By: Russ Burlingame on September 17, 2012
Tonight, those handful of people who have been waiting by their televisions and pretending Hulu doesn’t exist to see Eric Kripke and J.J. Abrams’s new show Revolution will have a chance to tune into it on NBC. By the time you’re reading this, the show will probably be either in progress or over.
And, as we tend to do when a big, new piece of entertainment hits, we wanted to take a look back at the best and coolest moments of the episode. Being a fairly methodical show, it didn’t have as many big crash-bang moments as you’d expect (except the airplane crash–which was awesomely done but not exactly a “best” type of moment), so it’s a bit harder to list these than, say, a movie where everything is pretty condensed. But there were certainly a few story beats that jumped out at us.
What were they? Well…!
The last couple of minutes
That’s probably as much of a spoiler warning as is needed–if you keep reading past the words “the last couple of minutes,” you probably deserve what you get. But after the way things were set up, it seemed as if a large-scale EMP or something was out of the question in favor of something a little more supernatural.
After all, If every piece of electronics on the planet were just BROKEN, it would be a long and arduous process to get things up and running again, but it could be done the same way it was done at the start of the industrial revolution. Rather than a society in total collapse, we would have seen a government that emerged with a plan and near-total employment fueling an economic boom, alongside a spike in costs of most non-electronic goods as people realized it would be four or five years before they had a nice, cold glass of Coca-Cola again.
This seemed to point more in the direction of the supernatural, more akin to Lost, and so to see somebody just kind of flip the switch to boot up not only a computer, but an obviously old one? Pretty nice last-minute surprise.
Just about everything Aaron said
Let’s face it, Zak Orth is a funny dude. But he took it to the next level in Revolution, managing to evoke a lot of laughs, bring the comic relief and break the considerable tension while still being beliavably scared, and not just a delivery device for one-liners about how scared he’s supposed to be. Better than his jokes were his character moments, making him probably the most sympathetic character in the show.
The bloodbath at the camp
It’s the basic setup for the show, in a lot of ways, so they had to get it right–but the attack on the camp by Captain Neville’s men not only established Giancarlo Esposito as the grade-A villain that everyone knows he can be, but also gave some great character moments to everyone involved and set the stage for a complex and multilayered conflict that runs the gamut from Neville and his men harassing hapless villagers all the way up to his fear of General Monroe. It was a lot of action, a lot of plot and a lot of character all crammed into a very short window of time, which made for some good, but chaotic, storytelling.
The tattoo reveal
It’s hard to pull something like this off; frankly the idea that the bad guys, good guys and bystanders are all interrelated in convenient ways has been done so many times that it’s hard to take anything post-Empire Strikes Back very seriously. Still, the reveal of General Monroe’s backstory in the final moments of the show worked effectively and proved to be a nice twist. The fact that they built him up throughout the episode without anyone really noticing and without ever naming the character, so to speak, was the thing that made it work–it felt a bit like that moment when you realize who the narrator is in Fight Club, and you rewind back in your head and realize that somehow you never realized he didn’t have a name up until then.
Miles’s crazy ninja freakout
Yeah, it reeked of old-school action movie choreography, with dozens of guys lining up to fight him one by one…but whenever a character goes all Wolverine-style berserker rage and takes out a platoon of goons, it’s pretty fun to watch. When it’s a guy who’s so far been nothing but apathetic, quiet and withdrawn? Crank the fun factor up to eleven. While my favorite role of his remains his extended guest stint on My Boys back in the day, this little bit of badass will at least make you forget Billy Burke was in Twilight.
