If my computers' only power source came from a treadmill, I would be in great shape by now!

That looks interesting, I'll check it out. PBS had a couple programs set up like this, Frontier House and 1900 House... not exactly apocalyptic, but survival without modern technology or amenities aside from a confessional. There was another documentary about a family with kids living in the 80s... may have been several decades Electric Dreams, not as stripped back but interesting to watch the kids complain or the family try to pick out the most practical home computer in 1982. I like shows that deal with people's experience without all the stuff they're used to. When I didn't have the internet at home last year, I did a fuck-lot of crossword puzzles and walking.

Ever hear of the show The Colony? It"s about a group of ordinary people (volunteers) having to work together to survive a post-apocalyptic scenario. The only resources they have available is the junk laying around like inside an abandoned warehouse. The producers even implement attacks from outside groups.

Check this out. It's season one episode one.

Maybe I'm not being consistent myself either. I can certainly buy a premise of Terra Nova (as I understood it) or any other, I guess Water World or even Futurama, that far enough into the future things will be worse if we just continue the way we are, without any intervening colossal event, more than I can buy the premise that one colossal event right now would make everyone forget how to be who we are, and far enough into the future, of course there are portals to dinosaur times, I don't even care. Once survivors are settled into the non-electric world, how about we just put the United States back together. Only a couple Marines would decide the USA is not good enough? What really happened back there?

I have thought about this again - Justice Gustin reminds me that I know how much people can suck, and Revy reminds me that we have precedence for how loosely things are held together.

In my imagination, I'm sort of expecting the "people come together" after a disaster - people who are capable help people who aren't, as has been demonstrated, perhaps to make us feel much better and self-congratulatory, on news stories about disasters. As an optimist, I would think people would get closer with their neighbors, pool resources.. that guy who tried to steal the wagon of food threatened them instead of being looked at as someone needy, he was a thief and he was killed. I think the cracked article points out how stupid that whole scenario was. And the two Marines leaving base because they weren't given orders to do whatever it is the military tries to do when everyone else needs their help?

So this is a massive disaster that happened to everyone, so if something happened to New Orleans like a hurricane/flood aftermath, it's not like New York can help because it happened to them too, and everyone in between. I agree we can't feed everyone, but like Jack tried to tell people on Lost, we are out of airplane food, the "live together or die alone" speech, and Locke said, "we hunt." Rob breaks into Neville's house instead of being asked to share, seems to be rummaging a silverware drawer like an animal - we already have been shown they are not on friendly terms, but the insurance adjustor who fudged on "smoke damage" for policyholders who hadn't paid for smoke damage insurance wouldn't do the same for his neighbor? "You're my neighbor," he tries to reason with the intruder - then why is he starving and breaking in your house like a total stranger?

Now I'm not a people person, and I can see this happening, the disconnect between what a neighbor is and what a neighbor actually does. I guess. If someone doesn't try to organize and placate people into order, nobody knows what else to do but beat the shit out of someone with a tent. I still don't understand the Pellegrino thing - he was incapacitated and they could steal his things, but did they have to pulverize him to death, or were they going to eat him? Miles and Monroe weren't that hungry by the time they got near Chicago by contrast.

Anyway, a lot would have had to happen that we don't know about yet in 15 years and I'm starting to accept that people tried and failed to hold it together until the militias, plus there were wars - in the ocean. If Maggie knew, then she might have gotten home. If Ben had a magic necklace, did he have a computer too? If the militia never came for him, it never would have come up.

