Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Revolution: Season 1 Episode 14 - The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia


Hello everyone and welcome back to the Revolution!  We finally got to watch episode 14 even though it was originally supposed to air last Monday.  The tragic Marathon bombing has forced NBC to air Revolution's 2 final episodes outside of May Sweeps (we'll even be into June when this season is over. Crazy!).  Anyway, last night's episode was pretty decent.  I'll admit right up front, the 10:00 hour is just getting tougher and tougher for me to stay awake and attentive these days.  So, my recaps are suffering for it.  But, I'm sure we can get through this!  You guys can just fill in the blanks that I missed or misstated!  So, let's dive in!

  • Right off the bat, nice use of Vicki Lawrence tune later covered by Reba McEntire as the title of the show.  It let us know right off the bat that our Revolution Universe was expanding!  We knew Monroe had set his sights on taking down the Georgia Federation right after he eliminated the rebels in his own republic.  Looks like his schedule advanced a little out of order! 
  • The nuke that was the focus point of the last episode had been smuggled down to Georgia.  Miles and crew got word through their scouts and decided that they needed to stop it.  Norah, Miles and Charlie somehow got to Georgia very quickly without motorized vehicles.  Now, I'm sure the Georgia "FEDERATION" extends further north than Georgia did, but still. (FYI here's the map)  Didn't they end up in Atlanta in this episode?  
  • We got a quick scene where Charlie turned into Samwise from Fellowship of the Ring.  "This is the furthest away from the Shire that I've ever beeeeen" or, she's never left the Monroe Republic. Miles returned to his awful 1-liners to call her a hick in response!  Come on, Miles, more Boy Band face lines and less whatever that was! 
  • We learn that the Georgia Federation is filthy rich, are trading with Europe and even have steam engines powering some of their vehicles.  (Maybe our heroes hitched a ride to Atlanta?)    
  • The 3 find a way to disguise themselves as federation guards/military to get through the Atlanta wall.   But, in the process, Miles found out that an old friend of his, Alec, is the man with the nuke.  There was a whole backstory on a knife that has kept Miles out of trouble and his family out of trouble for years.  He passed the knife on to Alec, a sign that he truly valued this guy as friend/family.  I'm guessing a rift formed between them when Miles left the militia.  (again, I was sleepy)
  • The whole episode dealt with tracking this guy down and figuring out where the nuke was.  Miles and crew ran into some new faces.  We met President Foster of the Georgia Federation who has had encounters with Miles before.  
  • In the end, they were able to track down Alec and prevent the nuke from detonating.  And, of course, it was all at the expense of Alec's life.  This led Miles to be all reflective on how awful a person he is and continually remind us that he's bad for Charlie.  Even though, the very fact that he keeps reflecting on this shows that Charlie is good for him.  
  • At the end of the episode, Miles brought the nuke sans radioactive material to Foster.  He didn't want Georgia creating a nuke of their own.  Foster is fed up with Monroe and is not willing to bow down to the fact that he now has power.  Foster lists off her resources: money, tall ships in Savannah, and England's aid.  She wants to strike the 3rd World nation of the Monroe Republic from the south.  But, she asked Miles if he and the rebels can start something up from within.  In doing so, she offered Miles 200 men with a thousand guns.  General Miles Mathesson was reborn! 
  • Monroe meanwhile discovered that Neville and his wife have fled the capital and that Jason is still alive.  This made Monroe all "Monroey" and he just shot a guy for the hell of it.  Who knows where Neville is off to?  But, I'll cross Monroe Republic and Georgia Federation off my list.  Perhaps he'll be waiting for Rachel and Aaron in the Plains Nation or Wasteland.  
  • Speaking of Rachel and Aaron, they are enroute to Colorado where we learn the Tower is located.   But, Rachel needs information before they can just ransack the tower.  She turns to her friend and former colleague Jane.   Jane has some crazy power and weaponry on her ranch.  She fried 2 people who were assaulting our heroes with some crazy device.   She is absolutely against destroying all of the nannites (yes, they have a name now).   We learn, and already presumed, that they were powering the technology that was keeping Danny alive.  It's also keeping Jane's life partner alive as well.  She has cancer and the nannites have kept her alive for 17 years.  We don't know what Danny had.   Rachel is adamant that she would do things differently if she had the chance to do it all over.  She would let her son die for the sake of the world.   When Jane's partner realized the truth.  That the power could be turned back on and Jane knew how, she could not stand for preventing it to happen, even if it caused her to die.  Jane reluctantly gave Rachel a book that contained the information that she needed.  Maybe that book can explain how the hell they're going to get to Colorado on foot! 
I'm sure I missed a lot of details there, but hopefully I got the gist of what we needed to grasp moving on.  I'm going to start taking power naps after work to recharge for Revolution! (If only I had that kind of time!)  Anyway, hope you enjoyed my ramblings as always and I'll see you next week!  

