We five or ten remaining Revolution viewers heard the unsurprising news late last week: NBC is pulling the plug on what’s left of its electricity after forty-two episodes. I joked in a previous entry that perhaps the show could’ve forestalled cancellation if it had jumped to CBS and been retitled CSI: Future Texas. While waiting for the penultimate episode to begin, I came up with other useful ideas for new names if creator Eric Kripke can convince the studio to shop it elsewhere — to, say, the CW or Spike TV or Investigation Discovery or maybe TV Land. If someone bites, they could try rebranding it as:

Law & Order: Overthrow
Matheson, Texas Rebel
Charlie and the Soldier Factory
Everybody Hates Bass
Neville’s Advocate
Post-Apocalypse Idol
A Stop at Willoughby (and Other Twilight Zone References My Wife Will Love)
The Day the Nanoz Took Over
The Big Bang Dreary
Abandoned JJ Abrams Project #232
America vs. Nature
All Steam, No Punk
Mustache Dad and His Amazing Friends
Death Death Revolution
Mel Gibson’s The Patriot: 2029
Blackout is the New Orange

…none of which has anything to do with tonight’s new episode, “Memorial Day”, in which trainjackers try trainjacking a train from another group of trainjackers who were there first. Also, someone gets slapped and angry. But I had to keep my spirits up somehow.

How did our cast fare this week? Follow along while you still can:

Super-Villain Team-Up featuring Tom Neville and Bass Monroe: With Jason Neville dead and Julia probably ditto, Tom realizes the enemy of the enemy is his friend. Even when it’s the former boss who became the friend of his enemy and therefore became his enemy. But now that the friend of his enemy and said enemy become enemies again, that means one of them can be his friend instead of his enemy. Assuming he doesn’t turn around and become their enemy yet again. Or frenemy. Or enefrenemy. See, now I lost track. This kind of linguistic obstacle is what happens when characters attach and detach and reattach every other week like Legos owned by a really wishy-washy six-year-old.

I call do-over. Tom wants Bass and Connor on his team so they can go kill the sinister President Davis, all the Patriots, anyone standing in their way, innocent bystanders who just should’ve known better, anyone who even thinks about looking at them funny, and maybe each other a few times over if they have any time left. Bass is cool with this plan because he thinks Miles has gotten too weak (read: morally upright) to defeat the Patriots, who remain the biggest stumbling block in his grand plan to establish the Monroe Republic II. Thus do the former coworkers turned enemies again become coworkers. Or friends. Mismatched buddy-antiheroes. A rebooted Tango and Cash. Whatever.

Rachel Matheson, disapproving mother of nanobots: Rachel embarks on a side quest to find a missing Aaron and Priscilla. She finds them holed up at a two-story house equipped with booming stereo and working bug-zappers. Inside, Priscilla the nanobot marionette is conducting random amoral scientific experiments, such as creating a room with a floor made of happy rats, or a mind-wiped elderly lady who keeps brushing her hair until she damages herself. Aaron is a helpless bystander, but Rachel isn’t. The nanobots love Rachel and Aaron as two of their co-creators, but that doesn’t stop an angry Rachel from slapping Priscilla, just to see if she can get away with it. Priscilla is unfazed, still smiling, and still condescending with her plan to rewrite all human brains so they’ll stop killing each other and start appreciating old Starship albums instead.

When Priscilla leaves for a while to go collect more unwitting Saw victims, Rachel is all smug because getting away with that slap proves the nanobots are no longer omniscient, either because of confining their consciousness to a single human host for too long, or because the writers were desperate to give the humans any remote chance of surviving the finale. Unfortunately her idea to electrocute the nanobots out of Priscilla is pretty stupid and only teaches them a new emotion: anger. So now the most powerful constructs on the face of the planet have turned into moody, vengeful teens out to make their parents sorry. This kind of shortsighted, catastrophic error is why Rachel never got to be the main character.

Our Heroes in “The Train Job”: The Patriots railroad has brought an entire tanker car full of mustard gas, presumably with the intent to kill Texas Governor Bill Carver, blame it on innocent California, watch Texas and California go to war, and step in to conquer the winner. Miles’ new plan: steal that tanker and ruin it with lots and lots and lots of lye. The adventure of how they acquired the several hundred gallons of lye necessary to do this remains untold. For any Revolution fanfic writers looking to continue the legacy after the finale, here’s an opening for your first fun, hypothetical adventure.

Miles, Charlie, Gene, and toady Scanlon welcome two new teammates, the only remaining townspeople who can stand Miles at all. They’re the father and daughter of the late Dillon Matthews, the brainwashed cadet Miles had to strike down in public a few episodes ago, except they don’t know Miles pulled that trigger. Yet.

Together they stage a gunfight with the Patriots at the train station, win at trainjacking, and drive off into the night, even though Mr. Joe Matthews’ engineering qualifications consist of the one time he watched a trained professional do the job. Maybe he once also saw some movies about trains, or maybe his older daughter was a Shining Time Station fan. A ricochet killed their top engineer candidate during the gunfight, so Interim Driver Joe (Colby French) is their only hope. Lucky for him driving a train is just that easy, and he manages to keep the train from rolling, exploding, or lurching a lot while he tries to figure out how the clutch works.

