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This week we get a few more tantalizing pieces of an interesting plot and then more mush.  I could not have been more disappointed in the character elements of this episode.  Yes, the bacon is sizzling with Robert Hawkins and the revelation that the new president is changing the history textbooks.  Yes, it was fairly suspenseful when they were trying to download the office computers. Yes, it was exciting when Jake and Chavez fake fight to slip each other notes and keys.  Yes, very amusing that the reporter mysteriously dies without giving away Jake and Robert. But then Mimi can’t mourn her missing wedding guests?  NOOOOOO!!!! 

Jake and Eric are ready to tar and feather New Bern over the loss of their father, but Mimi can’t have more than last season’s one moment of grief over her own losses?  When Bonnie and Stanley argue whether to tell her they did not find any living relatives, the show had actually built up to a poignant moment and then they totally mush, mush, mushed it.  I love Mimi’s strumpet personality, but this just crosses the line into outright producer La La Land.  It reminds me of that terrible moment in *Volcano* when the female scientist loses her best friend to the lava flow and all she does is get out of the hole, throw her helmet, mildly curse and say she didn’t get the data she needed.  The moment was terrible not because a good woman died in the middle of a natural tragedy, but because that was the moment I decided never to spend seven dollars on a movie ticket again. Four bucks at a matinee, maybe, if the movie has an Oscar nomination.  Anyway, you have to give actress Alicia Coppola a few brownie points for managing to still make Mimi likable despite the horrendous cop out the script took by having her character blow off the horrific death of every soul she knew and cared for before the bombs.  For one brief moment I thought perhaps she would grapple with the spiritual world, that she was going to say, “It’s okay.  They are here.  I can feel them all around me and in the memories I keep.  I know my mother sees you, loves you.  I know my father’s giving you his blessing.” INSTEAD, she says, “It’s okay.  My family is here. You’re my family.” If the writers had just given her another moment of blatant grief as they did in season one, I think I could have loved this episode.  Now I can only see Stanley and Mimi as comic relief.  They are funny, just not human.  But then this isn’t a story about people from Kansas who are fighting for survival; it’s about how people from Beverly Hills with big pocket books see the world.  I guess they would be okay having their whole family annihilated if they end up with a hottie like Brad Beyer and a great view of Montana that is supposed to be Kansas.

I also thought the storyline with the reporter went a little lame.  Yes, he’s not printing the truth.  That wasn’t the big “OH NO!” moment I believe the producers intended.  Most people hear the media with a squint.  Since nobody actually believes what reporters say anymore, the big reveal that a Pulitzer Prize winner was okay with being the new President’s lapdog didn’t exactly come as a shock.  I think they intended this to be a moment of outrage and instead it was a moment of irony.

You know, during the first season of *LOST,* I couldn’t get my mind off of the plot or the characters.  One time, I fell asleep reading my three-year-old a bedtime story and I kept talking.  When I woke up, my little boy was staring at me and I realized I was talking about an argument between Jack and John Lock. That’s the huge power of *LOST*.  With *Jericho* I find myself forgetting that I am watching it while I am watching it.  I kept picking up the phone to vote for Jason Castro, contestant 11 on *American Idol*.  I had watched him the hour before and now kept thinking of the singers rather than this new episode. But then I remembered I needed to pay attention to *Jericho* for the sake of the review.  I am just getting the idea that the producers have started the rush to the end and it is very hard to care about the characters when they are moving into position to jump the shark. This is a tragedy.  The tremendous concept and potential for this show is spluttering across the airwaves like the men’s figure skaters of the 1992 Albertville Olympics. Remember when they all fell on the quad? 

I must say that I do love Major Beck’s character. (He may not be Amish, but at least he’s not another white Presbyterian.) The chill felt when Ravenwood arrived came from Esai Morales’ perfect reaction.  You just have this feeling that he’s a good guy and will do what is right in the end, even if it means defying the new party leadership.  I also have to say I like the new jargon the writers are delivering.  The Blue Line and The Allied States of America create a believable tie-in with the world we know, at least for those of us who see The Blue Line on a regular basis.  The saving moment of this week’s show came with the flinching of the crowd during the gun salute.  I thought this moment powerfully demonstrated the trauma the town had gone through and the edginess of these survivors.  It was a real moment in the midst of pat answers and confusing chases.  It was a small moment, but served to remind us how our reaction to the world would change should war ever ravage the Midwest.  Isn’t that really why we love disaster shows?  To dive into our own soul and challenge ourselves with the question: How would I change if I faced the worst?

Despite my pitiful enjoyment of disasters, I’m not looking forward to next week.  I really wanted to see the epidemic episode delivered last season when they were presumably still in the midst of their winter.  Since they are all wearing skimpy tops and t-shirts, I am assuming they are back to summer in Kansas.  In real life, we get the flu in winter. When I went in to get Tamiflu for Gideon last week, after he tested positive for Influenza A and B and Strep throat, Wal Mart only had three doses left. They filled the partial prescription and I had to come back the next day after the truck arrived to get the rest.  If twenty-three American cities had been bombed that night, Gideon would have died within that week.  That is why our country is so vulnerable right now.  Sure “The Hudson River Valley Virus” sounds very clever, but the population of Jericho would not have made it this long without the normal flu knocking out half the population.  Then, without antibiotics, Strep throat would kill off most of the people that were left.  I am sure that next week, after I’ve seen the next episode, I will be writing that twenty years ago *Little House On The Prairie* did a better job covering this particular survival topic.  How sad.

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