Not an Olympics post – Revolution

I keep seeing commercials for the series Revolution, a JJ Abrams show scheduled for the fall.  I may watch this thing just to see how hilarious it is because from what I’ve seen in the commercials by my standards it is going to be awful.

It may be a well made show with decent scripts and great acting, but I doubt that would be enough for me to get past the problems with the premise.

If you want to enjoy the show without my observations ruining things for you just skip the rest of this post.  It’s also pretty long so if you don’t want to bother you should just skip it.

So you’re still here.  Let’s rant.  This is based only on the commercials but I really can’t not comment on this thing.

Apparently the show takes place 15 years after electricity has stopped working.  OK, I’ll give them that one for free.  Something has stopped electricity from working without affecting anything else – such as bioelectric activity which I suppose it could be argued that animals create electricity more than they use it.  Yeah, well, I’ll give them that one anyway.

But to me it looks like someone wanted to set a show in a future post-apocalyptic world without technology so they could have athletic young people riding horses, using swords and bows and arrows and generally looking awesome.  I can understand that, but they seem to have grabbed an idea to cause it as opposed to having an idea for what happened and then extrapolating a future from that.

Why do I say this, you ask?  Let’s start with the beginning as seen in the commercial.  There’s a jet airliner in a flat spin that crashes.  Why didn’t it just nose in?  Why is it spinning?  If it is crashing because the electricity failed then Why Are The Running Lights Still On?

And what’s with the bows and arrows and swords and horses?  Guns will still work without electricity.  Then there’s the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution – steam.  Steampunk is a big thing right now and they can’t imagine a steam powered car?  Something that actually existed – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Motor_Carriage_Company.  Not to mention trains and trucks and all sorts of things.  I might even be able to make a diesel engine work.  Also, gas lighting.

Then there’s the scene of people walking past Wrigley Field all overgrown and vine covered.  Sure, because in fifteen years no one has figured out how to cut the grass without electricity and the actual last ball park to install lights would never again host a baseball game if it had to be played in the daytime.  But all the cities seem to have been abandoned for some reason so, that broke baseball?  Whatever.

What about the effects of loss of life after such a catastrophic event, you ask?  That’s a fair question and one that should be asked before imagining this world.  Let’s say that aircraft, traffic and other accidents, lost ships at sea, deaths due to failed life support in hospitals and due to excessive heat and cold and general mayhem add up.  I’d say there would be at most 20% max loss of world population in the immediate aftermath – almost exclusively in industrialized nations.  In the following years I would estimate 30% to a maximum of 50% loss of population.

What would that do to the US?  It would give us the population that existed in the 1950s.  Not colonial levels; 1950s levels.  The country was not exactly deserted in the 1950s.  Sure it would take some effort to restore a working infrastructure and distribute food and other goods, but this is supposed to be 15 years later.  If anything we’d have functionally full employment.  All industry would require more human involvement, not to mention the military.  Of course there would be increased death rates due to illness and injury and the population would be younger, but horses instead of cars?  Well, maybe, but not exclusively.  And deserted cities?  I doubt it – at least, there would be cities even if the large metropolises were deserted though I think they would be scavenged for material and rebuilt in a usable form.

The population would undoubtedly be younger because health care would take a major hit and seniors and the disabled and chronically ill would not live long in that world.  Though I really doubt that everyone would be in their twenties.

High speed communication would be much more difficult, but not impossible.  No more satellite communication, or transcontinental or transoceanic for a while at least.  But in the late 19^th century, when steam powered trains were the norm, you could get across this country in less than a week.  That slows down communication but it doesn’t leave people cut off.  And what about fiber optics?  Why not use that to reproduce a telegraph service? 

Sure there would be initial problems and violence and confusion and chaotic times, but it wouldn’t be permanent and it would take a lot less than 15 years for signs of recovery to be apparent.

Mass transportation, mass communication, major industry, industrial farming, densely populated cities with street lights and police and fire departments and mail delivery and hospitals and all that stuff, all of that existed before the revolution of electricity at the end of the 19^th century.  The end of the 19^th century, that’s how far back this would take us.  Think about that.  Compared to today the technology was much less advanced but it wasn’t non-existent.  There was even air conditioning.  Aside from the telegraph we could reproduce everything that was around then without electricity.

So you can see how I would have a problem with a show that wants to use the loss of electricity as the cause for anything really dramatic 15 years after the event.  It would be less post-apocalyptic and more historical drama. 

Then there is the fact that everyone is dressed in new looking clothes, which means that somehow people have managed to learn how to build and operate looms, tan leather, make boots and shoes and the like.  It also looks like there are enough bowyers and fletchers around, maybe also people making katana and najinata as well, to keep people in weapons.  Plus they can distribute all of this stuff.  Yet they can’t cut the vines that have taken over all of the cities.

I suppose they’re using cars as planters because – well, there really is no reason for that.

People are also wearing eyeglasses.  They figured that out but not the rest.

Is there any chance that people are going to be raiding libraries and hoarding books to learn what they need to know to survive and flourish?  I doubt it.

And now I just saw another commercial that asks the important ridiculous questions: what if there were no medicine, no law, no police?

Right, because we all know that none of those things existed before electricity was being used.

Good grief.  If that isn’t just hyperbole thrown into a commercial – and even then it is just stupid – then this show is going to be worse than I thought.  And as you can tell I already thought that it was going to be pretty bad.

What will be a problem is weather because forecasting will be severely limited.

And now another commercial where people are armed and wearing new clothes with well repaired houses but you can see through the damn fence around their compound because it is made of uneven and unmatched twigs with no chinking or wattle or daub.  A five year old could do a better job.  Apparently everyone also forgot how to make walls.

Can it possibly work as a guilty pleasure?  Maybe I could see if it manages to not live up to my expectations and has plots that I can’t predict right now.  Maybe someone can convince me that I’m wrong.

This is a long and convoluted post not a long and comprehensive post so I did not cover every possibility and maybe they explain all of this somehow, but I think my main points are legitimate.

And what about lightning?