The weirdest show on television, "Revolution," is halfway through what is likely to be its swan-song season. In a world without electricity, three good guys armed only with knives are walking down a dark country road where eight bad guys with carbines wait to ambush them. The guys who formed the ambush and have the element of surprise fire hundreds of rounds at close range: all miss. The good guys sneak up behind the bad guys, and need mere seconds to kill them with knives. How can you sneak up behind an ambush? After the first couple of bad guys die when struck from behind, why don't the rest turn around?
"Revolution" carries a stark warning to humanity -- after the electricity stops, so will logic. The current season depicts the 16th year after the global power blackout. A child born at least two years after the blackout is shown as now a man in his mid-20s. No explanation. A character is shot in the stomach at close range with a bullet from an assault rifle; in a few minutes she is completely fine without medical treatment, and able to walk several miles. A good-guy character is shot in the chest with a crossbow arrow, recovers in a day or so when treated with "balm," then needs mere seconds to kill a huge muscular man by kicking him once.
After electricity, good guys cannot be killed but bad guys drop dead instantaneously if a good guy looks at them crosswise. And there's an infinite supply of bad guys. Viewers are told that about a year after the blackout, order broke down and a horrific Hobbesian war of all against all killed 90 percent of the American population. Since then militias have fought each other for control of towns and of remaining manufactured products. So military-age males ought to be in short supply. Instead, the societies of "Revolution" seem to consist entirely of military-age males and good-looking young women.
There are huge muscular men everywhere, all obedient to various crackpot warlords who are obviously insane. No matter how many military-aged males are killed, twice as many more march in. But there are no old people, no children -- and no farmers. No one grows crops or raises stock: Eating seems to have been forgotten altogether, though there's plenty of moonshine, which characters drink all day long, and unlimited bullets. Plus, Aaron the computer geek has been wearing the same clothes for 16 years, and they're not frayed.
During the initial episodes, it was darkly hinted the blackout was caused by a test of a military ray-gun weapon; during the test, something went Horribly, Horribly Wrong. The McGuffin everyone was seeking in the first season was a flash drive with software that nullified the ray-gun effect and caused electricity to come back on. A dozen or so episodes concerned maneuvering for the mysterious flash drives. Then "Revolution" was renewed for another season, and the flash drives, like food, were forgotten -- they haven't even been mentioned in the current season. In the future, memories will be short.
Now viewers are told that self-aware nanobots shut down the electricity in order to, in order to . . . presumably, that's the Big Reveal for the series finale. Often as action series are strung out and new twists added, previous episodes become nonsense in retrospect. This year's plot twists have rendered nonsensical nearly everything in the series pilot. Consider the super-scientist character, Rachel. Now we're told that 16 years previously, Rachel designed the self-aware nanobots and always knew they would destroy the world. Yet in the pilot, she's a mother with two little children, she's made no preparations to care for them after what we're now told she always knew would be a permanent global blackout. And in the pilot she was obsessed with getting one of the flash drives, though we're now told they were always no good versus the self-aware nanobots she herself built.