Letters to Kripke: About Last Night...

Ramblings On...The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia will be coming to tvfortherestofus.com in the next few days, but for now, here is my most recent "Letter to Kripke"

Dear Eric,

You know those times when you are just so mad that a calm flows over you?  It is an anger almost like depression when you begin to wonder if you really loved what you thought you loved, or if you had somewhere along the line fallen in love with an idea of the thing, and not the thing itself? This is how I am beginning to feel about this “sequel” to the original ten episodes of Revolution.

I say sequel because there was a certain kind of flow in the first ten.  We had a huge break, and now we are getting the second ten of season one. But doing the season like this makes it look more like a season one and two.  I feel like you are trying to make an HBO series out of this.

You see, HBO generally has a good thing when it begins.  As a matter of fact, I would count the first season of Deadwood and the first season of Rome, actually the first season of the Sopranos and of Game of Thrones as well, as not only some of the best first seasons of television, but some of the best seasons of television in general. Ever. Revolution was never HBO quality, but it interested a lot of people early on. It had its flaws, including a power out sequence that made no sense, but there was a lot of good (if not sometimes over the top) stuff in there. Then you decided to use the hiatus to make the show “bigger and badder” than the first half.  You wanted to give it that umph you felt was lacking for the first ten. But in so doing, you did something that I, to put it bluntly, just don’t think is working...You turned the second half of the first season into a “sequel”.

One of my absolute favorite movie franchises of all time is Wes Craven’s “Scream” series, created by Kevin Williamson.  Through his amazing scripts, and out of the four movies Williamson wrote all but Scream 3, we see so much truth about the industry.  We see so much about what it is that movies are attempting to do--the good, the bad and the psycho killer ugly. My favorite movie of the franchise is actually Scream 2, which speaks volumes about sequels and how they are done.  Eric, please go and watch this movie, because you are falling into ALL the pitfalls of sequels.

How is this happening?  LIke HBO does with their second seasons, you have expanded the world, made more icks, killed more people, showed more fight sequences, brought in more characters.  Yet you still only have the same 43 minutes an episode.  Sure, you’ve sped up things, but at what cost?  I’ll tell you--at the cost of character development.  Instead, your characters are taking on a caricature feel--this one is too angry, that one is too crazy, this one is too scared, that one is too out of context for words...

We started off the episode with Monroe opening fire on Neville’s closest assistant.  The way it is done is that Monroe doesn’t think he can trust this man any more than it turned out he could trust Neville.  He had given Neville his trust years before and now that was destroyed.  But in the end, all you have done is had Bass “shoot the messenger”, a tired cliche of despotic tyrannical leaders.  It is the hallmark of a “Big Bad”, of an “Evil Overloard”. You have Bass not only send the nuke to Atlanta, but also approve of its detonation over the wire when Alec was not responding, validating that Bass is in fact the one who wants this done, not that Randall was doing it under the guise of Bass’s wishes.

These horrific acts of Bass’s are supposed to dwarf Miles’s own horrors, sending the man who was like a son to him to die, once again showing Miles’ lack of care over his family.  Apparently you want him to be the hero because “he’s trying”? I don’t know where you went to Sunday School, but in my classes, I was told that the “road to Hell was paved with good intentions”.  Miles winds up killing this “son” figure, but he wasn’t strong enough to get on the radio and tell Bass he did it.

I hate that you seem to have chosen Miles for a redemption he doesn’t deserve and doesn’t want and left Bass with nothing, sinking further and further into psychoses.  How can he not?  He has lost everything.  You want us to feel that the heroes have the odds against them, but I just don’t see it.  To me, everything seems against Bass.  Everyone hates him and/or uses him, The minute he tries to be nice people take it as a weakness.  Everyone is so in Miles’ corner, the only problem he is having with redemption is that he knows he doesn’t deserve it.  If you ask me, the better story would be Bass’s redemption, that he seeks himself, because after all this shit, losing his family, losing his best friend, (next week we’ll probably find out he lost women, too), losing his faith in himself and the country he constructed, and then becoming outright tyrannical, finding himself again on the side of good would be a truly heroic journey.

Instead, I fear you’re going to have Miles hold true to his desire to burn down Philly, and have Bass play the fiddle while it happens. 

I understand that every man has to take responsibility for his own actions at some point, and that blaming what Bass has become all on Miles directly opposes that view, because it would mean that I don’t believe Bass is a man capable of deciding things for himself.  This is entirely inaccurate.  I hope that Bass will be able to look into that abyss and say that only he can save himself and start down that path.  I also want Miles to stop with the pity party and weak attempts and take responsibility.  And not in some stupid fabricated way like this new “are you ready to be a general again” crap.

In closing, Eric, please take your head out of your ass and get back to what you are good at, character relationships, before you ensure that a second season is all NBC offers you.