WARNING: If you missed this episode, head over to CBS’s Innertube and watch it now. Otherwise, we’re getting ready to spoil it all to hell for you.
So we’re four days after the bombs have dropped and one day after the fallout has cleared; people are finally starting to run out of gas, and the attempts to gather more are the major goings-on in the background of this episode.
Eric and his wife continue to have their problems; he pisses her off by having a beer at the bar rather than coming to help her at the clinic, then when he runs around town to get gas to power the clinic’s generators but is beaten to the punch by brother Jake (who, I swear, I hear someone call Jimmy this episode), she basically says, “Yeah, whatever.” So he promptly turns around and – figuratively speaking – spits in the face of her profession as a saver of lives by allowing the out-of-towner with radiation poisoning to have a drug administered that leads to his death. Hopefully, these two will just cut the ties that bind sooner than later and be done with it. Oh, and about the aforementioned out-of-towner, it was a little odd that Gail (Jake and Eric’s mom) seemed to latch onto the task of caring for him so adamantly; I’m wondering if there’s some reason for that.
The ongoing saga of Robert Hawkins and his family is unfolding too slowly for my liking; he’s become progressively more unsympathetic with each episode. In fact, he’s barely the same guy we met in the first episode. Since arriving in town, he’s quickly gone from Mr. Gung Ho to Mr. I-Don’t-Think-So. Obviously, he knows more than he’s willing to reveal – as further evidenced by the fact that he turned out to know the guy with radiation poisoning – but as a character, I wish they’d write him more consistently.
There’s a throwaway line in the episode that I really liked, where Jake and Stanley are trying to figure out who’s going to put the gas in the steel tank, and one of them says, “Remember those pacts we made to live to be a hundred?” It’s about time they once again touched on the fact that these guys have been friends for years upon years. (It was indicated when Jake first returned to Jericho.) I also wish they’d focus more the pairing of Jake and Heather, as we saw a bit of tonight; the flirtation between Skeet Ulrich and Sprague Grayden is nice and realistic.
Additional observations:
* Mark my words, Mayor Green’s cough is a death rattle.
* That paranoid deputy who’s suggesting that the tanks spotted last episode might be Chinese or Korean? He’s gonna end up killing somebody.
* The guy at the gas station being concerned about the fact that his bosses might show up and get mad that he’s given away the fuel was just silly.
* And as far as the complete stupidity of the rich teenagers having a big-ass party…well, I’ve made my annoyance of this subplot pretty clear. To paraphrase “Say Anything,” bitches stay with bitches, and, hey, what do you know? The bomb went off, and their mutant genes DID still form the same cliques!
I was legitimately surprised when Jake led the townsfolk to where the 20 sick people were, only to find them all dead. That was dark. But the way-too-motivational speech by Mayor Green took away any edge it had. Talk about getting CBS’ed.
