NEW ANALYSIS: DON'T WATCH THIS FUCKING SHOW!
Basically, this episode is devoted to describing nuclear fallout... For the generation of Americans who didn't live through 60 fucking years of Cold War and haven't ever watched a film or a TV show or read a book. So Jericho is geared towards the newborn to eight year old audience, I guess.
Last week on Jericho: Melodrama.
Begin episode: Adventure climbing! Black man is smarter than all the crackers.
Instant stupidity:
Total apocalypse seen on the horizon. Big nuke clouds, right? Situation is clear to everybody. Jericho is now all alone and must struggle to survive. Skeet to our doctor girl: Does the clinic have a fallout shelter?
Doctor Girl: *perplexed* Yes. What's going on?
Huh?
Crackers don't trust the black guy because he's educated and, therefore, suspicious. Education consists of the following: Seal the windows and doors to stop radioactive dust from getting in and rain from the radioactive cloud will also be radioactive. How the hell would a black man know that?!
Cracker: *suspicious glare* Durrr...How do you know this stuff?
Black guy: Because I was in St. Louis after 9/11!
Huh?
Cut to title sequence and "Jericho" theme song, which sounds an awful lot like the "Rescue 911" theme song, without the swelling brave hero music.
Big stupid comment from the first 10 minutes -- All of the gas stations have been abandoned so the pumps don't work.
HUH?!?!
This fucking show is killing me. You don't need people there to run the pumps. What the fuck is that? How does anyone even think to write that line of dialogue? Has the writer never ever been to a gas station in his life? WHAT THE FUCK?!
Sad Scene: Run to the basement to avoid radioactive cloud. Guy tells his dog goodbye, kisses it, then goes to his basement. Dog sits there and sadly watches him leave.
Dude -- I think there's room for the dog in your basement.
Deputy Mayor: Do you realize a nuclear bomb went off yesterday! There's a radioactive cloud heading this way!
Cracker: So? If I'm gonna die in a nuclear blast, I'm going to do it right here, playing pool with my friends.
DM: But you aren't going to die in a blast. *dramatic beat* You're going to get radiation poisoning. *describes it*
Cracker: *GASP!*
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So a couple of escaped prisoners grab our cop boys in the first episode, right? Again, it’s no secret that the world has ended. Instead of killing our cop boys (as was suggested in the pilot, but removed in the redone first episode), they just capture them, gag them, and put them in the trunk of the car. We are reminded of this when, after grabbing a girl, one of the disguised prisoners opens the trunk and says to the seemingly unconscious, gagged and bound cops: Make a sound and you die.
This is said to them after prisoner number two has already taken the girl far from the car. So he’s just warned the cops to not make a sound in an empty car in a field far away from our damsel in distress. What? So they don’t disturb the birds or something?
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Hot deaf girl scene!
Deaf Girl: *Deaf girl retard talk amounting to “hello” and the damsel in distress’s name*
Disguised Prisoner: *two-for-one special rape face*
Deaf Girl: *not at all suspicious to see an unfamiliar face in her population 5000 Jericho sheriff’s uniform*
Kids…a town of 5000. The police force is seven guys. That deaf girl has seen every cop in town about one million times in her life. So a stranger, in uniform, showing up on your doorstep? That’s whip out the shotgun time.
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Situation -- The vent fan in the shelter’s not working. It needs a new belt.
Skeet’s New Girl Interest: It needs a fanbelt. Any mid century American car will do.
Mid century American car? Who talks like that? Hey, I own a mid century American car! Oh, wait, no, that’s a car that’s 56 years old. Let’s just pop right out there and find a 57 Chevy because the cloud’s coming in less than 30 minutes.
My Acura’s 1990. I’m going to refer to it from now on as a late century Japanese car.
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Deaf Girl Adventure Scene. She’s able to follow and participate fully in a conversation even when she’s not looking at the people talking.
Damsel in distress distracts prisoners long enough to grab a display case gun and THREE of the six bullets in the case. Because if you’re going to shoot your way to freedom, you don’t want to have too many bullets weighing you down.
Damsel in distress, sneaking out of the second floor window, casually jumps one story and lands on her feet without any sign of trouble. The jump is the most artificial and clumsy stunt I’ve seen. She just sort of hops off the roof and plops down on the ground with a very small half-roll forward onto her knees and a polite little “Oof.” I don’t know…that’s a bit of a jump.
The shootout is so stupid I can’t even begin to describe it. The damsel and the prisoner are ten feet from each other, guns drawn, and the prisoner cracks off about a half dozen shots to her right trying to shoot Skeet in the far distance while the damsel just stands there, gun aimed, waiting for him to finish squeezing off those shots.
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Things not to do: Black guy gets a lengthy message over the ham radio in Morse code. He copies it down. It is NOT shown to us, and he lies about receiving it. “I can’t get this old thing to work.”
Look – that’s fucking cheap writing. You don’t do that. You don’t build suspense that way. It’s not how things work. It’s write by numbers bullshit. It’s how you write a script when you’re too stupid to develop characters or plot.
To develop our characters, we are constantly having people ask them how they learned to do whatever they are doing. The reply is almost always “I knew a guy once” or stuff like the St. Louis 9/11 routine.
In this episode, four characters are questioned on how they learned their little tricks, all with non-answer replies. It is possible that there is no script for this show.
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Blow up the entrance to the mine.
All clear!
*contact*
*BOOM*
Multiple screen cut showing the explosion. About a dozen of them. Cut to close up, to medium shot, to long shot, to side shot, looking up, looking down, closer in, a little bit out, the other side. Cut-cut-cut-cut.