Slight problem: before they can neutralize the mustard gas, Our Heroes are accosted by Our Antiheroes. Tom, Bass, Connor, and backstabby Scanlon have a counterproposal: drive the gas all the way to DC, kill the President, save the day, rule the world, etc. Larger problem: in the course of squabbling with each other, an accidental gunshot at the tanker reveals it’s empty and they’ve been had.

The easy math: it’s back at Willoughby and about to be used on their populace, not on another protracted Austin raid. Miles, Charlie, Gene, and Bass hop a wagon and make a beeline toward town, but can they return in time before something awful happens? They already lost millions of lives at the beginning of the season when Atlanta and Philadelphia were nuked, but at least they were nowhere near those places when doomsday came. This time they’ll be right at ground zero, assuming they don’t arrive too late and have a really depressing finale.

At least two combatants stay behind: Connor, who’s sick and tired of his formerly formidable dad leaping to Miles’ side and wants no part of a potential mustard gas meltdown; and Tom, who let vengeance interrupt his train of thought, tried to shoot Charlie again, and got himself knocked out for not staying on task. (When Tom dares point his gun at Miles, that’s the moment Bass went all gooey for him again.) This pairing may work well for Connor, who in a previous scene with Tom hinted that perhaps he has bigger plans that don’t involve his dad and might have room for an equally evil replacement.

I honestly didn’t notice if tag-along Scanlon stayed or went. Let’s assume the bullet that struck the tanker also skewered a tree branch that fell and knocked him out. This far into the series and this far down on the Nielsen ratings, is anyone really into fact-checking me at this point? In fact, let’s dream even bigger: I predict the series finale ends with Scanlon revealing himself as another nanobot proxy who’s been manipulating events all along, another hidden enemy like Cylons except somehow not a ripoff, and it’s he who’ll rule America after all the other characters are mustarded to death. King Nanobot Scanlon has a terrible ring to it, but that’s not his problem. Maybe he and Queen Nanobot Priscilla can have a royal wedding and dance to ” We Built This City” while countless captives are coerced into eating a crappy catered dinner and pretending it tastes good.

Charlie Matheson, former main character: Her primary contribution to the entire episode comes the evening before the train job in a chat with Miles, who admits his game plan amounts to thinking to himself, “What Would a Good Guy Do?” and then doing that thing. Charlie’s response, believing herself wise: “Being a good guy sucks.” This sort of negativity is why she was demoted from main character to grunt.

Ed Truman, Patriot Tool: The one Patriot you would’ve expected to die several episodes ago survives to this day. He gives his girlfriend Marion Reilly a new necklace, tells her he really really loves her, and looks forward to taking her to the May 14th Memorial Day children’s choir concert. (I suppose the new regime is free and clear to rearrange holidays all over the calendar as they see fit.) Also appearing at the concert are two special guests: Texas Governor Carver, and President Davis! Both shake hands as a sign of unity, and there are Texas Rangers and happy children also hanging out in the large audience, and there are speeches about the two forces teaming up against those belligerent bullies in California who probably have nefarious anti-American schemes or primitive WMDs or something.

Ed’s proud day is slightly ruined when he leaves the ceremony, heads upstairs to supervise the massive Yellow Cross™ mustard-gassing that will slay all those innocents downstairs but satisfy the Patriots’ craving for war, and discovers Marion standing there, reeling in horror. She’s already been sneaking behind his back and relaying plans to Our Heroes, but this is the first time he’s caught her in the act of snooping. At last he knows their love can never be. So Ed tells her he loves her and gently stabs her to death.

In case anyone out there still thinks he can be redeemed, he also takes back the necklace he gave her. Then it’s time to get back to his duties, which at this point include mass murder.

To be concluded!

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For anyone still following along at this point who also has YouTube access, here’s a value-added bonus: a look back to a happier time in the life of Tom Neville (Giancarlo Esposito), a time before the blackout ruined everything, before his family was killed, and before Revolution was a thing that got cancelled. Before we bid farewell to him next week, please enjoy this retrospective of an era when a much younger Tom was a recurring player on TV’s Sesame Street. Special thanks to my wife for unearthing this sweet, retroactively bizarre montage.

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If you missed all of last season and would rather read about Revolution than spend hours playing TV catchup, the MCC recap of the season 1 finale has links to MCC recaps of all first-season episodes, in all their uneven glory. MCC recaps for the current season of Revolution are listed below as handy reference for future generations. Thanks for reading!

9/25/2013: “Born in the U.S.A.”
10/2/2013: “There Will Be Blood”
10/9/2013: “Love Story”
10/16/2013: “Patriot Games”
10/23/2013: “One Riot, One Ranger”
10/30/2013: “Dead Man Walking”
11/6/2013: “The Patriot Act”
11/13/2013: “Come Blow Your Horn”
11/20/2013: “Everyone Says I Love You”
1/8/2014: “The Three Amigos”
1/15/2014: “Mis Dos Padres”
1/22/2014: “Captain Trips”
1/29/2014: “Happy Endings”
2/26/2014: “Fear and Loathing”
3/5/2014: “Dreamcatcher”
3/12/2014: “Exposition Boulevard”
3/19/2014: “Why We Fight”
4/2/2014: “Austin City Limits”
4/30/2014: “$#!& Happens”
5/7/2014: “Tomorrowland“