This review contains spoilers.
1.10 Nobody's Fault But Mine
I was really excited by the prospect of this episode, even if that makes me sound utterly deluded. Well, I was mostly anticipating the break I was going to get into covering this trash, as Revolution doesn't blight our screens again until the 25th of March 2013 (hooray!).
In a change from my regular tirade about how abysmal the show is, I thought it only best to give that a short break too, and instead talk about some of the very odd overtones in this particular story. Specifically, the Star Wars gig that the writers suddenly decided to follow for whatever reason. From the outset they just couldn't help inserting borrowed scenes from Star Wars in this otherwise incredibly boring narrative.
About four minutes in, Major Tom and Bass have a minion/Moff Tarkin exchange that's essentially the one where Tarkin says, evacuate? "In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances." The Star Wars theme of that struck me hard, even if I was slightly distracted by Tom's delusion that you could go from Philadelphia to Boston for 'a few days', when it's over three hundred miles away, and even on a horse the journey would take at least a week or more, unless you like to kill them.
While I was mulling that over, the story switched to a scene where Miles repeats a classic Han Solo riposte of "It's me!". The episode then went on to borrow from other ideas and scenes, as it built up to the confrontation between Miles and Bass, or is it Obi-wan and Vader? This was sending me plenty of other signals, about who the father of Charlie really is, because I'm pretty certain it won't be who she thinks it was. Is this building up to a 'Charlie, I am your father' moment? It looks likely, because the writers don't really have any original ideas of their own, it seems.
But, although I wanted to be nicer, I can't help referencing the end of the episode where they stored up all the best BS for a complete splurge in the final scenes. For starters, Rachel must be the dumbest smart person ever. Given what needed to be threatened for her to make the amplifier, that she then left the Pendant and that device in one piece seems like the ultimate in blond moments. She is officially an idiot.
But even that paled into insignificance when the helicopters appeared, old helicopters (much older than they needed to be), that would never work without seals and filters that you wouldn't have access to after fifteen years. But what made me laugh the most was that they'd mounted GAU-2/A miniguns on them! In the very opening scene of the story we'd gone back to the early days of Miles and Bass, when they started running out of ammo. And, now he's going to deploy a weapon that can consume ammunition at the rate of six thousand rounds per minute. How insane is that?
It's like one writer wrote the opening scene, and then another, without even reading it, then wrote the end, oblivious to the ideas that had been presented earlier. I'd have really liked some brief diversion to Randall and Grace, as that at least is marginally interesting, but we didn't even get that small joy.
At this time I'm still trying to decide if I want to continue reviewing Revolution, because it is without doubt the worst thing I've been tasked to cover. A more optimistic person might consider that in the four months before we're subjected to more of this, that the writers might be able to craft a decent story and dialogue for the sad souls asked to perform here, but I'm not remotely confident.
I've seen static station idents that are more engaging than this is.
Read Billy's review of the previous episode, Kashmir, here.
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