The show's worst enemy will be the minds of its audience and how much they are willing to push their imaginations to "suspend belief". The broader concept is a spin on your standard post-apocalyptic drama, with the characters surviving a world that has mysteriously lost all electricity ten years prior. With modern society so dependent on electrical power, the governments and institutions have collapsed and civilization has regressed into a tribal state. The land is divided up among military factions called 'republics', suppressing local people under their tyrannical will with muskets and medieval weaponry.
The pilot episode contains enough drive, drama and action to keep you entertained until the very end, but as soon as the credits are rolling, you'll ask yourself, "what the **** did I just watch?" Okay, I can buy into the premise, something has shutdown man-made electricity and when the power is out, people will use crossbows and swords to save valuable ammunition, but it's just not in human nature to reverse technology and innovation. That's the exact opposite of what drives the human spirit! People would still find new power sources to run the world. Hard times would push into hard progress. Not to mention that there's a difference between current and static electricity; one is a chemical reaction. You can make a make a battery out of a potato with stuff you can find in your garage. There's electricity everywhere you look in nature. This is remedied in the show with one line, "Physic doesn't even make sense anymore!" Okay, fine. I realize that the Internet is off and Google no longer exists (which they remind us in this episode), but have all the books burned up too? Does anybody remember history? Does steam still rise? Because that's how we powered massive engines before the discovery of electricity.
Okay, enough about power and on to the guns. Where did all the civil war muskets come from? Those would be a difficult find in a world stockpiled full of guns. You don't need electricity to keep a gun in decent shape or to make bullets, but I get it, they're trying to make two worlds meet—the past and the present –and a sword fight makes for a cool action sequence.
There are some redeemable aspects that bring the show back to life. The characters are set up well and have a lot of room for development. I like how they use their past lives to explain how they got to where they are now and how their old jobs helped prep them for the new world or how much they've dramatically changed since. Just remember, it's more about the characters and less about plot. These people are supposed to be real, not in actual real-life or reality–TV sense, but real as in it's the actor's job to make it real, to pull you out of your life and into theirs (not always accomplished). It's watching a social experiment to see how people will act when they are pushed into a hostile environment, observing how they will act and react in this dog-eat-dog world. Well, at least that should be the point.
The pilot episode contains enough drive, drama and action to keep you entertained until the very end, but as soon as the credits are rolling, you'll ask yourself, "what the **** did I just watch?" Okay, I can buy into the premise, something has shutdown man-made electricity and when the power is out, people will use crossbows and swords to save valuable ammunition, but it's just not in human nature to reverse technology and innovation. That's the exact opposite of what drives the human spirit! People would still find new power sources to run the world. Hard times would push into hard progress. Not to mention that there's a difference between current and static electricity; one is a chemical reaction. You can make a make a battery out of a potato with stuff you can find in your garage. There's electricity everywhere you look in nature. This is remedied in the show with one line, "Physic doesn't even make sense anymore!" Okay, fine. I realize that the Internet is off and Google no longer exists (which they remind us in this episode), but have all the books burned up too? Does anybody remember history? Does steam still rise? Because that's how we powered massive engines before the discovery of electricity.
Okay, enough about power and on to the guns. Where did all the civil war muskets come from? Those would be a difficult find in a world stockpiled full of guns. You don't need electricity to keep a gun in decent shape or to make bullets, but I get it, they're trying to make two worlds meet—the past and the present –and a sword fight makes for a cool action sequence.
There are some redeemable aspects that bring the show back to life. The characters are set up well and have a lot of room for development. I like how they use their past lives to explain how they got to where they are now and how their old jobs helped prep them for the new world or how much they've dramatically changed since. Just remember, it's more about the characters and less about plot. These people are supposed to be real, not in actual real-life or reality–TV sense, but real as in it's the actor's job to make it real, to pull you out of your life and into theirs (not always accomplished). It's watching a social experiment to see how people will act when they are pushed into a hostile environment, observing how they will act and react in this dog-eat-dog world. Well, at least that should be the point.
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