Jericho has jumped on the flashback episode bandwagon. It seems like almost every show on TV now has an episode that takes place sometime prior to the series premiere. Usually though, shows tend to go back a bit further than 48 hours. Of course, the episode is called “The Day Before” in spite of those 48 hours. I guess “The Two Days Before” didn’t have the same ring to it.
Not only did most of the people of Jericho have no connection to the bomb blast, most of them didn’t really do anything all that exciting during the 48 hours prior to the bombs going off. And some of the more eventful developments were ones we already knew about. For example, April had divorce papers drawn up. She already told Eric about the papers after he found them in an earlier episode though. All we really learned was the exact day that April got her papers. Not overly exciting. Other non-exciting developments included Mimi arriving in town to audit Stanley (here’s a shock, they didn’t like each other when they first met!), Emily and Roger having a fight and then reconciling and Johnston planning for a vacation!
Fortunately Jake and Hawkins provided us with some more useful information. Jake apparently has a history with Ravenwood (which admittedly was already implied). He was also involved in some sort of incident in Afghanistan or Iraq where some people died, which apparently makes it difficult to find employment as a charter pilot.
Interestingly, the Feds were on to Ravenwood’s less than legal behaviours so it is a bit odd that the government has apparently contracted Ravenwood to do work for them in the aftermath of the attacks. Granted, with the widespread chaos and devastation, the government may be desperate enough to overlook Ravenwood’s past crimes while trying to maintain order.
Crossing Ravenwood leads to unpleasant results, as Jake’s friend, Freddie, found out. But, seeing as we have had a couple episodes of Ravenwood running amok already, I doubt anyone was shocked to learn that the members of Ravenwood aren’t paragons of virtue. I do wonder if we’ll see Freddie’s wife, Anna, turn up at some point in the future. Given Jake’s promise to protect her, it seems quite likely that we will.
We’ve already seen a character linked with Hawkins turn up as a refugee. The big news on that front, and the biggest bit of information we learned from this week’s episode, is that Hawkins’ organization was seemingly behind the bombs being dropped, with the vaguely stated goal of ‘changing the world’. Knowing that they were involved doesn’t really give us any indication as to the why though. It could be some sort of misguided attempt to strengthen the United States by eliminating the old power structure and imposing their own, but if that is the case, they certainly have a lot of work to do if they want to restrengthen the country. Alternatively, they could simply be working for a terrorist organization or another country intent on eliminating the US as a world power. They could even be doing this in a misguided attempt to make the world a more peaceful place, we just don’t know.
Further clouding the issue, Hawkins was tasked with delivering one of the bombs and yet he failed to do so. Then some masked men beat up Hawkins’ lover, Sarah, and threatened to kill her if the bomb wasn’t delivered. But, from the way it was edited, Hawkins received that message only moments before the bombs went off. He had no time to deliver the package before the other bombs went off, and we’ve seen that travel was extremely difficult after the bombs went off so I don’t see him having had time to do go all the way to Columbus, Ohio and back during the nuclear fallout rainstorm. And yet, that didn’t affect Hawkins’ association with his organization, as he has still been working with them to achieve whatever their ends were. Were the guys in masks part of the organization? If so, why were they bothering with masks? And if Hawkins’ organization wanted him to deliver the bomb, why don’t they care that he didn’t? Questions that will have to be answered another week, I guess.
The unusual thing about this flashback episode is that it was so close to the bombs going off. And yet, the bombs going off couldn’t be the end of the episode, because we’d already seen that, and it wouldn’t be very climatic this time. So instead, near the end of the episode, it picked up where the last episode ended, and then went about five minutes beyond that. Roger is back, and he hasn’t been enjoying the post-apocalyptic lifestyle. Hawkins’ lover and fellow mysterious organization belonging to, Sarah is also in town and she doesn’t look overly happy. Presumably she and Hawkins will have words next week. Said words will probably be purposefully oblique to keep the audience in the dark as much as possible, but maybe will learn a factoid or two along the way.
