The major motivating factor of the first season of ‘Revolution’ all revolved around the lack of energy and the ability to turn it back on. Now that some of the power is back, expect a change to the series. This second season is going to almost completely change gears and remove an energy source from the equation of what really matters.
For a show based upon a world without power and a few people knowing how to turn it back on. that’s a rather bold shift in series dynamics. We knew they were planning on making big changes already but some of the overall arcs no longer being the focus should prove interesting – assuming that they can pull them off. So how’s that going to play out? Well, executive producer Eric Kripke chimed in with answers to a few questions. My one head’s up, though, is there are a few spoilers for those that haven’t seen Season 1 in its entirety sprinkled in here as well as a few for the upcoming second season.
At the end of last season, you turned the power back on. Are the power and the pendants all 100 percent behind us already?
“We never had any intention of keeping the power on, because the show would very quickly lose any semblance of what it was about. The power was always on as a misdirect, just long enough to get these nuclear missiles in the air. As we begin Season 2, it’s just a worst-case scenario, which is: Bombs are in the air, the power is off. The power’s going to stay off. The pendants are not working.
We can just push through to another layer of character and storytelling, because the quest to turn the power on and the quest to turn the power off is both limiting and it’s not what the show’s about, in my mind. It’s about these characters and all the different facets of what it’s like to live in this modern, primitive world, and those were the stories we were interested in exploring.”
This exact quote both worries me and makes me happy. I’ve thought all along that the main premise of the show being to get the power back on was limiting. Finding a way to move away from that and keep the power off can lead to a grand new world full of new ideas and opportunities. While that’s great, it also has me concerned that they wont’ be able to keep the audience’s attention through this transition.
A new threat will be a great way to do just that. What kind of a threat?
“Their driving impulse is these new bad guys that we have in Season 2 called the Patriots, this insidious conspiracy of people who are draping themselves in the American flag, but they’re not America. They’re planting their tentacles in all sorts of different story lines, and our heroes have to realize what they’re up to and stop them. The character Randall in Season 1 was the first of them, but he was just a vanguard of a thousand more of them that are out from Cuba. It becomes a more interesting story of trying to uncover the mystery and conspiracy of what this dark force is up to.”
Well I’m glad that they’ll expand on Randall and what he’s all about. I’m just not sure how this new threat can be all consuming. You would think if they could find a way to once again get the power back on they could, I don’t know, end it rather quickly. I mean surely Rachael can figure something out right?
“Rachel has a complete and total nervous breakdown. We pick up Season 2 three months after the events of Season 1, and Rachel is just coming out of what was a very serious, occasionally catatonic state, and [she] is fragile as she has to face this new threat.”
OK, Maybe she can’t. Maybe her daughter can snap her out of it and encourage her to do the right thing?
“Charlie splits from the family. So a character who spent Season 1 doing nothing but trying to get her family together finds herself unable to be with them, and she peels off on her own.”
I mean just because she split away doesn’t mean things will be impossible for them to get back together and work things out, right?
“They’re about 1,000 miles apart from each other. We spent time in Season 1 taking Charlie from an adolescent to an adult, and then we really felt that the final step of that is she had to step out from her parents’ shadow, which was Rachel, and then Miles as her de facto father. So she had to go off on her own and be her own person and grow up and have sex and just be an adult. So she’s both a more wounded Charlie and a cooler and more comfortable-in-her-own-skin Charlie. It’s been fun for Tracy [Spiridakos] to play because I think she was chomping at the bit for the character to not be so young anymore.”
Well, at least she hopefully won’t be the whiny brat that made me want to turn off almost every single episode from the first season when she was on screen. (I honestly felt when they killed her brother that the wrong sibling had died.)
The show sounds like it’s taking a darker direction (both from a lack of power and emotionally) and I really do like the sound of that as it’s more fitting for a post apocalyptic world. I just hope that the transition can be successfully made otherwise as we enter the second season, I’d predict we’d be entering its last.
What are your thoughts on the changes that they have lined up for the series?
Source: TVLine