As far as the clean clothes, sure that nerd's favorite AC/DC t-shirt lasted so long - it looks like the 1st shirt he wears after he does laundry, lol, I don't know why that doesn't bother me so much. I'm given to understand there are things you're supposed to overlook, and things you need explanations for. Some power works. Miles' hotel has all the torches going at the same time - do you think he walks up and down the corridors to light them? The "set" seems really lazy to me - a support column slides right out of position, only one of them, and lands in the middle of the stairs, and there are trees growing inside, and he has a pool table set up like a normal lounge. Aaron should immediately recognize that he is in a video game then and become the most capable, and perhaps he recognizes he is out of his element in fact because it's not a game. This must dawn on him within the next two episodes, other than the fact he was given an amulet and tagged along on the "quest", and maybe that time he kneecapped the militia guy, got a knife turned on him, and depleted his stats. Maybe they cut the scene where he made a puddle on the relatively clean marble floor. Maybe that's all we get.

I'd like to see him more as a Sayid than Nora is; he's not even managing to be Hurley - Hurley was useful and recognized how to fill his Hurley niche when opportunities arose. After 15 years living this way, an abandoned commercial airliner is a good place to get a medical kit, you think? I would have thought too that he gave up on computers ever working again after the first 2 years he must have frantically tried. He lived in a village containing a magic necklace kept right on the body of his friend, and nothing ever turned on, so we come upon a broken computer and of course we have to risk trying to put it back together - it wouldn't be here if it didn't just work 5 minutes ago. Of course he was right, it's in the script, but reasonably not.

So I guess just saying that I hope we're filled in more quickly about certain indications that a lot of things were tried in 15 years. Fire still works, they tore apart the boats for lumber, but people have lots of fire, lots of candles like they just picked up the Instant Engagement Kit at Party City (for the romantic atmosphere we all look forward to in the apocalypse), and throw logs to run a train like they do it all the time. I'm not the science expert many people are, but this shouts "inconsistency" to me. I know this is about the Revolutionary War somehow, but I would love to see some other stories on the planet, like when Lost spent a few episodes on the Tailies' experience. Monroe is consumed with gaining power in his locale, wonder what's China or Russia doing now, or places that didn't rely heavily (or at all) on electricity in the first place. Did every country on the planet decide they needed to fuck up all their transportation for lumber? What's this new project with all the wood? Isn't one of the "modernity" complaints about McMansions, and nearly everyone starved to death and they didn't make any new boats.

I hope we're not meant to ignore these lines as throw-away explanations. What happened in the intervening years is the mystery to me, not what caused the power to go off or how to turn it on, and the political dishevelment would fall into that time period either, not just in the summary, "fear and confusion led to panic." The leftover people tend to re-civilize themselves as they adjust. Don't they?

In Terra Nova they solved the paradox issue by making the portal connect to an alternate dimension rather then to the past of their own earth. I think the issues they were getting into just before Fox pulled the plug were really interesting, how would we deal if we found a virgin planet, would we try to avoid the mistakes we did before and build a more sustainable economy or would we just go back to strip it of resources and fuck the future. I'm still on the fence about revolution, the concept have potential but the execution so far was less then stellar and I really don't like the sort of magic way the electricity gone and how physics no longer work so even batteries and hydroelectric turbines don't work.

I watched the one season (2011) of Terra Nova and enjoyed it. I liked how it took place during the year 2149, but in a prehistoric world. Both worlds were in existence at the same time.

To me, this situation evokes many paradoxes. A society with technology in a prehistoric time would have huge implications on it's future and ultimately the whole future from that point on, up to and including 2149. IIRC, their actions had no effect on the 2149 future. They had a portal that was used once every several months or so to transfer people and equipment back and forth across 85 million years.

The show raised more questions than it answered. The plot was more about relationships and dealing with crisis and less about how they accomplished time travel.

Overall, it was thought-evoking and entertaining.

I would like to think that in a post-apoalyptic world, mankind could pull together and deal with it, but I doubt it. With my confidence level in mankind so low, all I can picture is a Mad Max or Waterworld type of life. I hope I would be wrong.

Kodie, I want to like it too. They are just doing everything wrong. I can barely keep a decent shirt in one piece for 5 years, how are they still wearing obviously factory made shirts after 15? Etc, etc...