17 comments:

MJ said...

Was sent this article - made me think of Revolution.

This Magical Electricity-Creating Fabric Will Soon Be Everywhere
Wake Forest University
David Carroll is a nanotechnologist working on a simple material that he thinks will soon be a part of everything you own.
Carroll's research group at Wake Forest University developed a flexible fabric that makes electricity from heat or movement. It could revolutionize cheap, renewable energy.
Thermoelectrics are not exactly new, but usually made of materials that are brittle, heavy, and expensive.
Carroll's fabric, on the other hand, is lightweight, feels like wool felt, and can be wrapped around surfaces or even sewn into clothing.
While energy can't be "created" this fabric can essentially pull electricity out of thin air, from heat and movement.
The fabric Carroll's group has can turn heat — from your body, the sun, anywhere — into usable electricity.
And unlike anything ever before, it can simultaneously collect power from vibrations or movement — letting your smartphone case bounce on a carseat during a long drive could charge your phone. So could a shirt flapping in the wind.
Listening to Carroll, you get the sense that this power felt is going to be everywhere. It can be wrapped around your house, and every appliance inside it. Before you know it eager smartphone users will be fighting over heating grates instead of outlets.
We talked to Carroll about the fabric that soon may be stitched into every shirt, lying under every car hood and wrapped around every house.
Business Insider: Can you explain how this works?
David Carroll: Thermoelectrics work like this: If you grab a bar of metal at one end, the metal under your hand begins to heat up and that makes the electrons there move faster. And some of those move down to the other end where the temperature's cooler and so now you have more electrons at one side of the bar than the other. And that gives you a voltage and that voltage can be used to drive things.
So in order to get really good thermoelectrics, we use exotic materials that can move lots and lots of electrons very, very fast, but that don't allow the transfer of heat. These are ceramics. They're very expensive and they're very exotic. They work very well, but they're just not very useful in the sense that you can't apply them in many of the places where heat sources exist.
For instance, these hard ceramic modules will not do very well in trying to pick up the heat from my body, even though my body produces 100 or 120 watts of energy, or heat power at any given time.
BI: Where did this idea come from?
DC: Well, originally the idea came from my ten-year-old daughter.
The whole idea was to take isolated heat sources, like a human body or a car or a home sitting in its neighborhood and wrap it in something that would be able to capture the heat better. And so you can't really do that with most thermolectric material — they're not flexible, they're not fabrics. So my daughter, she's very clever and we were talking about this, she said well it would be cool if you could make it flexible. She had the idea of putting it on the back of a phone. She wanted to charge a cellphone with it.

MJ said...

part two

BI: You could use body heat to charge a phone?
DC: From a body that is producing 100 to 120 watts of power, you might be able to get one or two watts of power out of that. If you make clothing out of that, that's enough to start running electronics, like cellphones and things of that nature. And we've actually built some of those. We have put our power felt onto T-Shirts, we've put [it on] connectors for the iPod and things like that.
And so it's pretty nice. It's not totally efficient, but it's not meant to be. It's just meant to supplement the battery.
BI: How much does this cost?
DC: It's very, very inexpensive to make. For something on the order of a quarter, you can use it to cover your laptop computer.
Now the biggest complaint we all have about laptop computers is that the batteries don't last, right? I can't fly from North Carolina to London and work on my computer.
So what if you could extend your battery 30 percent and it only cost you a quarter to do it? See that would make a lot of sense. It's practically free, and the only thing I am doing is giving you a different style of cover than you would normally use.
You could also embed it in your [smartphone] case. You're maybe adding another dollar to the cost of the case.
Or if you have a home like my house here in North Carolina — it's been cool here for the last few days — if you look, the home is leaking about a kilowatt or so of power out into the environment. Well I could capture a whole lot of that and run my refrigerator with it.

