Monday night at 9 p.m. central time, the lights went out around the world – at least on NBC’s much anticipated new drama, Revolution. The premise is that “an event” caused a global black-out of all technology, and all the power mysteriously disappeared for everything from standard batteries, to cars left stranded on the highway, to your standard electricity starved appliances in your home.

While we at Global Data Vault – specialists in disaster recovery — are uniquely interested in the actual apocalyptic “event” precluding much of the drama that then unfolded in the pilot episode, sadly the show was ala J.J. Abrams, more action than storyline and glosses over the meat of the issue – at least on day one.

The highlights of the pre-episode were accurately captured in the many promotional trailers, with only a few predictable extra steps near the end. Here’s a brief (although pretty thorough) recap of what happened on the sci-fi premier of NBC’s Revolution that boasted rating of 11.6 million viewers:

(Spoiler alert)

Charlie  Matheson (played by Tracy Spiridakos) the drama’s main wanderlust character, is the young daughter of Ben (Tim Buinee), a presumable scientist who in the opening scene races home one evening declaring that a disaster is about to unfold. He’s talking with his brother Miles (Billy Burke) who lives in Chicago on the phone as the lights flicker out for the last time and planes begin to fall from the sky. Then the storyline fast-forwards abruptly 15 years to the agrarian afterworld where anarchy ensues, several militia form – and naturally one in particular searching for Ben. Charlie’s brother Danny (Graham Rogers) attempts to protect Daddy Ben from the militia headed by Captain Tom Neville (Giancarlo Esposito), but Ben is killed in the crossfire. Thankfully before the confrontation, he hands off a futuristic USB pendant to Aaron Pittman (Zak Orth), his comrade and village teacher (we later learn was pre-blackout, a big-wig at Google).

Fueled with sorrow of the loss of her father, Charlie sets off to avenge Ben’s death in search of Uncle Miles, taking with her the sort of step-mother Maggie (Anna Lise Phillips) and the not so brave Aaron. Along the way, she is befriended, and tricked by handsome boy Nate Walker (JD Pardo) who we later learn is with the militia and tasked with her elimination, yet later saves her from death before scampering out of the episode. (Most assuredly we’ll see him again.) The collective antagonists are on the quest for answers, and so the plot hopefully will thicken.

Whilst the family in arms is reacquainting themselves, Danny manages to escape from the militia temporarily, and seeks refuge in a farmhouse owned by an “algebra teacher,” Grace. (Maria Howell) However, once Danny is recaptured by the militia and exits her home, Grace plugs in her matching little futuristic USB pendant (surprise, there’s two!) and viola, she’s communicating via secret computer with another party unbeknownst to the viewers.

And here’s the (not) surprising conclusion: the head of the militia – General Monroe (David Lyons) — is none-other-than the former BFF of Uncle Miles.

One can conclude that the episodes to come will consist of again, lots of walking, fighting, and along the way piecing the puzzle together so that the earth can be restored to its previous energy levels. And perhaps the writers will throw us a bone from week to week to feed our appetite of curiosity about just how the power grid colossally failed worldwide. And if we’re really lucky, we’ll find out if all of civilization backed up their data so they can resume their previous lives and, of course, if Aaron is able to restore his stock options.

What would happen if the lights went out around the world and everything went dark? That’s the premise of the new NBC drama REVOLUTION that airs September  17^th at 10 EST. Since Disaster Recovery is right up our alley, we figure it’s a must see for our crew.

Yeah, yeah. It’s likely the whole globe won’t suddenly be devoid of all electricity, but what if – gasp — just the Internet went down? Can you even remember a time when we didn’t have the interwebs, let alone the smart phones that connect us to them 24/7. Would you panic?  Would your heart start racing as fast as any one of Go Daddy’s customers on September 10^th when all their websites and hosting went down? That was virtual pandemonium. The help center lines rang a fast busy for hours, the system was overloaded with terrorized business owners in the midst of a complete productivity meltdown that afternoon.

The Go Daddy incident (whether it was or wasn’t the work of Anonymous, Go Daddy’s claiming internal router issues) was small potatoes compared to what was unleashed recently into the nuclear defense system of Iran. Proof positive that with a more organized and well-funded effort, cyber threats to our critical infrastructure — water purifications, power generator and who knows what else — are a very real thing.

What’s known as the Stuxnet virus, which according to the New York Times, is credited as the work of American and Irsaeli governments, is a highly sophisticated computer worm set forth via a simple USB thumb drive. Stuxnet  infected the industrial software and equipment running Iran’s nucluear centrifuge system and literally damaged the machines critical to Iran’s uranium enrichment program.

Thankfully for most American’s, the Go Daddy event is the closest widespread outage they’ve ever been subjected to (and we hope ever will and that they had online databackup in play), but on Monday evening, we can all play a little “what if.” (The pilot is on the NBC website here.)

Like the girl at the end of this video, “I hope that never happens,” but we want to know, how were you effected by the Go Daddy outage and – what would you do if the power went out?