Episode 3: Four Horsemen
Broadcast date: 28 November, 2007
Broadcast time: 20h31
Broadcaster: SABC3
According to a caption, the episode begins 18 hours after the bombs had exploded.
Robert Hawkins is shown donning a yellow NBC suit and gas mask. Stepping out into the rain, he attends to a cache of assault rifles and other supplies, moving a single barrel from a storage unit to a large U-Haul rental truck. The truck bears Kansas license plate KVJ 572.
At the Richmond farm, Stanley finally shows up, to his sister's relief. He tells Jake about seeing a group of tanks headed west on Interstate 70 toward Denver, Colorado, but he also reveals that he had to trek for twenty minutes through the rain, potentially exposing himself to a high dose of radiation.
Meanwhile, one of the citizens who took refuge in the salt mine begins to act restless: Scott Rennie, a co-worker and friend of Heather, suffers a claustrophobic panic attack. Gray and his friend Shep try to calm him down as he pleads to be let outside.
The rain clears, and people begin to come out of the shelters. Jake and a team of firefighters breach the blocked opening of the mine and bring out the survivors. Heather discovers that Scott is dead from an apparent heart attack, but begins to suspect foul play and begs Shep for more information. Jake and Bonnie are glad to find that Stanley has apparently suffered no ill effects from being caught in the rain.
With news of the tanks heading toward Denver, and new information being scarce, Jake devises a plan to send out parties in all four directions to try establish contact with any survivors. Gray half-jokingly calls the scouts The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Their planning is temporarily interrupted as the satellite television in the local bar receives a weak signal from a Mandarin Chinese news program that reveals some of the extent of the nuclear explosions in the United States.
A map graphic behind the broadcaster bears red circles marking the cities of Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco, what appears through the static to be Seattle, and either New York City or Philadelphia. After a few seconds, the signal is lost.
Before Gray leaves, he criticizes Mayor Green in front of the others, accusing him of not doing everything he could to anticipate the crisis. In response, the mayor leads him to a private room where he immediately sucker-punches Gray, angrily admonishing him that the people need them to lead, not squabble.
Meanwhile, Heather discovers a letter left to her by Shep, who confesses that Scott did have a heart attack but that he and Gray did nothing to get him medical attention, allowing him to die in the mine. Shep heads out with the others looking for help.
On the way to Wichita, Kansas, Jake encounters an abandoned Boeing 757 airliner that apparently made an emergency landing on the highway.
The plane landed without suffering significant visible damage and deployed its emergency evacuation slides, but the passengers are not to be found. Nearby is the wreckage of a regional jet, which crashed with a presumable loss of all passengers and crew. Jake retrieves the cockpit voice recorder from the crashed plane and returns to Jericho.
At the Sheriff's Office, after the children are escorted from the room, the tape from the recorder is played. The recording reveals a desperate, chaotic situation in the air. Pilots report seeing mushroom clouds in Denver, Kansas City, and Dallas. They also report seeing military aircraft traveling at high speeds at various locations throughout the airspace over the country.
All communication with air traffic control has been lost, and planes are flying without guidance as their fuel supplies dwindle. Some pilots decide to attempt landings on highways and in fields. The tape cuts off as the pilots of the commuter plane realize that they will crash. However, Jake discovers that Emily's fiancé, feared dead, may have survived, as part of the transmission reveals that his plane made a successful emergency landing in a field in Nebraska.
With the town's remaining stocks of meat about to spoil, a cookout is held in the streets of Jericho. Robert Hawkins and his family are absent from the event. His wife tells him that their children would like to attend, but Hawkins vetoes the idea saying, "We're not ready," and continues to build a cinder block wall in his basement, apparently to hide materials he retrieved from the storage unit.
At the cookout, a reflective Mayor Green poignantly observes that this may be the last time they will see the town in such a mood.
The episode ends on a high note as Dale finds a shipment of supplies near town, on a train that had been abandoned by its crew. The train had collided with a car that is still dangling from the locomotive.
Source:
wikipedia