Brown Jenkin said:
For ICBMs I am talking about more than Atlanta and Denver. In adition to Denver, Colorado Springs should have been hit as well and at least two clouds fairly close to each other should have been seen. Colorado Springs is probably the more important target of the two with NORAD and Air Force Comand operating out of that area. Terrorists would hit Denver, enemy military would strike Colorado Springs. If it is ICBMs then I would also expect several other clouds to be seen hitting the US ICBM launch silos and possibly Witichita as well.
I don't think Witichita is anyone's high priority, or even medium priority target. I've been there, and frankly I wouldn't waste the nuke.
As for Colorado Springs, I don't know. It could well have also been hit. We see one nuke peaking over the mountains. I don't know the geography enough to know if you could have seen two. Or, if the second one hit after the first one, the first one may have blocked view of the second one. I don't think you or I have sufficent information to conclude that you WOULD have seen two, for sure.
[quoteI am currious about this point. If it was another major power why wern't there more ICBM strikes visible. If not a ICBM power then who? There is enough 24 hour news and government leaks to those news chanels that if there were major tensions with a major power then the power would be known.[/quote]
It might have been known. We are only introduced to people who may well not care what the dispute was about. We do not see anyone who was actively watching TV, and the emergency speech had not started yet.
We as an audience should know if it is Russia/China/North Korea/Iran/etc. and that info should give an idea of how widespread the conflict likely is. If it is Russia/China then we are looking at Post-Apocolypic posibilities, if it is Iran/North Korea we are probably talking a few large cities in terrorist strikes.
I don't see why we as an audience need to know this, at this point.
If it was thousands of nukes then see above. Colorado Springs is just as visible as Denver from that distance. Given the military importance of the area far more than one should have been seen.
See response above.
Western Kansas is fairly sparcely populated but there are county seats about every 40-60 miles apart so it wouldn't take to long to reach the other poulation centers (as small as they may be 2,000-5,000 people). Given the sparcity of towns in western Kansas it is not like everyone in Western Kansas wouldn't already know where everyone else is.
I'm sure we do. We go about 30 to 45 minutes after the incident, and most of it involves people grabbing food and water, and dealing with injured people. I'm sure they know where other towns are. They just don't have communication so far with them, but are actively trying.
This goes back to the question of who the enemy is.
The main characters do not know. I think that is part of the point of the show. Something happened, it was serious, the President was about to tell people, we don't know exactly what it was, and so far in town nobody has said what it was. I think you need to deal with the possibility that people may not know, but it might also be very serious. There are several senarios I can think of that would account for that possibility.
With only one cloud it wouldn't apear that a post-apocalyptic scenareo is going on.
See above.
Wouldn't the instinct of the county government be to check in with its neighbors and see if there is word from the state level at one of them.
That was in fact the Mayor's first reaction, and the police. But communications appear to be dead (even when they had electricity). They are trying the short wave next. They were about to send police officers to the next town I think, but those officers were killed in the prisoner escape (main characters do not know this yet). Again, it's only 30 to 45 minutes into this.
Why is the entire town freaking out to the extent that they don't even trust thier neighboring towns to know they are alive?
The characters are supposed to be human beings. 30-45 minutes into what appears to be a nuclear attack, they are behaving less than perfectly rationally. The "trust" issue was not raised by people in the town. It was raised by the mysterious "ex-cop", who knows way too much and seems very competent in a crises.
Is the town so xenophobic that even thier fellow Kansasins (or whatever the word is) can't know about them?
No, in fact despite the apparent reasonableness of this stranger, they do not take his advice and do not paint over the name of their town on their police cars and are attempting to go to the next town.
Also what enemy is begining thier invasion in western Kansas? Seems like the last place an invading army would bother with.
Indeed. And the people of the town are not buying into that theory. It was just something suggested by the stranger.
We should because the President was briefing Congeress on it and it was news.
The briefing had not begone, and while the news in the background may have mentioned more specifics, I personally did not catch them nor did any main character so far as I can tell.
And the next town over in each direction that should still be there and that they have visited many times in the past.
Of course they have. Nobody said the geography is a mystery to anyone.
That better be answered soon because that should be the first concearn of the local government.
The "local government" is a Mayor and a Sherriff. And their first concern is stopping a riot and getting wounded inside and checking for radiation.
Well the unspecified military emergency is one hole.
It's not a hole. It's something that was not answered in the pilot, and that appears to be part of the point - something big has happened, suddenly, and people don't know what it was. I can think of things that could be like that, that are not necessarily terrorist related. I bet you can as well.
A xenophobic fear of known neighbors is another.
Nobody is reacting like you seem to think they are except for one person, who is a stranger to the town.
A lack of concearn over radiation, or the lack of fallout, is another.
Within 10 minutes they have geiger counters out. Why do you insist on pretending that is a lack of concern? The second episode deals with the issue. How fast did you want them to move with this issue, two seconds? I think your standards are harsher than you would accept on yourself.
The fact that for the show to have long term potential it has to play up the Lost angle and trap them in a post-apocalyptic world or it just becomes small town drama as power and communications come back up in a matter of days/weeks/months if it is not. The fact that there is only one mushroom cloud visible to achieve this post-apocalyptc scenareo.
We have only one episode to go on. I don't see how it is a plot hole that they have not revealed everything that could possibly be revealed in a single 1 hour episode, 15 minutes of which takes place before the nuke hits.
My issue with this show is that I am burned out on shows that keep posing questions but don't give answers and the probability that this is one of those shows given the evidence so far. The reason I am participating in this thread though is that the topic of a what if scenareo we have been given is an interesting one though and I find this what if scenareo fun.
All I know is the writer has it planned out for quite some time, and he seemed to have well-researched things and plotted things out and had good answers for questions posed to him. That's a heck of a lot more than most writers seem to have these days for television shows.