As far as society falling apart, just look at New Orleans after Katrina. It really doesn't take much for everything to go wrong. Another piece of food for thought, without modern technology, we have no way of farming enough food to keep everyone alive. Starvation would be rampant in a month in most cities. Our civilization lives on a knife edge, anything could tip us into oblivion.

I tried to make that shorter by only hitting some major bullet points besides, but I really appreciated the sharp focus of the cracked article as well. I'm not huge into dystopian world-building kind of stuff. I guess I like it. I mean I liked Lost, and I really liked Cast Away, so I think that "island with none of the stuff I would have packed if I knew I was going to be stranded for a couple years" and "all that stuff would be 5 CDs and 5 books I'm tired of reading and 5 movies I don't ever want to see again in my life". Because there's a DVD player there. I like portraits of self-reliance more than future technology. You know, like "in the distant future," well of course everything has gone totally to shit and polluted, I can buy that vaguely nothing will resemble the present anymore (or aliens attack or global nuclear war), but there's a portal to dinosaur time and we've built a village there and that will not impact the sooner-future when everything gets polluted millions of years earlier than it did and make a portal back to ? We already fucked that up, we have to go back even farther this time. I didn't really give Terra Nova a chance. I don't read a lot of books or watch a lot of movies where this kind of speculating is normal. Depends on what I have to overlook to really get into it.

So of course in 15 years without electricity worldwide, I have to imagine they've done everything they could - the militia government is not holding back anything, because they only want power to take over some other militia republic and would have had the best working on it. Alternately, the people just settle for what it is. Powerful people making stupid decisions is the world we live in now (sometimes). They are trying to harness what could be too much power for we know they are evil - and they're evil because instead of taking a neat plan like the United States of America, the plan we try to share with other struggling new governments in parts of the world without as many niceties as we have on the ground, their idea of structure is to plan that all your citizens are lunatics. Because they responded to a catastrophe as savages.

The de facto United Statesian of the group, Nora, doesn't know she has the power in her group. They're going to do this the hard way since Aaron's going to sit on that for a while and the only three other people who know about it are 2 dead and 1 militia. He keeps it a secret to his friends, but he has it out on the table gaping at it while guarding the prisoner. At least when the prisoner necessarily escapes, that wasn't also his fault. His "character development" hopefully goes somewhere compelling soon; who he was can still be who he can be, but for some reason never occurs to anyone. Save it for some other character to ask him why he dwells on his past so much. To make an ironic example, in high school, I went out with a guy who just moved and all he could talk about were his accolades at his old high school yet failed to demonstrate himself as being as talented as he claimed to be - so Aaron needs a dose of shut the fuck up about it unless you're going to do something with that nerd head you keep yammering on about.

Is this how story-telling goes? The foreshadowing of Nate seeing Rachel's drawing of the necklace later is a big heavy hammer. Are the characters acting normally or conveniently? I really want to like this show for some stupid reason.

I caught up with it yesterday afternoon. I feel like people would have had town meetings to try and remain structured. I think the big fail is that people did just what the writers needed them to do in an apocalypse. They became savages, and 6 months out, it's up to Miles and Monroe to see something and do something about it. 2 weeks out, sitting in their dorm at Parris Island with no orders? America just falls right apart and nobody tries to recreate it and settle people down and rebuild, and just because there's a car in the middle of your cul-de-sac, fucking grow a garden in it. Sure you can't move all the trash out of sight.

Anyway, I like the show a lot more and it's probably that Esposito and the few guest starring people. I had compared it to Lost in that in one, we have immediately a cast of somehow interesting characters who try everything and anything: let's use all the stuff we can from the airplane; hey I found a radio, let's hike up to the top of that hill; let's try to build a boat; ok, let's build another boat and don't set it on fire this time! And the whole first season was inside about a month after the plane crashed. In the short glimpses of the time right after the power went out, people just started walking or breaking into houses. Nobody seemed to try to organize and make committees. Supplies were that low. It's hard to tell how they comprehended this happened over the whole world, but I know people get restless if the power company doesn't come by a week, they get restless but somehow remain civilized and still don't starve to death. Of course they have generators and cars and fireplaces typically and can bring stuff back from another town that they need. And they have town meetings! They go to the gathering places and talk shit about the power company.

