.
Geekboy/former Google Millionaire is great. He starts out as a one note character, but they really flesh him out. He's obviously the character that a bulk of the audience is meant to identify with, but they do it well.
They walk the line of what defines the good guys and bad guys. Espositio has a family, a wife, a sympathetic back story. Head bad guy Monroe is a beautifully broken man, while still being incredibly dangerous and scary. I will forgive my fiction many a fault for the blurring of the Us Vs. Them and taking the time to point out they're all humans.
The science is almost great.
The things I HATE about this show:
[Warning spoilers in this section]
The female lead. Sweet bleeding Christ on a cracker is she awful. Please note that "The day the power went out." is 15 years prior to when this show is now taking place. Her younger brother, who is younger to her by 2-4 years is 18 at the time of the first season, which makes her at least 20. However, she and her brother are written as if they're 12 and 16. They BEHAVE as if they're 12 and 16 most of the time, the rest of the characters treat them that way.
After some thought I am wondering if the reason why children are so usually universally awful in moving pictures is because writers cannot write them. Because even if the characters WERE 12 and 16, it's still badly done. And in retrospect I've noticed writers, across the board, seem to have trouble realistically writing characters of 17-23 unless the show is entirely set from their perspective.
About a third of the dialog is pretty weak. However, all the adult characters slowly get good fleshed out back stories and the character building itself is pretty solid, AND the majority of the actors really do well with what they're given.
THE SCIENCE IS ALMOST GREAT. The backstory seems to be that a group of scientists were working on wireless electricity generators, and somehow accidentally manufactured a null electricity field generator. There are pendants (which are little usb thumb drives enclosed in some sort of super strong metal) that then nullify the null field. However, in the script they speak of these pendants as GENERATING/BROADCASTING energy.
Now the thing which is blocking the electricity from working looks quite like a giant super collider (I'm only halfway through season one so this is my understanding of what I've seen), and it seems to me that it would require much more effort to BROADCAST/GENERATE power in the presence of this null field than it would to simply cancel out the null field. So, I hope they're simply dumbing this down and it's intended to work as I am understanding it.
Also, I'm not sure why simple combustion engines don't work. Perhaps the null field negates spark plugs? I don't know enough about how those things work to pick that apart, I will have to pick somebody's brain about it.
But that's it so far, I'm really enjoying it despite its faults.