After the missiles we saw in Federal Response head into the night, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) goes off above Jericho (in all likelihood, above Denver, but it looked like it was above Jericho) and knocks out all the electronic equipment in town, which makes for a big mess. Two weeks later and the town is on the verge of lawlessness, mostly because there isn’t much law left.
Jake has a run-in with a mysterious personality (Clayne Crawford) from his past, who doesn’t like it when confronted in Bailey’s, and turns the tables on Jake and his mom by taking off with some horses from their stable. It also turns out that they took off with some of the supplies from the train that stopped outside of town, so the grocery store isn’t likely to get any more provisions any time soon.
While Stanley appears to be on the edge of a new relationship with IRS nutjob Mimi, who is now looking for a place to stay. Looking for a way to ease the wall between them, she proposes that she stay at Stanley’s ranch in exchange for lowering the debt he has with the government. We’ll see how that works out.
In the meantime, Stanley discovers that his corn is infested, and when he goes to Gracie for some pesticide, she offers to give it to him – in exchange for half his crop. When he refuses, he instead goes to the Greens, and they offer to help, but they assume that he’ll want to give the corn to the town, and he refuses their help, instead opting to burn the bad corn and hope to save the good.
The only thing in town that appears to work after the EMP hit is the laptop of Mr. Hawkins, and he carelessly leaves his basement door unlocked so his daughter Allison can get inside, and she sees Jake’s passport picture up on the screen and wants to know why his computer works when no other computers in town do. He explains that it was designed to work through such a hit, and it’s given out by governments. No word on which governments, or which side he works on.
In the basement she also saw a map that show thumb tacks, presumably indicating hits. There wasn’t a shot of the Northwest or Florida, so it’s not possible to say what is there. But there were good shots of several places.
The first scan went from the East to the Midwest, and shows Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas and Denver. The second scan goes from the lower East coast to the West coast, and it also includes those cities, as well as thumb tacks in Kansas City and New Orleans (that were not there in the first view) and one in San Diego (that you couldn’t see the first time through).
When Hawkins catches her looking at his laptop, he realizes that she needs to be brought up to speed, at least on a certain level, and teaches her how to shoot a gun, which she seems to pic up pretty well.
Everyone else in town heads to Stanley’s farm and helps them pick the good corn before the worms infest it – no strings attached. And Jake’s family gets their horses back too, though he gets an ominous warning from his old trouble-making friend, who says “he will come looking for me, and he’ll come looking for you, too”. No idea who that is.