So this 15 year thing. With people falling so completely apart right away, I don't know why, but it strikes me that's long enough to try everything and anything and find that none of it works. But the train works, so why haven't they had trains. Why is this the only train, and it does work, so what the fuck. As annoying as some people are, Aaron is the worst. He's holding the magic necklace, but he's being a useless turd of the group. These are human beings incapacitated by the loss of electricity, and he, being the super-nerd he is, should have also been the guy providing alternate solutions. Nope, he only knows computers. Perhaps we are stuck with self-pitying nerds who feel they are physically fated without computers to weep about middle school for 15 years instead of do nerdy shit and help out a little. Charlie - was a little girl; Aaron - was apparently a grown man, and who has become a survivor about this shit circumstance? As "brains," Ben gave the necklace to him. Nora makes tools out of stuff. Why doesn't Aaron know how to do any of that shit? He's apparently the only one who will be able to figure out what to do with the necklace, but that's all he knows. As much as everyone else sucks, I don't understand his utter helplessness. The part at the beginning when he was supposed to be the village teacher was really the worst. It was broad and general deliberate demonstration for the home audience how vaguely things just stopped working, but you think children going to school in post-electric world wouldn't need to go to school to learn that. Why not something useful, Aaron - these kids are the future. I get it, he had lots of money, lap dogs even, not a wilderness kind of guy, but you live a certain way for over a decade.... I kind of have to believe in 15 years everyone did try everything and nothing worked already, none of this 1800s stuff. Nobody on this show ever saw Little House on the Prairie and made a pump, little cut off cul-de-sacs are self-sufficient gardeners and no farmers, no livestock, no mercantiles in town. ?????

So anyway. I don't know if this is a show that says we rely too much on electric devices, like why wouldn't people gather at town hall? Because they couldn't evite their neighbors and lost all social skills because of facebook and texting. We live on cul-de-sacs and don't know how to get out and meet new people. It's the apocalypse and we're shy. Or if it's a show that says electricity is an awesome thing that brings people together when they're far apart and we love it, and there's ice cream there. The "rebels" of the United States - seems like a good idea, so why is being an American the worst idea? We have the instructions and we know it works. Because their team is too violent and undermanned? There were "wars" that used up all the boats and we never built new boats so we could get this shit up. A woman walked all the way from Seattle to the East Coast to find a boat, I know she's on the wrong ocean but a boat somewhere is better than walking for years and heading back toward Wisconsin afterward? And without security cameras, the militia still finds you everywhere.

The explanations why they're so backward without electricity don't seem very human to me - that's the key that's missing. I can deal with their make-up, wardrobe, having an endless supply of exactly what they need, and shoes that never seem to wear out, strange dialogue, and even being outnumbered in every fight and still killing everyone, but humans solve problems, even if Aaron is too sad to be useful. In 15 years, nobody put that sad sack out of his misery and ate him I don't know. That would be sad, I'm sure he's nice.

Yeah, anyway. Kind of went off there.

Haven't seen it even though the post apocalyptic hypothesis intrigues me.

The show Doomsday Preppers is about real people preparing for disasters "...including economic collapse, societal collapse, electromagnetic pulse, terrorist acts, fuel shortages, war, pandemics, etc." Some episodes here.

One common thing I noticed, is that if anything does happen, most of them will be SOL due to preparing for the wrong cataclysm.

