It’s the first episode, so it’s a long one, kids…
Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) arrives in Denver, Colorado, by train, then – in a parking garage neighboring the station – uncovers a car. At a glance, the car looks like it’s been under wraps for some time…and it’s confirmed when Jake drives from Denver over to his hometown of Jericho, Kansas, and gets a rousing reception from everyone he sees. He’s decidedly elusive about where he’s been, however; he tells one person he’s been playing minor-league baseball, another that he’s been in the Navy. He offers the latter explanation to his ex-girlfriend, Emily Sullivan (Ashley Scott); she’s not selling what he’s buying, but when she asks for the truth, he offers only silence. It turns out that Jake’s returned home to visit his grandfather and ask his family for money; his mother (Pamela Reed) is thrilled to see him, but he receives scorn from both his father (Gerald McRaney) and brother (Kenneth Mitchell) based on his past reputation for squandering both his money and his opportunities. Disheartened, Jake and his mom go to visit Jake’s grandfather…who, we quickly learn when they show up at a cemetary, is deceased. After the graveside visit, Jake’s ready to hit the road…so ready that even his mom can’t convince him to do otherwise; meanwhile, just as Jake’s driving out of town, a bus full of schoolkids from Jericho – chaperoned by their teacher, Mrs. Lisinski (Sprague Grayden) – are returning from a fieldtrip. Suddenly, her cell phone goes out…
…Jake’s radio goes abruptly to static…
…TV signals all over Jericho cut out…
…and, as as a couple of little children are playing outside, one of them spots a horrifying sight in the distance: a mushroom cloud, right in the general vicinity of Denver.
At this point, several different stories begin to unfold simultaneously. The bus hits a deer and crashes. Jake and another driver, both understandably distracted by the sight of a mushroom cloud in the distance, run right into each other…and Jake’s the only one that makes it out alive. Teenager Dale Turner (Erik Knudsen) finds an answering machine message from his mother…one that’s interrupted by the nuclear blast. Jake’s dad – who, by day, is Mayor Green – begins to round up the troops and maintain calm in Jericho…a Herculean task, given that everyone’s panicking, particularly the parents of the kids on the bus. He sends the sheriff and a few of his deputies out to search for the bus.
As Jake attempts to stumble back to Jericho, bearing a nasty wound on his forehead from his wreck, he comes across a pair of kids from the bus who plead with him to come back and help them. Back in town, all phone service is out and no-one’s responding on the police radio; people are on the verge of rioting and looting. We meet a new resident of the town: Robert Hawkins, a former cop from St. Louis who immediately leaps into the fray to attempt and assist the police. Mayor Green visits a local eccentric named Oliver, who has the only ham radio in town, in order to try and contact someone beyond Jericho and confirm or deny that Denver was only city to have been bombed…and, then, the power goes out all over town.
Jake makes it to the bus, where he finds that a little girl suffered major throat trauma when they crashed; he surprises both the kids and Ms. Lisinski – make that Heather – by performing an emergency tracheotomy and saving the girl’s life. Meanwhile, it looks like the sheriff has found the kids, until we realize that the bus he’s on used to be full of convicts…and is now empty; moments later, he’s shot and killed, his uniform stolen by an unseen party. D’oh! Dale finally stops listening to his mother’s answering machine message in the darkness of his house, taking it over to the Green’s house and playing it for them. “I’m so sorry, Dale,” says Mrs. Green, “I didn’t realize your mother was in Denver.” His heart-stopping reply: “She wasn’t. She was in Atlanta.”
Jake starts the bus and, even with what’s clearly a pretty bad concussion, begins to drive the kids and their chaperone back to town…not that it’s such a great place to be. Dale’s trying his best to assist his employer at the grocery store in preserving her refrigerated and frozen goods – it’s obvious he sees her as a surrogate mother – but he’s pretty much the only person doing anything noble. The townsfolk are completely freaking out, trying to full their vehicles with gas and get the hell out of town. Hawkins offers the suggestion that they use highway lights to illuminate the otherwise-dark town, and it pays off; the sudden light momentarily stuns folks into stopping their panic, but it doesn’t last. Local mayoral candidate Gray Anderson uses the moment to rally the townspeople…and demand answers and solutions from the mayor. Green tries to calm them, but he’s got no answers to their questions. He gets a reprieve when Jake pulls up with the busload of kids, and, in the wave of excitement from the crowd, the mayor asks them to place their trust in him and he’ll do his best to get them the answers they all want.
Seems like a pretty uplifting ending, right? Nah. The episode actually ends with Emily, who’s been driving to pick up her fiancee, having to stop her car when the road is filled with the bodies of fallen birds. Breathlessly, she asks, “What’s happening?”
Yeah, right, like they’re going to answer THAT in the first episode…
