REVOLT

JJ Abrams has a new pilot series set for the fall. It is called REVOLUTION. From the press release:


Our entire way of life depends on electricity. So what would happen if it just stopped working? Well, one day, like a switch turned off, the world is suddenly thrust back into the dark ages. Planes fall from the sky, hospitals shut down, and communication is impossible. And without any modern technology, who can tell us why? Now, 15 years later, life is back to what it once was long before the industrial revolution: families living in quiet cul-de-sacs, and when the sun goes down lanterns and candles are lit. Life is slower and sweeter. Or is it? On the fringes of small farming communities, danger lurks. And a young woman’s life is dramatically changed when a local militia arrives and kills her father, who mysteriously – and unbeknownst to her – had something to do with the blackout. This brutal encounter sets her and two unlikely companions off on a daring coming-of-age journey to find answers about the past in the hopes of reclaiming the future.


I saw the trailer on G4 last evening.  My initial impression was that I had seen this show before hand, in various composite elements.  First, there was a 3D graphics landscape inspired series about what would happen if man was suddenly eliminated from Earth. What would happen to the buildings left alone in nature? The show depicted the elements taking over cities and towns in one, five, ten, hundred or more years without man's involvement. Of course, buildings were taken over my vines, animals took over the landscape, and then infrastructure collapsed into rubble. Second, several years ago there was a web novella that was updated weekly with crude 3D animation figures telling the story of a tech salesman in NYC on business when he woke up and most of the Earth's population had vanished in an electromagnetic spike. I cannot remember the name of the series or its bookmark on an old discarded laptop, but the story involved the main character traveling, mostly by foot, back to home in Seattle. When he leaves NYC, he finds bands of confused people, trying to live off the remains of stores. As he gets closer to the goal, he begins picking up pieces of mystery of what happened to everyone. There are bands of war lords on horse back inflicting their own brand of justice on strangers. There is also a mysterious shadow government organization trying to suppress the truth. He learns from underground groups to avoid that organization by avoiding urban settings, camping in the wild, and living on the edge. He slowly learns that there may have been a large electromagnetic burst of some kind which had an adverse affect on the United States, making some people disappear or vanish in their sleep. One of the tell tale signs when he reaches his home is whether his wife's bed had an indentation; that meant she was gone - - - out of phase with his existence. He also learned that one of his clients may have been part of the secret organization who knows all the answers to the mysteries of the Event. The story line began to point to some government weapons program. But before the story concluded, the author's web site stopped updating material. After no updates, I forgot about it, including its title.


The Abrams pilot story has a mish-mash premise.  A large, global electricity black out could happen. But the premise that man would not have the technology to create any sort of power afterward, including simple batteries, does not make much sense. Also, in the trailer, one of the characters when the Event is happening, downloads information into a decorative flash drive. Somehow this drive has its own power source that can be used to boot up patched up computer components to communicate with other people in secret. It sounds a little Hatch-like with the terminal to input the Numbers to "save the world."


If there was a huge electromagnetic disturbance that knocks out all of the electricity on the planet, why would it continue to prohibit engineers from rebuilding the grid by coal, steam, geothermal or wind generators? And if this EM event was so grand, why is the Earth's core not affected, as the series show people still living subsistence lives farming suburbia throughout the seasons. The Earth itself is a giant electromagnetic generator, whose polar fields create upper atmospheric shell that creates a protective ozone layer from the sun's deadly forms of radiation. 


So before the pilot is shown, there are concerns about the Big Premise of REVOLUTION. If you are going to set down a huge mystery, there has to be a science fiction plausibility answer otherwise viewers won't care.