TV Show Review: Revolution

I wasn’t completely convinced when Revolution came on the air. I’m not a huge fan of the post apocalyptic vision of the future. But I want more science fiction on TV so I gave revolution a chance and it has grown on me over the season and after the last episode I felt the urge to write down why I enjoy it.

The first and most basic is that Revolution has done a good job with making the characters more interesting as you learn more about them. It does this in part by assuming that people have more than one part to their personality. Few of these characters have a single defining moment, though of course everyone on the world does have at least one defining moment in common.

That is the second part I have grown to like more. Like many people when I first heard the premise of the show I was a bit skeptical. All the electricity in the world just stops working sounds a bit more like magic than science fiction. And while I didn’t go to the, but our bodies run on electricity, that many did, understanding there are significant differences between the electrical impulses in my body and that of a computer, it still seemed implausible. But as they have revealed what actually happened it has become more reasonable. I have no idea how much of that was planned from the start, but it’s good to see some interesting ideas in my science fiction.

And that leads to the third part of what I have been enjoying about Revolution. In the last weeks it has began to expand the world building. You have learned more of what is going on which helps, but you also get to meet some of the other political players which very different governments. The Monroe Republic isn’t the most powerful or important people around. Georgia is, for example, considerably wealthier and more advanced since they were, it seems, more suited to the way things work now. A warmer climate with better farming makes you far wealthier in a world that has returned to the preindustrial age.

Overall I’m not ready to say that Revolution is a great show, but there is decent action, interesting characters and a plot that seems to actually be moving. I just hope that they don’t decide they need to keep the show in the exact same situation for 7 seasons. I’d find it far more interesting if they solved the electricity problem, because that would lead to plenty of interesting situations as people rebuilt society and dealt with the cause of the fifteen year long blackout.