Tag Archives: Billy Burke

“Revolution” 10/8/2012 (spoilers): Charlie vs. Old Man Witherby at the Abandoned Amusement Park

October 9, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Billy Burke, Revolution, NBCViewers have had a week since last week’s episode of Revolution to write down their guesses as to which character would die tonight. Would it be Aaron, the softest of Our Heroes, whose death would take all sense of comic relief with him? Would it be Miles, the main character? Would it be Charlie, the character that the show keeps telling us is the main character? Would it be “Nate”, sacrificing himself to atone for his nebulous militia past? Would it be Neville, executed for the crime of being too interesting a villain?

Before that moment of tragedy, we saw at least one victory in tonight’s new episode, “The Plague Dogs”, named after the Richard Adams novel about a pair of lab-experiment dogs on the run, like our heroes except with stranger side effects. Our cast finally reunites in the ghost town of Lowell, Indiana, as previously promised, fifty miles south-by-southeast of Chicago. (One empty business sports a sign reading “G. Stein Furniture Company”, the name of a real business in North Carolina. But never mind that.) As they merge and move along, their old buddy “Nate” also stumbles out of the shadows and joins them as a willing prisoner. We’re told that his last encounter with Charlie from episode 2 (“Chained Heat”) happened someplace called Pontiac. Presumably this is Pontiac, Illinois, one hundred miles southwest of Chicago and less than thirty miles away from Chatsworth, the recently raided town that the Rebel Alliance name-checked last week. (Pontiac, Indiana, is even more out of the way, hours south of Lowell. Obviously the larger city of Pontiac, Michigan, also won’t do.)

Their objective is to catch up with Neville’s entourage, en route with Charlie’s brother Danny to Noblesville, Indiana, which is thirty miles from where I’m now sitting and typing. Lowell to Noblesville is 120+ miles beyond what they’ve already walked from Chicago to Lowell. The bulk of the episode detours them into an abandoned amusement park, which in our reality would most likely mean a ten-mile digression off I-65 to Indiana Beach in scenic Monticello. It’s not a ride-for-ride carbon copy, but the show captures the basic essence of roller coaster, water slide, Ferris wheel with extra-wide gondolas, and plastic beach chairs. The show version has more water towers, its 1950s diner looks more like a place I know at Ohio’s Kings Island, and the giant-size guitar in the background of one shot gives away its true identity as the Hard Rock Amusement Park in Myrtle Beach, SC. As a single-episode stand-in, I guess it’ll do.

Also different from Indiana Beach: the attack dogs and their unhinged master, who sics his minions on Our Heroes and then vows revenge when they kill one in self-defense. How dare they! His poor, innocent, feral dogs were minding their own business and just going about their bloodthirsty day, and then that happens! Clearly the humans are at fault and must pay. Instead of haunting them with a fake ghost like most amusement park caretakers would, this grizzled stalker attacks from the shadows and even designs a primitive deathtrap for Charlie. Luckily for her the fixtures are authentically rickety and her day is saved. Ah, if only everyone’s day could be saved…

Meanwhile on the road to Noblesville, Danny does his own bit of heroic lifesaving after finding himself trapped with Neville in a storm cellar during a genuine Indiana tornado. The twister seemingly passes; Neville shouts “Amen!”; and I couldn’t help laughing as the ceiling collapsed on him. That’s our unpredictable Indiana weather in a nutshell, folks. If nothing else, Revolution nailed that part. Alas, Danny and Neville re-enact the old fable about the scorpion and the fox, as Danny conscientiously saves Neville’s life, only to be stung by him in return. Points to Danny for moral superiority in the face of a CG storm, at least.

Meanwhile down in Noblesville, now revealed as Monroe Militia HQ, Evil Dictator “Bass” Monroe continues holding Charlie’s mom Rachel captive, perpetuating what must be a years-long tradition of interrogating her unsuccessfully, even with sadistic lackey involvement. A flashback reveals that not only did Rachel turn herself in to save her family, but that her original captor…was Miles himself! DUN DUN DUUUUUN! I suppose this should be shocking, but it’s kind of not. Now that we know the Monroe Republic is half Monroe’s fault and half Miles’, I expect we’re in for a long parade of stunning revelations about the evil Miles committed before he realized what a series of grave mistakes he’d made, like My Name is Earl with more bloodletting.

To his credit, Miles corrects one important wrong in this episode. After two acts’ worth of wishy-washy quitter angst once again, he finally takes a leap of faith into the waiting arms of family commitment, officially deciding to stay with his niece and help see her quest through to the doubtlessly heroic end. The impetus that inspires this decision is tonight’s Shocking Character Death…which would be a lot more shocking if I hadn’t totally called it last week.

Alas, poor Maggie, we knew you slightly. Your flashbacks reveal a little more history, of your children separated from you in England, of your epic one-woman journey from Seattle to Buffalo, and of your unbelievable discovery that large boats capable of sailing to England are now extinct because of wars that demolished them all and, I suppose, resulted in the deaths of every boatwright and every boating company in America. Never mind that Christopher Columbus and several centuries of pirates managed just fine without today’s boat construction technology. Were all those Carnival Cruise liners drafted into the wars and sunk during fierce naval conflicts, too?

Sorry, where were we? Yes, Maggie, then — Charlie’s de facto stepmother passes away due to femoral artery damage from one vicious stab wound courtesy of the Phantom of Indiana Beach. A sad ending to her story, after being rescued from suicidal thoughts by Charlie’s dad Ben, made a part of the family, and now…this. In her final flashback, Maggie reads to her kids from yet another classic road-trip tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a copy of which she leaves behind with Our Heroes, perhaps serving as a reminder to keep following that yellow brick road. Or a reminder of a more innocent time when adorable dogs like Toto were the norm and not the exception.

“Revolution” 10/1/2012 (spoilers): Educating Charlie, the Secret of Miles, and 10,000 Sniper Bullets

October 2, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Charlie and Nora, "Revolution"

Action heroine class is now in session.

Week Three of NBC’s Revolution, entitled “No Quarter”, took major strides toward turning Charlie into the main character at last. She found a personal mentor in Nora; she completed her third kill (random crossbow takedown); she took out an entire bridge with archery and explosives, and — most shocking of all — she learned Miles’ deep, dark, horrible secret that makes her morally superior to him.

Miles’ shady past may never have come to light if Nora hadn’t introduced us to her friends in the Rebel Alliance, including their leader, Nicholas (Derek Webster from Damages and Harry’s Law), labeled a Catholic priest but struggling to walk the walk in a world turned topsy-turvy. More credit for the rebels’ survival may be owed to their nameless sniper who has the pleasure of mercilessly wielding the precious M40A rifle that Our Heroes acquired last week. (If they distinguished which of the three kinds of M40As it was, then I missed the last digit.) While everyone else hides in the basement of a former restaurant called Harrigan’s that resembled a Bennigan’s except of course totally different, the noble sniper mowed down the onslaught of evil cannon fodder as quickly as they could be ushered out of hiding by their leader, Jeremy (Mark Pellegrino from Supernatural, playing quite the remarkable villain here). Fortunately for the sniper, either Nora also lifted a gigantic box of M40Ax rounds along the way back to Harrigan’s, or the rebels stole the bullets previously and kept lugging the dead weight around until they could locate a weapon to match with them.

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“Revolution” 9/24/2012 (spoilers): Mitigating Morality and Fussing Over Flags

September 25, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

The Rebel Alliance goes up to 11Last week’s premiere of the new JJ Abrams series Revolution achieved encouraging Nielsen ratings. Then again, so did the pilots for The Event and FlashForward. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday morning to discover how episode two fared. I’m sticking with it for now with some form of curiosity, but I can’t say the show is firing on all cylinders yet.

The interesting sword-fighting scenes in this week’s episode, “Chained Heat”, are mostly between Miles and special guest C. Thomas Howell as a generic bounty hunter. Unfortunately for Miles, all his other party members lack key adventuring skills. If they were Dungeons & Dragons characters, their class would be Hostage. Worse still in Miles’ mind, head hostage Charlie still adheres to old-fashioned, inconvenient, old-world beliefs such as Killing Is Wrong and Slavery Must Be Stopped. Through the course of the hour, Uncle Miles has to teach his niece that (1) life in the new world is basically a constant state of war, so killing is mandatory until someone reinvents the American legal and penal systems; and (2) they have better things to do than become a traveling abolition squad. The validity of either lesson remains open to debate.

At first Miles abandons his dead-weight companions and tries to carry the series solo, but Charlie refuses to let him because she believes she’s the main character, and also she wants to fight by his side with her crossbow that she’ll willingly use to wound animals or shield herself from swinging swords. Despite her inexperience and naivete, despite Miles’ considerable head start, and despite a scene where she plods around a playground for a while and has an intense childhood flashback, somehow she catches up with him anyway. One has to wonder if perhaps she possesses innate tracking skills not yet mentioned, if Miles somehow got lost, or if he was just testing her to see if she would follow him, and had been hiding in the bushes all this time.

Miles wouldn’t be alone in using shrubbery as camouflage. That’s exactly where “Nate” spent this episode, keeping himself, his conflicting motives, and his general brooding hidden but never far from the action. Basically he’s set up as a season 1 Angel to Charlie’s Buffy. Those are some big shoes to fill, “Nate”.

Of course, in order to follow Miles in the name of “only trying to help”, Charlie had to let Aaron and Maggie stay abandoned and fending for themselves. The duo reacts to this by not staying put, instead venturing forth armed only with the late Ben Matheson’s potentially world-saving flash-drive MacGuffin amulet, a dead iPhone that hopefully doesn’t experience memory degradation issues, and Aaron’s magic glasses that have survived fifteen years or more without collecting scratches all over the lenses. Maybe I shop at all the wrong optometrists, but after two or three years with the same pair of glasses, I’m usually half-blind and having to learn how to focus through the few clear spots.

Thus do Aaron and Maggie throw caution to the wind and advance in the direction of Grant Park, the hometown of Grace, the mysterious lady from last week that Danny met by pure happenstance, who then threw him to the wolves, and who for some reason has a working computer with a 56K modem with the old dial-up squawks and everything. We know little else about her so far except she had/has an asthmatic son whose inhaler had no expiration date; she’s not afraid to throw innocents to the wolves for the sake of saving her own skin or cause (too early to tell which of those means more to her); and her subplot ends in a cliffhanger involving a rude home invader named Randall. I like to think that a character with that name just has to be awesome, so I’m sure there was a perfectly courteous reason for him to smash her door down.

Funny thing about Grant Park, though: it’s fifty miles south of Chicago. That wouldn’t be a cakewalk for the Fellowship of the Ring, let alone for casual pedestrians. I can’t wait to see how that goes for Maggie and Aaron, who’s not exactly built like a cross-country runner. I also look forward to finding out how Charlie’s brother Danny, who was taken captive many miles west of Chicago in the pilot, somehow beat them to Grant Park by a full episode — accidentally and with asthma, at that. They do have one thing in their favor: Miles told everyone to meet in two weeks in Lowell, Indiana, which lies a measly fifteen miles east of Grant Park. That leg of their trip should be a breeze compared to the Chicago-to-Grant-Park marathon.

Miles’ side quest, as it turns out, is to recruit the last cast member, Nora (Daniella Alonso), who can hold her own in a fight, can allegedly blow stuff up, is willing to steal herself better weapons, and has a Rebel Alliance tattoo on her back, in the form of an eleven-star American flag. Apparently the rebels are so hardcore, they think North Carolina and Rhode Island don’t count as Original Colonies because they were too slow to get ratified. 11-OC in full effect, y’all.

Meanwhile, Giancarlo Esposito’s Neville, the most interesting evildoer in the show, saw reduced screen time, but taught us two key lessons: he’s some kind of religious (for me, the most eye-rolling revelation this week), and the original fifty-star American flag has been renamed the “rebel flag”. With the series taking place in northeast Illinois, it may be years before the characters walk far enough south for us to learn what a Confederate flag is now called. His superior, Sebastian Monroe, presidential monarch of the Monroe Republic, had even less screen time with only two scenes to call his own: one demonstrating that he’s against torture but not murder; and one revealing that Charlie’s mom is alive and captive.

Hopefully the future doesn’t see Charlie following her mom’s lead in every other episode. I’d like to see her grow as a character, preferably sooner rather than later. It was sad to see her innocence die a little when she experienced her first kill (and, seconds later, her second kill) while helping Nora steal the cool sniper rifle from the copter-hoarding Imperial forces. She doubtlessly has more trials ahead of her, so she’ll need to keep working on her backbone development, stop letting strong men back her into helpless positions, and start owning the fact that this entire journey was her idea.

If she keeps insisting on retreating to the background, I would recommend the show change focus ASAP so that Miles really is the one true main character. Along those lines, they’d do well to change the name of the show as well. My suggestions for a new name would include Miles to Go; Miles Down the Road; Crossing Miles; Miles and Nora’s Infinite Hit List; or We’re Walking, We’re Walking, We’re Walking.

