I did indeed end up going away for a few days on my vacation. But I’m back now. While I am feeling rather drained from all the running around and not sleeping I did over the past few days, what better way to recuperate than with some post-apocalyptic drama? Unfortunately, “One Man’s Terrorist” wasn’t all that great.
The whole situation with the refugees, which had been well-established all throughout the second half of the season, was handled rather poorly this week. There aren’t enough rations to keep everyone fed for the winter. Gray makes the difficult (and somewhat questionable) decision to evict the refugees so there’s more food for everyone else. That part was fine. Everything that came afterwards, not so much.
The refugees, told to leave town because the town can no longer afford to provide them with food/medicine/etc vow not to leave town. Instead they barricade themselves in the church basement. So instead of being forced to find their own food, they are trapped in a small space with no way to fend for themselves. Bravo.
Rather than being content with the fact the refugees basically solved the problem themselves, Gray then decided that it was very important to get the refugees out of the basement and back to a drain on the town.
And then there was the whole bit with Roger accidentally shooting Gray (with Gray’s own gun). Roger was all ‘whoops’ but then when Gray complained to Jake that it wasn’t an accident, all of the sudden it was an impromptu hostage situation. I guess Roger felt that the best way to help the refugees was to not only put Gray’s life in danger, but Emily’s as well.
The way Gail resolved whole stand-off and the refugee problem at the same time was well-intentioned but it didn’t come off very well. I don’t know if it was the acting, or the fact that other than Gail, we just had a bunch of random extras during her big speech or what, but it came off as rather forced.
Gail’s solution of just having people share their rations has its own problems. The town has been struggling for weeks to stretch their rations as far as possible yet apparently the three Greens have been getting enough surplus in the ration department to be able to feed two more people. So it turns out that they apparently had more than enough rations all along, they just did a terrible job of divvying them up.
Hawkins’ quest to track down whoever Sarah was freelancing for is interesting. We still don’t actually know what organization Hawkins himself was working for, or what their ultimate goal is, but maybe something in Hawkins’ dealings with this other group will give us at least a little information.
I must say though, it did seem rather stupid of Hawkins to make a big poster of the organization. It was particularly stupid of him to include a picture of Sarah with a big red X drawn through it. Considering Hawkins has a secure laptop which he could use to keep track of this information, the poster seems to exist only to be found by someone else at a later time. Sloppy work, Hawkins.
One assumes there will be some additional investigating of Hawkins given the news report Jimmy heard at the end of this week’s episode. Of course, the tidbit about the bombers having authentic looking FBI badges in and of itself shouldn’t be enough to get Hawkins in any real trouble. After all real FBI agents tend to have authentic FBI badges too and it’s not like the people of Jericho have any way of getting Hawkins’ badge tested for authenticity. But one assumes there will be a negative impact on Hawkins credibility. Perhaps it will teach Hawkins to stop acting suspiciously all the time.
This week, for the first time since the second half of the season kicked off, felt like a bit of a misstep. Hopefully things will get back on track next week.
