Jericho

So I'm bit disturbed by the reappearance of post-apocalyptic themes in pop-culture this year. There was a brief, shining moment between the fall of the Berlin wall & collapse of the Soviet Union and today, where all those nuclear nightmares I'd developed after years of gloom and doom SF in the 70's were just bad memories. Now, thanks to global terrorism, the lunacy of N. Korea's "Dear Leader" and an administration that can't even pronounce nuclear, let alone reassure me that they're on top of the issue, it seems those old bad thoughts are making a comeback.

Heroes on NBC has a scattered group of people discovering that they have super-human abilities and will have to work together to avert the disaster that one of them is able to foresee. So far, I'm enjoying the hell out of this one. Interesting characters with cool powers and the overriding mystery of who's going to blow up New York and why… there are enough interesting twists to keep me coming back so far.

But Jericho is the one that has surprised me. This one is true post-apocalyptic fiction, as the bombs are dropping almost before the first commercial break, and everything that follows takes place in the aftermath of the mysterious attack.

There have been several chilling moments so far, as in the opening episode when one of the teens in town listens to the message his mother left on their answering machine, only to hear it cut off as the bomb drops on her. When you find out a short while later that she was in Atlanta, and not Denver, as we've been led to expect, suddenly the picture gets a whole lot more disturbing.

Last week's episode, "Federal Response", was even more disturbing, with the remnants of the government stirring from the ashes and calling everything that the people of Jericho have assumed into question. I got literal chills in the final few minutes, when they reveal the true meaning of the episode's title and we realize the extent of Federal Response in a post-apocalyptic US.

I honestly didn't think I'd stick around for this one. The themes are ones I'd rather dabble in than subject myself to as a weekly diet of "what do we do now that the world is gone?" But they've mimicked that Lost dynamic, with the central mystery of who blew up their world, and characters with dark, potentially dangerous pasts and made this story much more interesting than I expected.

This week's episode was less about chills and more simply telling the story. I felt a bit of a disconnect as they jumped the timeline up a couple of weeks (we've been following the story in incremental moments and, several episodes in prior to this week, less than a week had passed — to jump ahead two weeks was kind of jarring from a storytelling perspective). But I'm sticking around for this one, just to see where they're going to go with it. I have a feeling there are some dark and interesting moments coming up.