2.26.2014

Television: Revolution, "Fear and Loathing"

Where were we? Oh, right, Monroe & Son had been caught trying to steal diamonds in New Vegas; Charlie had helped them but escaped. Neville & Son were hitting up Miles and Rachel in hopes of bagging Monroe and dragging him back to the Patriot President so as to save Julia. And Aaron and Priscilla were being held hostage by their old friend Peter. All three of them were suffering from the nanos appearing to them, but while Peter was using this as some kind of pseudo religion, Aaron and Priscilla were less enthusiastic. Hence the Peter locking them into a hotel room part.

Truly, the situations in this show only get increasingly ridiculous. While, at the same time, the characters find themselves in the same kinds of predicaments over and over again. So that there's never any real sense of progress. And it's starting to get dull as well as dumb.

In tonight's foray, Charlie managed to save Monroe and Colin by first saving the life of Duncan, thus meaning she owed Charlie. (Sure, I could go into the whole dog fight story, but God, who really cares?) The sum total of the story line was that Duncan gave Charlie five of those big, brawny types that Monroe had been hoping to purchase with the diamonds he tried to steal. The big twist being that these guys will only take orders from Charlie, not Monroe Dum or Monroe Dee. Not much of a twist at all, really. More like a cute tweak.

And the Miles/Rachel/Neville/Jason thing? The only progress we managed to make there was that Neville finally came clean and admitted he was only there to get Monroe so he could save Julia. He offered to come back and help Miles and Rachel clean out some Patriots once Julia was safe, but . . . Miles wasn't for it. Instead of simply saying, "Well too bad because Monroe isn't here," he inexplicably decided to go with, "Monroe is with us now, so you can't have him." Uh . . . Now we're just creating drama for the sake of it, and never mind that Miles has enough other problems not to have to make more for himself. This is me rolling my eyes.

Finally, in the Aaron story, the nanos begin begging Aaron, Priscilla, and Peter to save them. Priscilla insists they should let the nanotech die out. Peter of course feels quite the opposite. Aaron asks how they can possibly find whatever glitch in the computer code is causing the problem without, you know, a computer. But duh, the nanos can fire one of those up for them, no prob. So then we went through the very vogue let's-have-writing-all-over-every-wall thing until Aaron announced he'd found the flaw in the code. Now I could tell right away what he was doing, and Priscilla's reaction only confirmed it. So it was no big surprise when whatever "fix" Aaron was inputing into the computer began to actually kill off the nanotech. Derp. Made me wonder how this Peter guy had ever been useful at all if he couldn't spot the issue the moment Aaron had pointed out the "problem" on the wall—that is, Peter literally couldn't read the writing on the wall, or at least not make any sense of it. "You always were the smart one," was Peter's throwaway line, but then what the fuck did Peter do to help create this nanotech?

My other issue with this was: Why did the nanos let Aaron input this kill code? If they were the ones running the computer, why not shut it down the moment they realized what Aaron was doing? Instead they just kept saying, "You're killing us . . ."

The final scene of the episode had Aaron waking up in 2014 to a world as we know it: electricity, cars, etc. Apparently we're going the Lost alternate timeline route now. Sigh.

What we need more of—what we've had precious little of this season—is Miles + Monroe + Neville. These three play off one another so well, their little bitchy exchanges . . . That's worth watching. The rest of it has become something of a repetitive, derivative drag. I wonder whether Revolution will even see another season, and whether I'd miss it at all if it didn't.

No comments: