New Drama Showdown: "Last Resort" vs "Revolution"

As we all know, the networks have been searching for the next Lost for some time.  There was The Event, Persons Unknown, V, Alcatraz, and a whole bunch of other short-lived shows I can't even remember that failed to hook and capture the public in the immediate, visceral way that Lost did.  I was reading an interview with Zeljko Ivanek where he was talking about being bummed he didn't get to work with Blair Underwood more on The Event, and while I love Zeljko and I love Blair Underwood, the sad truth is that The Event was terrible.  Just really, really bad.

My love of Lost got me into a quandary with some of my best friends when the sixth season aired.  I had been pretty obsessed with Lost since about mid-way through the second season, when I watched the first season DVDs and then went off to a new college and realized I could buy episodes on iTunes.  That shit hooked me pretty hard.  After I graduated and moved back home, I made a bunch of people start watching. I swore to them that the writers knew what they were doing and all the loose ends would be neatly tied up if they would just be patient.  Now, I still maintain that Lost was, for the most part, a great show, and after careful consideration, I even became a fan of the finale.  But fuck, the writers really dropped the ball during season six.  The episodes aren't all terrible and we do get some satisfying answers, but they spent WAY too much time introducing unnecessary new characters, faffing around with Charles Widmore, and getting to the heart of the Jacob/Smoke Monster thing and not enough time wrapping things up satisfactorily with the original cast and some of the mysteries they'd been developing for years.  Don't even get me started on the alternate reality/limbo thing - while I do like the finale, the build-up to it was frustratingly dumb.  Anyway, this is all to say that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof robbed me of some of my well-earned reviewer credentials and to this day, my friends still give me shit when I recommend a mysterious drama.

Well, I'm hoping that I can redeem myself now.  There are two new dramas this year that have already found some success with the Lost style of a large, diverse ensemble cast and gradually-revealed mysteries, and it turns out that they're both pretty good.  One is already pulling ahead of the other in my book, though.



Last Resort is awesome.  It's about a nuclear-capable naval submarine that receives confusing orders to preemptively hit Pakistan with a nuclear bomb.  They question the orders and the channel they came through, and are immediately attacked by American missiles.  The captain and crew of the submarine commandeer a nearby island and try to keep everyone from getting killed.  That's about where we're at right now, but the possibilities moving forward are fantastic.  There's massive government conspiracy and corruption, there's the question of military protocol and chain-of-command and how it functions in this unusual situation, there are shady characters and mysterious characters and a strong theme of women in power that, so far, has been handled incredibly well.  The acting is strong all around, but I think what's really going to make Last Resort a success is Scott Speedman.  Where has that dude been all these years?  He's literally the only reason I watched all of Felicity - he's crazy hot in a uniquely emotional sort of way, he's remarkably charismatic and not a bad actor to boot.  Last Resort has a wonderfully diverse cast, an interesting location, and oooooooh, I love me some government conspiracies.  I didn't watch it at first because military stuff doesn't usually do it for me, but Speedman hooked me in and once I was there, I didn't want to leave.  I'm already invested in all of the characters and can't wait for more.  If there's only one of these dramas that you watch this fall, make it Last Resort.

Revolution has fewer similarities to Lost on the surface, but the way they're handling the over-arching mystery feels very much the same.  The basic premise is that somebody figured out a way to make electricity stop working everywhere in the world.  Now, this premise is honestly a little dumb.  The thing about science fiction is that there needs to be actual science behind it, and the idea that some catastrophic event could keep batteries or wind farms or fucking lightning from working just doesn't really fly with me at all.  But let's suspend our disbelief for the moment.  One of the main reasons Lost was so captivating were the incredible characters whom we were able to immediately fall in love with and root for (and yes, I know Jack was The Worst but he was a necessary cog), thanks in no small part to the great actors who played them.  Last Resort is pulling off this feat as well, but Revolution is still struggling to catch my empathy.  The character who we're supposed to feel the most about is a teenage girl, and it's been four episodes and I could give a shit if she died.  One of the main characters died last episode and all I could think was, "They didn't develop the character enough to make me care about this at all".  As various people wander through the post-apocalyptic jungle and we learn about the militia and the rebels and the people just trying to farm and get by, the writing is not giving us enough character intrigue.  Beardy Google Guy is great because the contrast of someone who's life WAS technology being forced to survive in a world without any is interesting, but in terms of development he seems pretty flat.  Elizabeth Mitchell's character is slightly intriguing because she has answers that nobody else does, but the idea that they're going to torture her son is boring because no, they're not, they'll slap him around a bit and then she'll tell them things.  The best character, to absolutely no one's surprise, is played by Giancarlo Esposito.  I still haven't seen any Breaking Bad, but I trust that it is great and I trust that Esposito is as great in it as he is here.  A captivatingly intense psychopath, he is a creation of this new world they live in, and every scene with him is electrifying.  In other news, there are also a bunch of boring white guys doing what boring white guys do - eating up screen time and being self-satisfied.  Bleh.

Unlike Last Resort, the mystery moving forward doesn't seem to have endless possibilities.  Someone has turned off the power, and our ragtag gang is going to figure out how to get it back on.  Sure, there's some exploration of human nature and how it devolves without societal constructs, but that basically makes it feel like The Walking Dead with no zombies, and aren't the zombies the entire reason we watch The Walking Dead?  I love a post-apocalyptic story like nobody's business, but I just can't help questioning the entire hook of Revolution again and again.  In the last episode there was a big-ass storm but nobody talked about lightning or how lightning functions in the non-electric world.  Just having Beardy Google say, "It defies the laws of physics!" over and over again isn't really a solution.  Revolution seems to be gaining some cultural momentum (thanks, it seems, almost entirely to Giancarlo Esposito), which is why I checked it out in the first place, and I'll stick around for now and see where it takes us.  But they better make the characters more interesting, more likable, and more unique in a hurry, because Last Resort already has a leg up.

If only one of these shows survives, I think you know by now that I want it to be Last Resort.  It's a show with the capability to appeal to a lot of different types of people, which is one of the benefits to having a wide cast with a comfortable balance of strong female and male characters of differing ages, races, nationalities, and backgrounds.  The military aspect is helpfully separated from our current bipartisan politics, and the President, whom we have yet to meet, has already been established as a shady figurehead.  I like stories that take our present world and posit one important change, such as an insane, dictatorial President, that shifts everything and makes all the difference.  But regardless of the futures of Revolution or Last Resort, it's nice to see that some people finally got it right, and that those of us who've been hungry for a good serialized mystery, whether we were angered or satisfied by Lost's ending, can finally dig our teeth into something substantial.  And get to watch Scott Speedman keep a cool, sexy head and take his shirt off to boot.

Last Resort airs Thursdays at 8 on ABC (they really need to get a better timeslot) and Revolution airs Mondays at 10 on NBC.

Image via TVFanatic