Logan's Run: The Day After [spoilers in the OP]

Cafe Society
1

At the end of Logan’s Run, Logan, Jessica, and the Old Man return the domed city. Logan and Jessica enter, and try to convince people that Carousel is a lie and that people can ‘Live! Live! And grow old!’ The computer won’t accept Logan’s insistence that Sanctuary doesn’t exist, and [cut to the chase] basically the city blows up. The inhabitants come outside, where they are fascinated by the Old Man. On to a new Future!

Yeah, that future…

The city’s infrastructure has been destroyed. We know that there are no more fish. Box supplied the food: ‘Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea. It’s all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming.’ When the fish died, Sanctuary-seekers started coming and Box froze them to feed the city. Yep, the inhabitants are all unknowing cannibals.

So the city can offer shelter, but there are no means to support the population. The food supply is gone. Nobody except the Old Man knows how to survive on the outside. The future seems pretty bleak to me.

(The aftermath may have been discussed in the book, but it’s been decades since I’ve read it.)

2

Watching that scene again, it strikes me that 1) it would take a huge amount of runners to actually serve as the sole food source for the city, and 2) Box doesn’t actually deliver food. He says it’s his job to freeze and store, but there’s no indication that he delivers these blocks of frozen animal to any kind of processing facility. There must be some other food source fueling the people.

But yes, I agree the future looks bleak. The weather’s nice on the day the people leave the city, so it leaves us in an upbeat mood, but if it was a storm, or winter, things might seem less optimistic.

3

The books (there were more than one) are significantly different from the movie. For one thing, the people in the books were never limited to just the one city and there were plenty of them who went outside. So it’s a movie-universe problem, not a book-universe problem.

4

I don’t remember this aspect being dealt with in the TV series (well, the city isn’t destroyed in that, IIRC, Logan and Jessica just escape)

5

I meant to say also that the Old Man used to fish in the Reflecting Pond, but he said they all disappeared.

6

I fairly recently re-watched the entire TV series (I have it on DVD). You are correct, they just glossed over this/ignored it. In the TV series the City of Domes is intact and it’s just Jessica and Logan running around along with an android named REM after the first episode.