“Revolution” Pilot: From Slow Burn to Swashbuckling

September 18, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Billy Burke, NBC, "Revolution"Tonight was the broadcast premiere of NBC’s newest genre series Revolution, from executive producer JJ Abrams and creator Eric Kripke, best known as the original mind behind Supernatural. In a world where electricity has gone the way of the dinosaur and the physics of combustion engines have magically suspended operation, factions have arisen to make the most of a scary new world without advanced technology, lifesaving devices, or Angry Birds.

After a cursory intro peppered by distant, low-key plane crashes, the show’s setting begins fifteen years later after mankind has regressed to villages and an entire generation has grown up with only vague memories of ice cream and the Internet. Our heroine, Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos), is a more optimistic, less assured Katniss Everdeen who eschews regular bows in favor of a crossbow, which serves her poorly when she learns the hard way that reloading takes longer. At least, I hope she realizes her error. If she sticks with the crossbow simply to avoid trademark confusion, I’ve no doubt that future fight scenes will sadly gloss over this issue. Don’t be fooled by how easy the Huntress makes it look, kids.

After a tragic death and the passing of a family MacGuffin, Charlie reluctantly inspires a ragtag team of misfits to quest with her to Chicago. There’s her dad’s Australian girlfriend Maggie (Anna Lise Phillips), a doctor with sly methods for maiming a foe; Aaron (Zak Orth), a former Google exec who tags along because of comic relief; and Nate (JD Pardo), an archer with multiple weapon proficiencies and shifty priorities. They vow to walk dozens of miles together for justice, revenge, safety, and premise.

The reason for this quest? Charlie’s asthmatic brother Danny (Graham Rogers) has been taken captive by the most immediate Big Bad, Giancarlo Esposito (now departed from Breaking Bad and incarcerated on Once Upon a Time), a sinister militia captain named Neville who’s not thrilled with the orders he has to follow, but has no qualms about putting his crack-shot skills to use for his overlord, Sebastian Monroe, ringleader of the militia that rules the immediate surroundings within the landmass formerly known as the USA. Esposito firmly takes charge of every scene and won’t let go, particularly in a sequence in which he nimbly and unflinchingly mows down a row of uppity villagers, exactly one split-second bullet per villager.

Our Heroes’ not-quite-epic journey to save David — even though he’s a prisoner waaaay back home — trots them through O’Hare International Airport, fifteen miles east to Wrigley Field, a few miles south to the Magnificent Mile, then into the heart of the Loop, where an old hotel sets the stage to introduce Charlie’s long-lost uncle Miles (Twilight dad Billy Burke), who may be the lynchpin of their cause if only he can put down the bottle, stop hiding, and assume his role as the One True Main Character…who’s apparently expected to drop all his plans, trek with them back across twenty-odd miles of I-90 North, and save the day without an audition or an incentive beyond “Because family is important!”

When Evil Esposito isn’t onscreen, the first ¾ of the pilot skims through a lot of character meetings without many chances to get to know anyone at length. The energy level cranks up at the 45-minute mark (including network ads) when Miles, previously described in an offhand manner as a “killing machine” as if it weren’t nothin’, engages in the sort of well-choreographed, high-speed, one-man-army swordplay demonstration that was once the hallmark of bygone shows such as TV’s Angel. For a few minutes, I was on Action TV Cloud Nine.

If you’re patient enough to endure the setup and introductions, lying in wait after all that happy Errol Flynn-ing are two special surprises in the final five minutes: a revelation that threatens to undercut the show’s entire premise; and a better look at one of the show’s secret weapons barely noted in the preview materials — David Lyons, once known as TV’s The Cape! Somewhere out there, Abed Nadir is deliriously happy.

The pilot was released online early at NBC’s official site, but that’s not helpful to people like me who prefer larger TV screens, or to people also like me who somehow didn’t find out about the early release until after the fact. (For shame, Internet — you’re supposed to tell me these things!) Revolution isn’t quite A-plus material yet, but the pilot, as directed by Iron Man‘s Jon Favreau, climaxes with enough pizzazz and tantalizes with enough promise that I plan to check back next week for more, though I’m making no long-term commitment yet. After the sweat and tears normally poured into a pilot on big-budget double overtime, it’s usually the second episode that doesn’t try as hard to impress, and is a better indicator of the real quality control levels to be expected in the weeks ahead. Also, I’d like to see if Charlie wises up and ditches that awkward crossbow.