We already wrap houses in Tyvek [a product from DuPont that insulates houses and reduces heat loss and manages moisture]. So if you could wrap it in something that could do what Tyvek does, but it also produced power — say as much power as the solar cell on top of the roof, then why wouldn't you do it?
BI: And this is just a fabric we're talking about, right? This can be used in clothing?
DC: You can use it in all of the different places you use fabric. It feels like it, it behaves like it, you can even wash it — haha — we know that by accident.
I had some samples in my pocket and my wife ran it through the washer and dryer. It actually washes just fine.
BI: How efficient is it?
DC: You can collect somewhere in the neighborhood of one milliwatt or so per square centimeter of the covering.
BI: How would you actually use it?
DC: Imagine you put this across the back of your phone. You hop in your car and let's say its a nice warm day.
And, the other thing this stuff does is if you flex it, if you make it vibrate, that also collects power. It is both piezoactive [in that it collects power from movement] and thermoelectric at the same time. It's essentially the only material that is, that I know of. So it's kind of cool.
So I hop in my car and my phone battery is running low. I'm going to drive from here down to Raleigh (North Carolina) which is about an hour and a half. I set this on my dashboard, the car vibrates — that generates power. And the dashboard's hot — that also generates power. From both of those sources I collect additional power and soak that power into my battery. By the time I get into Raleigh my battery has about a 20 percent charge on it.
It changes the way people use things.

MJ said...

part 3

BI: Then all you would have to do in any situation is find some kind of heat source. Even in the wilderness or in an emergency?
DC: Exactly.
If I go camping and I have a campfire next to my tent and I lay my phone out there next to the campfire and I go to sleep, when I wake up, assuming no one has stolen my phone, I have a charged battery. So it absorbs energy from the power that surrounds it and puts it back into the battery.
These days if you are at the airport, you hunt around for the outlet to plug your computer or phone into. But it could be that's not what you hunt for. Instead you hunt for the heat register, because that is where your power source is.
BI: What would you most like to see power felt do?
DC: That's an interesting question. I look at it kinda like the cellphones are right now. People think of cellphones, you remember when the Motorola RAZR ... we thought that was revolutionary? But the revolution didn't come until they got really smart. An iPhone is a revolution away from a RAZR.
And it can do a lot of stuff. So smartphones became ubiquitous. They became invisible. You turn your alarm in your home on with it. You turn your car on with it. You look up stuff on Google. All your contacts are in it and you use it as a camera. It actually is integrated into your life. In a way that you don't expect, in a way that you don't always notice.
Well power is the same thing. Power exists all around you. I'm standing in my kitchen, and I have power electronics all around me. I've got a microwave oven, I have a stove, I have a refrigerator. All of these things are a part of my life in an invisible way. Power felt is really meant to be invisible.
The revolution it presents is more power — a power density greater than what we have today. So laptops last longer, electronics last longer, things like that. You use power differently; you expect to collect power from your surroundings. You recognize now that power can be soaked up and placed into your electronics, like a sponge would soak up water. So that new point of view, that new way of seeing the world, is what changes stuff.
Power isn't just the thing that comes out of the socket in your house anymore. It is something that you as an individual have access to. You now have a power-generating device in your hand. It doesn't store power; it makes power. That's what makes it different.
BI: So how long before I can become an off-the-grid human? How long will it be before some of these products come to market?
DC: We hope to have the first ones in the market next year. We are in the process of signing a contract with a company that is commercializing the stuff. That company has some fairly big backers behind it — large companies that you have heard of. I can't give names but let's just say the chances are extremely good that they make something that's in your house right now.

MJ said...

Sorry to post it this way - was sent to me as a document due to web sense issues here at work.

Mike V. said...

when I first saw that you had posted 4 comments, I thought I really missed a lot of information in the recap! :-) LOL

I'll give it a read, thanks for sharing!

Mike V. said...

Very interesting article. Could definitely see that benefitting the world once it's in mass production. Once we are able to eliminate wall charging, the world will be a different place.

The next iPhone is rumored to have wireless charging, but the source of the charge would still need to be plugged into a wall. But supposedly the applicable devices in the room will be able to charge just based on proximity to the source. That's a start. But this felt thing seems closer to the answer!

And of course, one day we'll just have nannites flying around the air replicating themselves and sucking the energy out of the world! :-)

MJ said...

