Be Excellent To Each Other

This just premiered on Sky 1 today. Probably shown a while back on American telly.

Big budget sf series that hopefully doesn't go down the Terra Firma route of being shit.

Some mildly annoying characters, but mostly good ones, and a good set up from the first couple of episodes.

Basic story premise is that all electricity goes off in the entire world, and what happens to the world. Some people seemed to know this was going to happen, but not with enough time to save too much... but they did save a little.

Anyone else watch it? First two episodes were good, and threw enough out there to get me into it.

We watched most of the first batch of US episodes (10) then we sort of stopped. My wife is now out most nights doing some sort of pregnancy related exercise (Yoga etc) and there just isn’t the hours in the day.

Good show though enjoyed it and need to pick it up again. The 2nd batch of episodes has just started in the US and there will be 20 in all for S1.

Yep, it's just restarted in the US for Season 1B.
I've been enjoying it a lot - this kind of SciFi is right up my street anyway (think Jericho, Jeremiah etc) but my GF really likes it too. It does have a similar feel to Terra Nova, but this is noticably better and does have a few "Didn't expect that!" moments.

Well worth a look IMO

Will be watching this with my eldest to see if it's any good. Both episodes on the planner at the moment.

Malc

Bugger. I wanted to watch this. I'll look out for repeats.

According to the sky+ app it's on again tonight at 21:00 and 22:00

Malc

And Monday, Tuesday and Thursday too.

Malc

Cheers. Hopefully I can catch one of those!

That’s my only concern, my wife loves this show as well. She also liked Jericho and it was her first experience of a show cancellation. Yesterday my sister in law was excitedly telling me how great Jericho was. I have no idea where she was watching it. I had to let her down gently and tell her it had been cancelled more or less after S1.

Ooooh, cool. I loved S1 of Jericho (S2 didn't exist, frankly), so if this is like that and not like a shit Terra Nova, this should be good.

Struggling to imagine a "shit Terra Nova"

Yeah, it's tautological, really.

Watched this last night, it was very Jericho wasn't it?

Malc

This has potential. What gives it a very big dark mark however is that 15 minutes into episode 2 they are still listing production credits.

That's cos they don't start the credits until 14 minutes in.

Anyway - seen 3 episodes, like it. Will be watching more.

Well it's fucking ridiculous, is what.

You're a FUCKING apologist for this late credits mess

Do they put content-specific hashtags on the screen like in Community? That makes me want to kill.

Not on the sky1 showing. Not as appalling as the late credits which Mr Chris somehow thinks should be the norm in all programmes now.

Flashpoint (Canadian police drama) was another one that really liked late credits. 15 minutes into a 42 minute episode wasn't unheard of, and I'm sure there would have been a 5 minute ad break before then too.

Not impressed with it so far.

I've seen 4 or 5 episodes. Not sure what to think. I'm instantly against the show simply because of the premise that all electricity stopped working. Had they chosen a more plausible apocalypse reason, then I'd be more interested. Also: I initially hated the main girl, but now I think she's alright. I definitely hate her brother.

Without spoiling things, they do explain the power outage (in part) in later episodes and its slightly less implausible than it first seems.

Also, after 15 years of not electricity, we noted

*All their teeth are fantastic
*All their clothes are modern
*All their clothes are clean/new.
* I want to shoot the leading lady/girl


I am guessing that no electricity throws us back to the dark ages/ Victorian times, why on earth is steam power not back?

Good point.
While it would obviously work, how easy would it be to build working steam engines again as opposed to raiding a museum.
Aside from the knowledge which may not be available, you'd need to build a foundry from scratch.....

I'm pretty sure an electric bostness wouldn't make all the existing foundries explode.

I know the theory and could probably give it a good go, and I know my dad could build one from scratch.

You'd have to hark back to the old ways of producing the raw materials and the tools you'd need, though.

But it would make them all stop working. Even if they use fossil fuels for heat, there will be electricity needed to make them run.

How many foundries are there in the UK?
Infact if the electrics went out, then surely we're completely screwed. We'd actually be worse off than medieval people, simply because very, very few people know how to be a blacksmith and make a forge. Also: Most accessible Iron would be used up, so we'd have to smelt down old things.

Also: If, as is present in the show, 'electricity stops working', what does that mean for natural phenomena like lightning, static electricity, the magnetosphere?

This is what I sometimes think about in the context of nuclear apocolypse or whatever - peopkle's knowledge is so specialised now (assuming people even have any knowledge to start with) that it wouddl be vanishingly unlikely that there would be many people in any given group of survivors who would be able to do even the most basic things, let alone start making metal.

Us Conrnish boys would get things up and running seeing as how we invented steam power. Further interesting trivia: In HayonWye when I was there the time before last, a man in a bookshop told me books on traditional blacksmithing were rare and valuable as they were so popular. We also met a man who described himself as a "freelance adventurer" in the Rohan shop.

I have recorded episode one, and then forgot about any others so I might have to Skyplayer it later.

Best thing you could do is raid the library for technical books on the industrial revolution ASAP.

It's still a long way from being able to build steam engines though.
It took 14 years to build a Peppercorn train, *with* modern technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60163_Tornado

Trains are huge, though, and would be fairly useless.

Traction engines are simpler and smaller.

I don't know much about combustion engines, but do you actually need electricity for diesel and petrol engines? You only need spark plugs, right, and they're only to ignite... So can you not just use a taper or something?



There's a train in the show

Building a cornish pumping engine would be fairly trivial from scratch, if inefficient. Converting it to make stuff move should be easy to do, as well. I daresay I could probably build one from a varity of stuff, or at least get someone to weld stuff where I tell them to.

With an electric welder?

YOU'RE NOT CORNISH

Ahem.

Yes - petrol cars would need spark plugs, but you can run engines on compression alone.

Nitro RC cars do it, and old tractors like Marshalls do it too.

I done a picture. You'd have to stick a pressure release valve in, and connect it to something, but it might work. Steam rises, turning the wheel attached to a spindle going outside and Boomshakalaka! it's the torque of the town.

I'm not that convinced it was a county-wide group effort.

I'd think food would be a bigger problem, to be honest. Modern pesticides would vanish, and parasites are so bloody resilient these days that they'd just destroy all the crops.

That would explode.

Yes, no pressure valve/outlet.

I done an edit just now, as I uploaded on my phone and typed on the computer. I added a joke in there, too.

That, once again, is the conspiracy at work.

You're my Hero

Excellent.

We could eat meat. And steal other people's food. In the Steam Tank I could design and build.

I know.

If I were being picky then I'd tell you that your engine still wouldn't work as you've got no way of adding water to it.