I'm not going to do a long analysis of what's wrong with the show. I'll just hit the high points of what pisses me off:
- The first episode starts in the modern times when a Plot Device happens to turn off all forms of electricity everywhere. Categorically NOT an electromagnetic pulse, apparently it is capable of affecting the entire world, and prevents things like batteries from working. At least they acknowledge within the show that this is bullshit and, according to physics, shouldn't happen.
- Of course, according to Hollywood logic, losing power causes transformers to explode; airplanes to go into flat spins and crash; and turn off cars in a dramatic down-the-line fashion.
- Then the series skips ahead to fifteen years later, thereby bypassing all of the interesting post-apocalyptic bits about survival and rebuilding. (A viewing of the second episode shows that we may get bits and pieces of this parceled out in flashbacks. Still, that's 10 minutes of flashback to 40 minutes of show.)
- 15 years later, and all the kids have remarkably perfect teeth. Their hair is washed, their faces are clean. They have clothes which look BRAND NEW and have undamaged, top of the line, compound crossbows. Apparently entropy only happens to the sets and not the props.
- Speaking of which, I've watched "Life After People," and these places do not look like they've been abandoned for 15 years. Five, maybe. It's amazing how good Chicago looks.
- Oh yeah, the St. Louis Arch is missing a chunk at about the 2:00 position, but it's still standing. I'm not an engineer but I'm pretty sure this is impossible.
- Given all the guns in America, we are supposed to believe that they've either gone missing or have been confiscated by the Militia? But yet these same militia troops are using Civil War-era flintlocks?
- But the named bad guy has a modern semi-auto pistol. Well that's movie logic again: why would you want to arm your front-line troops with good weapons when you can give them crap and only arm the officers with modern equipment? I swear, it's like this Monroe guy is reading from the big list of villain cliches.
- Oh, okay, so the key-fob thing is another piece of Plot Deviceium that somehow turns the power back on... and also apparently rebuilds crumbling infrastructure such as telephone lines, because there is a computer that is communicating long-distance with another. If it's cellular, replace phone lines with cell towers. About the only way this might make sense would be if they were connecting over satphones, in which case I have to ask how the hell they restored power to the satellites in orbit (assuming their orbits hadn't degraded to the point of uselessness or re-entry).
- Was anyone at all surprised that the big bad guy was the other man in Uncle Badass' car? I mean, they all but telegraphed it.
- Speaking of Uncle, he's one of only two characters who seems halfway competent (the other being Deagle Dude). Two episodes in, and I already want to punch the others in the face. How did any of them manage to survive this long?
- Flexible morality: It's immoral to kill someone who was trying to kill you, and who will cause you future grief if you let him go, but it's perfectly okay to kill slavers as long as you act angtsy about it later. Sure, that makes sense.
- The female teenage lead is basically Katniss. Her love interest is basically Jacob from Twilight, minus the lycanthropy. And so far, the entire series seems to be written at about the intellectual level of a young adult novel.
I could go on, but you get the point. For all that Cormac McCarthy's The Road was too bleak to be believable, this series isn't bleak enough. I could understand that if this was an 8 pm show, but it's on at post-watershed 10 pm instead.
My initial prediction was "One-season wonder" but NBC is trumpeting how it's a "hit new series" so it might stick around for a while, increasing in suck. I'm torn between giving up on this show entirely, and watching it like a trainwreck where I can skewer it on a weekly basis. If you haven't started watching it, then please, take my advice and stay away.
It's not Revolutionary; it's Revolting.
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