Jericho: A.K.A.

[vaznetti]

Is lj really slow tonight, or is it just me?


This week's episode did something the show really needed -- revealed some information about Hawkins' mysterious past and brought him (and his family) into contact with the rest of the town, and it did a great job of it. Jake corners Hawkins and pretty much forces him to start talking -- and what a story it turns out to be, with Hawkins as an undercover CIA agent in a terrorist cell, Sarah as his handler, and the deeply suspect Thomas Valente in charge of an operation ostensibly aimed at retrieving twenty five missing nuclear weapons on US soil. I'm left with a couple questions -- is Valente just trying to take advantage of the chaos resulting from the operation's failure, or was he involved from the beginning with the conspiracy? And if so, for what purpose? I mean, you don't usually expect to find Homeland Security trying to topple the US government, at least outside of 24.

Hawkins and Jake were amazing: Hawkins building the story, and Jake's growing apprehension and horror, first at the murder and then, of course, at the bomb, which leaves him completely dumb. I was relieved that Hawkins is not in fact a bad guy, but also that Darcy has good cause to feel the way she does -- because all she knows is that he promised not to desert their family, and then did just that.

And now Hawkins is on Valente's trail, and Jake too.

And I liked the little moment between Alison and Emily -- because Emily's relationship with her father is probably the most interesting thing about her, and the parallel is not exact. And the show left us to draw it. I think this is the strength of the show, in the long run -- that it has so many characters to draw on, and they all have complicated stories, so that a little scene like that one can call up all kinds of possibilities. (In the first episodes, it was just overwhelming, but now it works.)

Mimi and the chicken was just the comic relief needed -- and had just enough seriousness to be worthwhile. I like that she gets it wrong more than half the time.

The more I think about this show, the more I hope it gets a second season -- it got off to a slow and (at least in my memory) awkward start, with a lot of characters and plotlines. But now it's built up to something really satisfying and complex.

The one thing that doesn't exactly bother me, but I do notice it, is that despite the way the lack of food is a major plotline, no one actually looks like they've gone without. No one looks like they're starving -- and more to the point, most of the time no one is trying to make the actors look like they're going hungry. I do a lot of handwaving on this point.

Comments

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really hope it gets renewed, too. I agree that this plot was actually a whole lot better than what I had feared. I like that we weren't bombed by Russia a la Red Dawn or anything stupid like that. And Hawkins is smart and interesting.

I love the mix of characters, but I have lots and lots of issues with the starvation plotline, actually. Rural people are poised to do a LOT better with food than city people. They would be doing a LOT better than they supposedly are on the show. Even with the game gone. Firstly, there would ahve been way more crops than just Stanley's.

Do you know how many apples come off a single tree? People would have them in their YARDS. We had an apple tree, a pear tree and a peach tree in ours when I was growing up in Michigan. Bushels and bushels of apples. Probably pears. People would have gardens. Our shitty little school had greenhouses attached to the biology wings. Every single person in that town would be setting up cold frames and growing tomatoes at home or something. Yeah, people need a lot of food, but a town Jericho's size surrounded by farmland would be much better off than they're showing.

food would be basic and boring, but they'd have it. Meat would be the issue. But it's Kansas, so there would probably be soybeans, oats, corn right there locally. Plus they have the salt. There would be a dairy farm and probably pigs within a couple of miles. People would have poultry. And there would be a plague of Canadian geese, just like everywhere else in the midwest.

I'm thinking of all the farm kids I went to school with in my school district, which probably had a similar population. We could easily have fed everybody and the animals with the agriculture we had plus people's gardens. And the school would have grown stuff during the winter. Plus there'd be at least one landscape greenhouse thing in town where you'd buy plants, we had one that also sold cement birdbaths and stuff. Land o'Lakes Wisconsin has TWO. Why wouldn't they be doing that? You'd have fresh veggies all year if you put that to use for survival. And you bet some of those rich folks had sunrooms in their houses, you plant a garden in there.

So, you see, I have thoughts. But I love the show.

[vaznetti]

I totally agree with you about the starvation plotline -- it doesn't make any sense at all. I guess it's supposed to be an unusually cold winter or something, but yes -- people would be growing anything they could in their living rooms. And Stanley's farm clearly has chickens, since Mimi killed one, and they've been eating the eggs. And yes, where are the pigs? or the cows?

And the town looks totally unchanged -- no one has bothered to dig up their lawn or backyard for cabbages or potatoes, or anything like that.

And actually, the town has a very small population. They should be OK.

We have five apple trees in your backyard in Oxford, so yes, I know how many apples come off an apple tree. Too many to eat. The storyline makes exactly zero sense -- there's no reason for people to be going hungry, and they don't appear to be going hungry, but they keep talking about how they're going to run out of food. And apparently this will happen any day now. It is very frustrating to me.

I love the show, but this one plotline drives me crazy!

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Yes! The food! I was driving to a friend's house the other day and there were two Canada geese 10 feet off the road on one side and two white-tail deer 10 feet off the road on the other side. Last week a confused-looking wild turkey ran down my street, and I'm in the middle of town. And the rabbits, *everywhere*. (And they haven't even mentioned fishing.)

A year or two of unrestricted hunting would severely deplete the populations, but no rural town is going to run out of game in 5-6 months, I don't think.

Jericho is one of those shows that I watch and enjoy each week, but don't think about when I'm not watching, other than to speculate about how we'd survive the situation around here. (Lots of solar energy mavens in this region -- a big plus.)

[vaznetti]

Perhaps the geese all flew into a cloud of nuclear fallout and died. Or something. But yes, the world is full of things you could eat if you needed to, especially if you happened to live in a small farming town in the middle of Kansas.

I think the whole food-shortage thing is so bizarre, but it's important to the show so I do a lot of handwaving.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the geese all flew into a cloud of nuclear fallout and died.

Oh, right. Heh. Forgot about that hand-wave. But, okay, we can say that all the deer, geese, ducks, turkeys, doves, possum, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, fish, snakes, turtles, etc. ALL DIED in the toxic rain. And then move on. ;-D

[(Anonymous)]

But not the horses or Stanley's chickens.

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

We have so many long-term power outages at our cottage in the UP that we keep talking about installing solar or wind up there just so that we don't lose entire freezers full of food all the time. It's better now than it used to be, where we'd have 7-10 days without power whenever there was a big storm. Now it's more like 1-3 days.