Jericho (2006 TV series)/Headscratchers


 * There's obviously a teenage girl (Skylar) in town who is holding unsupervised parties at her house after the bombs go off, and not a single adult takes her in or assumes the responsibility of looking after her. And she's been sleeping with Dale for months and isn't pregnant?
 * Teenagers aren't necessarily stupid, and condoms last a long time. Why should Skylar be pregnant, again?
 * It's implied that people offered, and she turned them down. Also, she's just about the least of the town's problems.
 * They're always going on about the shortage of fuel to run the generator in Jericho, but there's ALWAYS a car with a tank full of gas to go out in.
 * Bombs only went off in about 20 major urban areas - and not even in every single state! There should be plenty of towns and local governments in contact!
 * Fallout. This troper was dismayed to learn that the Modesto Bee was the biggest paper in California, meaning his town was probably wiped out after San Francisco got hit.
 * The EMP effectively destroyed all but the specifically designed communication equipment (like Hawkins' laptop). Those governments don't even have the ability to phone the building next door, let alone tell anyone higher what's going on.
 * The bombs went off BEFORE the harvest, but they're short on food even after the harvest... in the middle of the breadbasket of America, where they grow food for in excess of a a half-billion people (they don't just feed the USA, but export the food, too), a good number of are dead now and the harvest wasn't shipped out anyway. That's like starving to death locked in a fully-stocked supermarket.
 * Jericho has plenty of crops. The people who are starving are from towns that have no farmland, like New Bern.
 * Actually the lack of food in Jericho was an important plot point in not having enough to feed the small group of refugees.
 * April should have known the pregnancy wasn't going well - after several months she was barely showing, if ever at all.
 * Mimi worked for the government and there's not a single living person/friend/relative/distant acquaintance left in the United States who she may have known and could contact?
 * The communications networks are down. All of them. That's kind of the point of the show.
 * When the United States has been attacked, don't you think you'd get your rival for mayor involved with the town government instead of ignoring them and letting them paint you as the bad guy?
 * The state of Texas sure not only declared itself independent awfully quickly, but they repainted their planes and got an embassy set up in Cheyenne in less than a year.
 * It's Texas. They've been waiting for this.
 * Why the Republic of Texas move its seat of government from Austin to San Antonio? Austin already has all the facilities and infrastructure for running the whole state-turned-nation. San Antonio would require some major work to be turned into a capital. The only reason to move to San Antonio is the abundance of military bases there, which might indicate a military government, but that doesn't seem to be the case at the end of season 2.
 * Branching off of the above, how is the ASA able to provide all of its soldiers the appropriate flag patches, it's government buildings their new flags, its schools new text books and set up diplomatic relations with foreign countries in the space of six months?
 * The ASA does seem unusually progressed as noted, particularly given the likely state of the industrial capacity for making all of the above. It's not complete however, as Major Beck's uniform still has "US Army" on the chest for about half of season 2 before switching to "AS Army" later on.
 * It's said repeatedly that the bombs detonated were 20-kiloton nuclear warheads. That's about the same size as the Trinity test, or the Fat Man bomb detonated over Nagasaki. However, checking this against the data provided at the High Yield Detonation Effects Simulator reveals that a 20-kiloton detonation (particularly if set off near the ground rather than an airburst) wouldn't even dent a wall over 2 miles out. Many of the cities are quite a bit larger than 4 miles in diameter. While the city would certainly cease being livable due to riots, lack of power, lack of food etc, the city wouldn't be "gone." It bugs me that "nuke" automatically means "full size superweapon" without actually understanding what yield numbers mean.
 * It's said on at least one occasion that the bombs were "high yield."
 * How is it so many soldiers "turned coat" and joined the AS military? Country and duty and patriotism is almost a prerequisite to joining the army, and a lot of stock is put into serving your country once you're in the military. I have a hard time believing so many soldiers, like Major Beck, would all of a sudden decide the Allied States is their boss and refer to the US as a "foreign nation".
 * Why even have "John Smith" doing what he did? He could just as easily have been a J&R employee, deep cover mole, instead of the man who helped precipitate the worst disaster in world history. And there's still the obvious question of why it is his interests coincided so neatly with Valente's in using the nukes to vastly rearrange the power structure in the USA.
 * The season 3 comic reveals that John Smith is a former J&R employee who saw how the company and its contractors were insinuating themselves deeper and deeper into the US government, and that it's dealings were very suspect. He put a bunch of Raven Wood employees on leave because of PTSD, drug use and fighting, only to have them kill his wife and put him in the hospital. When he realized that they had no oversight, and when he's diagnosed with cancer, he decided to put into motion the decapitation of the US government. He just didn't count on J&R and the ASA. That's why he planned to use the nuke meant for Colombus in Cheyenne. Velente and Tomarchio were allowing J&R to do things that were technically illegal - like take over the disposal of former USSR nuclear material from the military - and Valente established a CIA task force to track down Smith and his terrorist cells and keep them from being held accountable. It's possible that Smith's plan would have worked if all his bombs had been in position. As it was, Colombus and New York escaped destruction and Lawrence, Kansas, was destroyed instead of any number of more likely targets.
 * Still, it seems like Smith's plan fits the very definition of overkill.
 * Indeed it does. It's given no subtle treatment that he's basically insane for thinking that way.
 * And who caused the EMP? I currently suspect J&R because shattering the US communications networks would slow revelations about the conspiracy they're engaged in to cover up their deep involvement with covert ops specialists as well as attempting to seize power in the USA's remnants.
 * in episode four, the electricity in the clinic runs out. What this troper wants to know is, what the heck kind of clinic only has one bag valve mask?? A big deal is made about having only one (though it was called a hand pump ventilator in the episode), but most ambulances have at least two. Did I miss something??
 * It's a small farming community that doesn't even have a Costco.
 * Early in the show Chineese (and apparently Germans too) drop some supplies and, that's the last we hear of involvement of foreign countries. Why? Was that a token effort to clear their conscience?
 * There's the sheer scale of the relief efforts required. The East and West coasts of the US would require the largest relief effort in human history just to keep them above anarchy so the much less populous American heartland is obviously going to get the short end. The Midwest has a lot of open land that escaped fallout and ready access to food from the farms so humanitarian aid there isn't so urgently needed. Besides that, the Allied States of America, the Independent Republic of Texas and the United States of America all vying for sovereignty would complicate the issue. A civil war on the horizon, leading to UN peacekeepers operating in the US, would make it difficult to approach humanitarian aid (does China send aid shipments to the USA and risk the displeasure of the ASA? Do they send shipments to the ASA and risk them collapsing to a begrudging US market in the end?).