The radio was receiving. He was using it to establish what frequency the communication was happening on (I have no idea what led him to decide it was happening via radio waves). If the others don’t have frequency hopping, it seems plausible that you could break their communication by jamming it.
I imagine the others would be pretty upset if that jamming occurred. If nothing else, the nuke could be used to potentially keep the others at bay if that is the path they choose to try to save the world.
When we first meet him at his storage facility in Paraguay, he is checking every frequency on his ham radio and recording the results. That one frequency is the only one on which he heard anything. I assume that originally, he was trying to find other survivors.
Ahh yeah. It was the only thing he had to go on, I suppose.
One thing that just occurred to me: They mentioned that all of the cell towers had been taken offline, and the uninfected needed to use land lines to call. Why the cell towers were offline isn’t really explained. I suppose they’re using part of that spectrum, as well.
My impression was he started emoting at them (expressing his thinly veiled rage) and that is what caused the seizures. Presumably, he induced the seizures to see if there would be any variation in the noise he heard over the frequency he identified.
And there was. So he has confirmed a relationship between the frequency and We.
There could be an in-story reason as well. Like putting cell phones into airplane mode, which for a time was done because there were concerns they would interfere with radio communications to and from the plane. Whether it actually does or not…
I wondered at how much damage Carol and Manousos could do with a single atomic bomb but one of the episode recaps I read suggested that, since Carol killed 11 million people just by yelling at one of them in person, that setting the bomb off might just kill all of them.
As for this, it’s possible that taking the cell towers offline was another way for them to reduce unnecessary energy usage, like turning off all of the lights in Albuquerque, or having many people bed down in one indoor stadium.
I don’t think it works like that. The people didn’t necessarily die in proportion to how vehemently Carol expressed her rage. They died because it was like an unexpected seizure that caught them unprepared, not unlike how Helen died in episode 1. If you’re operating heavy machinery, moving at high speed, or even just standing on pavement and have a seizure with no one to help you, odds are good you’re gonna have a bad time.
Perhaps some died from the seizure itself (preexisting conditions), but again I don’t think it was necessarily due to how intense Carol’s emotive display way.
I have been imagining it as strictly binary: either they have a seizure, or they don’t.
Ehhh, I don’t see how it works better without cell phones.
Yeah, that seems possible, but they didn’t get around to turning off the lights for several days. Also, if you just cut power to all of the cell phone towers, they’ll run of batteries for quite some time afterward.
Hmm, the one that was housed at the top of the data center building I used to work in just had batteries as backup. I’m not sure about the tower that was put up after they knocked that building down.
I’m jumping around the streaming services that I subscribe to and was a bit amused to see that The Golden Girls is available on Apple TV and was listed among the “What to Watch After Pluribus.”
I think he was an amateur ham radio operator before the joining. He decided to isolate himself from the hive but he thought perhaps if there was a resistance movement they’d be transmitting every way they could, including through signals the ham radio would receive. He found the weird signal at that one frequency and I think he wanted to confirm that was the signal the plurbs communicate on by monitoring it while he stressed them out.
As far as the cell phone network, the plurbs don’t need it since their brains are cell phones, but they still want the unjoined to be able to contact them, so I suspect they’re just keeping part of the landline network online for that purpose because it’s easier to maintain and uses much less power. Makes enough sense to be plausible, though if Carol asked them to turn the cell phone network back on, at least where she’s at, I imagine they would.
