OMG that's even more stupid! Apparently EMPs take out modern firearms somehow. It would take hundreds of years most likely for people to run out of ammo in the U.S. Then they would run out only if people run out of brass and people who knew how to reload cartridges. That's just too dumb for me to even suspend a sense of disbelief.
I'm not sure what explanation the show is going with... the 4-minute preview teases the fact that some people have the ability to "turn the lights back on".
But assuming this is an outright, blatant copy of the story in S.M. Stirling's
Dies the Fire and its sequels, "The Change" does NOT happen due to an EM Pulse or anything man-made.
SPOILERS FOR THE NOVELS AHEAD! TURN BACK NOW IF YOU'RE AVOIDING SPOILERS FOR THE S.M. STIRLING NOVELS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
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In the books, "The Change" happens when the island of Nantucket is suddenly and without warning thrust BACKWARD in time centuries into the past due to some weird localized time-space disruption. This "Change" also renders ALL man-made technology from the invention of gunpowder forward inoperable. It doesn't just make electrical devices stop working, it also prevents the functioning of all complex chemical reactions, including, but not limited to, gunpowder, explosives, and internal combustion engines. Basically, the Human race ends up stripped of ALL technology developed in the last 600-700 years, thrusting us back to the Middle Ages.
When the reasons behind "The Change" are finally revealed in one of the books, it's a rather innovative, but shocking, plot twist. It turns out that the Powers That Be (basically, S.M. Stirling's version of the Gods) IMPOSED "The Change" on Mankind, because they felt that we lacked the maturity and wisdom necessary to use our technology appropriately. So, they stripped us of it until we grow up, basically.
END SPOILERS
Don't know if that's where the TV series is taking the story, since ABC's parent company is Disney. Not sure how Disney would feel about that particular plot twist. Also, there's the possibility that the show's creators have what they consider to be a "better" idea of what to reveal there.
In the meantime, when S.M. Stirling announced at the 2009 Dragon*Con that a TV series adaptation of the "Emberverse"/"Change World" novels was in the works, it was SONY that was the interested party that he was in talks with, not Bad Robot Productions and ABC/Disney. Also, I've now seen interviews in
Entertainment Weekly with Abrams and Kripke, and neither one acknowledges Stirling or his novels. So now, I'm just going to sit back and wait for S.M. Stirling to release a statement. I fully expect NBC and Abrams, et al, will get sued for "borrowing" so heavily from those novels.
opcorn
