This story was presented in previous releases as being a sort of Indecent Proposal, but actually it was more of the same boring rubbish that we've seen so far and not remotely like that movie.
The proposal is that Charlie goes to some neighbours of drug baron Bill O’Halloran, and kills their leader for burning his poppy fields, or he'll kill her friends. That makes as little sense as walking down a muddy track in high heels, but what the major contents of the episode presents are yet another series of flashbacks, mirroring the Maggie story, where this time Aaron gets some explanation.
Aaron lacks self confidence, probably because even when presented with long arduous walks across country and limited food supplies he's still unable to shed weight. Has he tried Zumba? But under his implausibly rotund exterior lies a man of steel, or that's the only way he'd survive shooting himself in the chest point blank, whatever his hip flask was made from. He's not a character I've warmed to, and when he shot himself I did cheer a little, only to have him come back to life and spoil my day. But then there are no good characters in the show, period.
For me the entire highlight of the story was the scene back at the Mickey Mouse club, where Bass Munro promotes Captain Neville to Major. Mmmm... Major Tom? Is one of the writers a David Bowie fan by any chance? Watching the scene between Bass and Danny I realised that every scene with Bass is identical. First he's charming, then threatening, then nice, then he always ends by being very horrible. He does this every time, even when he's ordering a meal or just looking at maps.
The arrival of Danny with Munro is a forerunner to his meeting with his supposedly dead mother. You'd think that he'd be shocked by this, but he isn't remotely phased, and it wasn't a scene where either actor did anything to indicate any emotional state. Their acting styles seem to be inspired by what Tracy Spiridakos does continually, where when she's asked to do emotion her face freezes in some odd expression. She is without doubt the least gifted performer on the show, which did make me wonder why they keep loading her character with scenes and dialogue. The bathing scene was presumably in here for the gratification of the a specific viewer demographic, but it served only to highlight why she's on the show, because it's not her line delivery skills.
It was only after I'd watched the whole episode that some of the completely incomprehensible things about what had been presented started to flow around in my brain. In what we've been presented so far the society in America has, illogically, regressed to a feudal society of the dark ages, and bartering is the only economy. In that situation, where no money exists, what use is growing heroin? It's not like people would pay you for it, or you could take that money and spend it? What would you spend it on if they did? If you're as much a psycho as Bill O’Halloran, then surely you'd just take people's stuff, rather than sell them drugs? Given the dangers of using the drug without access to medical care and drugs, most of the people they gave it to would be dead soon, and as such be very poor customers. With the population so reduced, people are more dependent on each other, not less.
Given how little thinking has gone into Revolution, I've started to consider how the show might be better, and came up with a great idea for how it might end, I think. What we discover is that the 15 minutes after the power went out the rest of the world worked out what the problem was and fixed it. But by then the most heavily armed civil population on the planet had started shooting each other by the thousands, and so they decided it would be best to leave the US population to their fate. That would make more logic than anything Revolution has presented so far, but I'm not confident that the writers understand the notion of irony.
Regrettably, Revolution is back next week.
Read Billy's review of the last episode, Soul Train, here.
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