Revolution.Follow

I was watching the season premiere of Haven Friday, and realized that I allow shows like Haven and Warehouse 13 a LOT of leeway in the "unbelievable" category, but shows like Revolution not nearly as much. I thought to myself "I'm being a bit unfair I guess".

But then I looked at the perceived genre or format of the shows, and a show like Revolution just comes off differently than shows like Haven and Warehouse 13. The format of those two just seems like it's supposed to be unbelievable. Revolution places itself in a more serious light, and things like this just stand out.

Still going with my guess.

I think there's something wrong when the only way you can pull off a plot hole successfully is to create a Matrix scenario.

Well now, apparently some additional magic allows bore loaded rifles to work, but cartridge rounds can't be reloaded. This apparently makes the latter rounds "rare". How rare? Less rare than bore loaded rifles. Wow. This just gets worse every week.

Also, apparently the entire US military just disappeared except for two guys. Strange, I know. Just don't think about it too much. Better yet, not at all.

What would be hard is finding primers but that makes it look even worse since need primers for the Black powder rifles. Really 5 mins on google would made this so much better.

The cartridge shells themselves are trivially easy. You could make them if you wanted, but with 100,000,000 times as many shells in the US than the likely population 15 years after said disaster, the idea that there would be any real problem with reloading as many as needed is somewhat absurd. Actually more than somewhat absurd. The only even vaguely difficult issue would be the primer caps. Again assuming that you wouldn't have millions of these things out there sitting on shelves in gun stores all over the place, it's not much harder to mix the chemicals needed for those as to make the powder itself.


Let's not forget that the woman they picked up is an expert in chemicals and explosives. So those work (quite well) and apparently it's not that hard to find the materials to make pretty much anything you'd need (or I suppose whatever the plot required). The other point I was making is that they were shown using bore loaded rifles. Do you know how few there are in the US? The idea that cartridges for bolt action, revolver, or automatic weapons are so rare that they'd switch to using bore loaded rifles is ridiculous. You could find the materials to make or reload a million cartridge rounds easier than you could make or find the 50 bore loading rifles shown in the episode.

There is no reason other than bad writing for that. I mean, if they just said that cartridge weapons didn't work (ie: my matrix theory is true and the simulation doesn't allow them for some reason), that would allow a possible way to maintain logical consistency. But they clearly do work. So why the hell isn't everyone using them? I can only imagine it's because some idiot writer/producer wanted to see civil war type militias marching around with single shot bore loaded rifles to make it feel like they've really dropped in tech. Gah! It's just terrible.



That wasn't really what I was going after. Where's the military in the areas they're traveling through? Assuming that they somehow continue marching towards Chicago rescuing people along the way and forming the core of this eventual militia, shouldn't they arrive to find a US military base somewhere nearby, with vastly more weapons and folks who outrank them? First off, the idea that 8 weeks after the blackout, they'd be sitting around bored because they're waiting for orders is moronic. The military would be out dealing with the massive violence and riots that would have to accompany such an event. 8 weeks later, probably half the US population would be dead (would have to since there isn't enough food in the areas with the highest populations), and every military base would have become the last points of semi civilization (enough supplies and people and weapons to defend them). They'd be hip deep in daily action, not sitting around waiting for orders.


And this would be the case where they arrive as well. How do a couple of non-coms end out running the entire territory with their militia? Now maybe they've got some explanation about this, but I'm betting they just pretend that the entire US military just vanished. They'll arrive in Chicago, find complete lawlessness and decide that they have to put a stop to it. And they'll be the only ones to do it. Again, where's the military? If they're there then those two would end out absorbed into a larger organization and be no where near the top. If there isn't any military then where did they go? Poof?



At this point I'm continuing to watch just to see how horrifically bad it can get. So far they've managed to exceed my worse predictions each week. It's like someone made a bet with Abrams to see if he could pitch a show to a network based on the intention to make it as unbelievable as possible and they let him do it. Probably thought it was artistic or something.

It's not even of the "so bad it's good" variety. It's just bad.

It's not about how realistic it is. It's about how believable it is. Even if the setting is fantastic you still have to make me believe that events could really play out that way if it was real. Revolution doesn't do that.

He was consulted by Zapp Brannigan on that one.