I have watched every episode. The show is basically the same premise as Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series but Stirling did it better (nothing works, no steam power, no gunpowder, not so sure about other chemistry though) and everything shifts back to the Dark Ages.
The writing in this show is just horrible. I think the characters are horribly shallow tropes. The actors aren't even that great.
I will continue to watch this show as th whole post apocalyptic genre is my favorite and the only other ones on tv are Wakling Dead and I guess Falling Skies (still havent seen it yet). I think it has a tremendous amount of potential but after I saw that the rebels where branding themselves with American flags, I just gave up expecting them to do anything really deep with the concepts of fascism vs chaos and man vs nature. It is a basic apperal to people to make them root for the "good guys", and then, only in the US.
Also, the Cracked article sums up the rest of my annoyances with terribly thought up scenes:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumbest-things-tv-so-far-this-season/

I haven't watched it, mostly because I've read the bad reviews and I agree with the reviewer who pointed out that just a little more than 100 years ago, we had a comfortable, highly sophisticated technological society that didn't depend on electricity at all, and if the power went out in the 21st century, we would have brought much of that Victorian mechanical sophistication back after fifteen years. Sure, the immediate aftermath of the power shut-off would be terrible, and lots of people would die and lots of governments would fall (mostly because food couldn't be stored and transported efficiently at first), but older folks would remember tricks like hey, we used to chop big blocks of ice from the lakes and rivers in the winter and store them in insulated buildings or caves so we'd have a way of keeping our food cold in the summer, and other stuff like that.

Plus, libraries. And historic re-enactment buffs. Once the initial panic and shooting over food died down, there would be plenty of resources for reinventing a non-electrified society. Might take a bit of time to breed enough horses to meet transportation needs, though, as I imagine a fair number of them would get eaten in the early days.

Giancarlo Esposito was the only reason I even considered watching, and I missed the pilot and was instead deluged by bad reviews, so wrote it off. It's a bad habit this TV season I have, of keeping shows on my radar just because of one actor/actress I tend to enjoy (Andre Braugher in Last Resort, which is also terrible and contrived; Terry O'Quinn in 666 Park Avenue, which is surprisingly not terrible, but is fairly slow going; if I wasn't already watching it, Amy Acker in this season of Person of Interest, though that show was top-heavy with talent to begin with).

Kodie, I'm <painfully> watching this show. Yes, totally implausible. No, your'e not being totally too optimistic. IMHO, the real 'heroes' are the militia, trying to put together society after it falls apart. Harsh reality: when society falls apart due to technology failures, it will take a brutal crackdown to get civilization back under control.

In all honesty, I have no idea of the point of this show. It has so much potential, but it fails to track down any of the relevant points. I'm going to give it two more episodes, then just give up, if it fails to inspire any sort of sanity.

I can't remember when it's on, so my attention to it is spotty. Mostly, I find the premise implausible (or what I think is the premise?): The power goes out and it's every man for himself. I think things would probably get sketchy for a while but they'd come back around eventually to an order everyone could live with and get used to in relative safety, security, and cooperation. I guess it makes for a more interesting story this way.

Am I totally too optimistic about people? Could it really just go down the tubes like that? I mean, looting does happen in power outages, but in case the power everyone assumes will come back on just stays off indefinitely, depending on how it was turned off and by whom, and people depending on certain technology suddenly doing without... that lady last week who wanted to go back to England because she had been on a business trip to the US when the power was cut (or that's the gist), no, lady, sorry, we tore apart all the boats for scrap metal. Really?

Being from the makers of Lost, a strange implausible story that still managed to compel my interest, this is just not compelling my interest. Put people on an island where the outside world assumes they are dead, and despite political problems within the group, managed to figure out a workable cooperative infrastructure without electricity. It was still a little cowboy internally and dealing with bizarre external circumstances, without which they would have just organized themselves a little town there. Should I go back to Hulu and watch Revolution for elements I'm missing, why people are not coping well - some external power who decides to deconstruct any possible resource people could have for making everything at least sort of ok without the luxury of electric power?

Is this supposed to scare us about electric cars or scare us what will happen when we rely on oil that's depleting, or what?