Monsters of Television

“I just want a future for my child.”

You are very smart, smarter than you might realize. A diet of serial narrative television provides you with a media intelligence that is unsurpassed in the history of storytelling. You’ve suffered the eternal questions and hidden clues of Lost. You’ve pointed out continuity roadblocks in Flash Forward. You knew The Event wasn’t going to last. And it’s all part of picking up on the details of how these shows are put together, even if you don’t fully understand the mechanics, that makes you a smarter, more critical audience.

That is why I think I’ve seen so many people on Twitter announce that they’re “out” with this series. They’ve tried it, stayed in for a hand or two, and then pushed back from the table. Because the audience for Revolution is smart. Now, that’s not to say everyone has tossed in their cards. Revolution is doing well, particularly for NBC, well enough to be picked up for a full season. But people are falling off. The show is slow-playing their story, which is essential for a premise like theirs.

But people have no interest in staying in a hand when they already know what’s being played.

I don’t know specifics to why the lights went out but I know all the plays the show makes before they happen. This episode was the epitome of predictability for anyone that’s ever watched a serialized narrative, from the small details to the larger “twists.”

Promos for this week’s episode tried to entice us by offering that someone was not going to survive the episode. You know from you media education that we can break down the possibilities of who that is by thinking through some very basic criteria:

Who Can’t Possibly Die Because The Show Can’t Continue: Charlie, Miles, Monroe
Who Won’t Die Because the That Would Ruin Emotional Payoff: Danny, Rachel.
Who Could Die But Hasn’t Yet Fulfilled Their Role in the Series: Nora, Aaron, “Nate”
Who Has Already Played Out All Their Emotional Cards and Could Be Eliminated Without Much Effect to the Series: Maggie.

When considering who would die, you may not have actually put words to how you decided, but you knew it was Maggie. Because Maggie is expendable and they already played that iPhone bit last week (an iPhone that’s apparently kept a charge for 15 years). Aaron is just as useless but they gave him the flash drive and he’s the only person in the group that could have some technological sense if they ever figure out how to turn the lights back on, even for a moment.

The other part of you that knew it was Maggie: they didn’t make a place for her on the show. She’s always been an outsider, even from the beginning when Charlie debated her status as “family” when Ben was around. From then on she had one good play of getting the thugs that kidnapped them to drink her poison but, aside from that, she’s only been a method for other characters to spill their thought processes.

But they certainly spend a good amount of time in this episode trying to make you fall in love with her. The walk from Seattle flashback. The drawn out death after being stabbed in an artery. The storyline of being saved by Ben on the shore of a lake in Wisconsin. Charlie’s reaction when she does pass. It’s so compressed and convenient that it’s hard to really feel emotional about her passing. She was dead weight with very little nuance and no amount of hurried melodrama is going to make her four episodes seem like an honest connection.

But Maggie isn’t the only storytelling failure in “The Plague Dogs.” Most of the tension in the episode is easily alleviated by any amount of thought. Miles pulling up stakes and ditching Charlie was never a real possibility. Neville wasn’t going to ever let Danny go, no matter how precariously close to a death by sink he was. Even the honest emotional moments, like when you’re curious how Charlie would escape the rigged crossbow, are betrayed by the shoddy worksmanship within their storyworld (this is the second time something weakly-bolted has benefitted the Matheson family).

There is one good thread, one thing that interests me right now as a seasonal (probably series) arc. During the flashback sequence when Rachel leaves to go hang out with Miles and Monroe (another violation: Rachel doesn’t seem like a character that would voluntarily join up with the Monroe Republic without some ulterior motives), you get the feeling that Miles is behind a whole lot more than training the unending soldiers.

Obviously, they’ve been trying to beat this concept into our heads for weeks now, that Miles is responsible for so much of our heroes’ troubles but that could have just been compartmentalized to the army. You can train an army but don’t have to be responsible for their actions. With last week’s violent salvation for Jeremy, we know that Miles was the seed for the stance of the Republic: justice because no one else will do it. But the look on his face when he sees Rachel and has her cuffed, you get the sense that he is the architect of the modern Republic, warts and all. I’m curious to see what turned him away. When did Miles turn from Sith Lord to Han Solo?

Everyone else is just meddlesome and predictable to me. Why the lights went out and Miles’s dark past are the only things keeping me in the game.

Other things:

• How many times is Charlie going to do that fake bait thing?
• I guess having a place in Seattle is just as great as in Paris: you can see the Space Needle from every window.
• The reunion of the split party (Aaron and Maggie meeting up with Miles and Charlie after two weeks) isn’t nearly as gripping as it could have been. If this were Lost, there would be no sound except a sweeping score and the entire scene would be ten minutes long.
• There’s not a chance in hell those idiots would outrun a pack of dogs. Aaron even getting to the fence is completely ridiculous. Dude would’ve been ate in three steps.
• I’m tired of seeing the same scenes between Monroe and Rachel every week. It’s the same thing. He asks questions. She gives no answers. He threatens her children. She stays stoic. Even she says it’s boring. They introduced a new wrinkle by providing the guy that tortures. Although Monroe deemed torture as savagery just a few weeks ago when it was used to interrogate a rebel. Sure, he ended up killing that guy but still seems inconsistent.
• I’m going to propose that Charlie is the antagonist of this show. Anytime someone that threatens the group is about to be eliminated, Charlie is the one that steps in to make sure that person can live to mount another attack. Charlie is forever getting kidnapped to distract the group from more pressing needs. Charlie invokes the mission to save her brother as a reason for the decisions to be left to her. I’m pretty sure they’d all be on an island sipping mai tais by now if it weren’t for Charlie forever leading them into danger.