Yeah Georgia Federation looks like it goes up thru the Carolinas and into parts of southern Va. Was funny seeing vehicles going again, and they were dressed in nice dresses and heels - very genteel southern looking. Lol on the Samwise reference - thought exactly the same thing. How has all the peeps in Monroeville not left to live in Georgia ? Just saying. And the Pres is yet another 24 cast member.

The rift between Alex and Miles was more than a rift - Alec had failed in a mission to shoot someone dead (only hurt him) and was seen so Miles and Monroe were handing him over to the Texas Federation for punishment and inprisonment - which is apparently quite bad.

As for Monroe killing that guy - you really were sleepy! LOL He did it cause the guy was Neville's best guy and very close to Neville. Monroe couldn't believe that someone he trusted so much could betray him so figures that this guy was that close to Neville and can't be trusted.

Mike V. said...

@MJ

Actually, I was awake for the Monroe killing the guy part! lol I was just too lazy to write about it! These are BRIEFcaps afterall :-)

But yeah...totally slept through the Alec/Miles stuff...whoops! :-) Thanks for the clarification!

Good point on not more people fleeing to Georgia. That fence didn't look too complicated to get past! The funny thing is...isn't Atlanta a dump these days? No offense to any Atlanta readers...I live near Philly and it's far from glamorous! :-) But, I still love it!

The pres did look really familiar. Wait a minute...was that Teri Bauer??? lol That's hysterical that I couldn't place her! Maybe she'll get amnesia on Revolution too!

Anonymous said...

Just caught up with it.

MJ, thanks for the post re the fabric!!

So, when did I miss that Norah was a nuclear scientist/nuclear bomb expert--LOL? Basic plot question, why does Miles, etc want to get involved in a war between GA/MR? If they did, why didn't they just warn the GF? I thought they just wanted to have freedom in MR, not save the US. Oh wait, they also want to turn the power on for the entire world. That's what I call mission creep.

OK, so it does seem they walked from Philly to Atl in 2 days.

A couple hundred men can make you a general--LOL.

Sorry my comments mostly neg. It was entertaining if you don't take it seriously.

I loved 24. But toward the end it suffered from the storyline getting old, then a little campy. I'm thankful we have GoT and Vikings, even Madmen. Can't wait for Grimm to come back.

Richard

mj said...

Lol on Teri bauer and amnesia. There def is much to forgive, as with many other shows. Did they go to Hotlanta - or just Georgia Republic? Lets face it - we would be complaining if they wasted screen time showing that they walked 5 days each ep.

Anonymous said...

There was a sign that said Atlanta

Richard

Anonymous said...

It's 820 or so miles, so about a month to walk. So,yea, we would be bored to death with that--LOL. It's just they had no provisions, support, etc--but as said-we forgive with other shows too.

At least with the Philly to Colorado walk, the others stopped by Jane's house.

The actor playing Randall is normally a bad guy who ends up loosing so the MR is probably headed downhill fast. Kate(GF Pres) is usually or has been someone who wins and now she looks to have Miles(Norah or Rachel's pet--LOL). It would really be funny if Miles has a past relationship with Kate too--he obviously knew her. I can't stop laughing with that thought!!

This guy could give Don a run for his money--LOL.

Richard

Mike V. said...

@Richard - Funny with the 820 miles. lol

And I actually had the same thought with the GF President and Miles. It seemed like there was some history there too. That would be hysterical if we see a trend over the episodes with every female he comes in contact with. lol

mj said...

That would make him a capt kirk! He bedded every alien female he met

Mike V. said...

Yikes, I missed a lot of comments the other day when I responded! lol I debated whether they went to Atlanta or not as well, but when I was going back through the episode for the recap I caught them say something about sneaking into Atlanta in the guard uniforms. Maybe there was a sign too like Richard said. I also think they were already a lot further south of Philly when the last episode started. Weren't they in Annapolis at one point?

And good call on the Captain Kirk lol. Then that would make this show a Star Wars/Star Trek hybrid...which makes sense since JJ Abrams is involved with the next chapter of both of those franchises. lol :-)

Mike V. said...

Don't see the article yet but just read a tweet that Revolution has been renewed! Grimm too. :)

Mike V. said...

http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/04/26/nbc-renews-5-dramas-parenthood-revolution-more/