Exactly. The Departure was just a premise with which to tell a story. How would people react? How would life go on? What kinds of religious reactions might emerge? It was always about the survivors. The leftovers as it were.
I watched several episodes but the smoking cult made me nauseous.
Yeah, you said that already. I doubt anyone gave a shit either time.
It seems like you’ve been trying to disagree with everyone in this thread but you’re not actually disagreeing me.
Ok, that’s fine, drop it.
Dial it back. These are excessively hostile posts.
Even if you go back to the tech of 1820, people can survive with the tech of 1820. No one’s going to have a job, nearly anything other than food can be scavenged, and as you said, even with food you’ll have quite a bit of time and some help with such a low population.
No one’s going to be where they need to be in the short term, no one’s going have a job, and it may be difficult to organize people because some will be content to scavenge. Supply chains are going to be difficult because of that and manpower is going to be scarce for pretty much anything. So even keeping farm machinery working might be a challenge because of the oil etc. needed. So they may need to go back to 1820 until they can get organized. So you go back to 1820. They aren’t going to have that much else to do.
In the next series, we follow characters coping in a world in which 98% of the population has vanished. Of course, mass media not longer exists so it takes quite a while for people to learn that it is a global phenomenon. Talk about grief.
Effectively, for the 2%, it would be another The Stand scenario, but without the dreams guiding people to reform communities.
In other words, they are fubared.
Never mind the difficulty travelling with the roads filled with abandoned cars.
I wonder how many cities would burn from unstopped fires caused by the thousands of crashing airliners?
Yeah, if only 2% of the population was left the overwhelming majority would just die before anything could be salvaged.
It would be like the world of the Walking Dead (back when it was still good) except there would be no dead bodies around to re-animate. Just a lot of space between people.
Would like to say I think the show runners are doing (‘are doing’, since I’m still watching) a fantastic job of giving us clues to a quasi-functioning, but emotionally shattered, society.
The cars can be moved off to the side, since they will still have gasoline and keys in the ignition. I suppose some will idle until they run out of gas. Then you take a gas can around and fill them enough to start them and move them off to the side. It’s not something that would take very long, and you don’t have a job anymore, so moving your quota of cars off the streets is going to be no big deal.
There aren’t going to be any firefighters in the 2% world for a while, so anything caused by a plane crash is going to burn away. It would be interesting for the few planes with pilots that were in the 2% world. They might be okay if nothing happened on the runway of their destination, though they aren’t going to get any ground help, as none of the ATC will be there. I suppose they can try to radio around for an ATC at some airport. ATC would be a nightmare, as some panicky controller, the only one at his airport, can’t contact plane after plane. I suppose his or her job is over after that day, though!
I guess in the world of the show, I have already said people weren’t as crazy as they would be IRL. So maybe the 2% world gets lucky, people get organized quicker than would happen IRL, and it’s just sort of poignant and sad instead of a full dystopia.
I think Nora needing to convince the scientist to build another machine is the weakest part of this story.
I get that the 2% world would be resource limited, but there are billions of people on both the 2% world and the 98% word looking for answers to what is essentially the greatest scientific mystery of all time. It’s almost unconscionable to think that any scientific mission to transport people to the 2% world did not also have an immediate priority to develop the means to construct another machine on the other side, and at least send a freaking message back home saying: “hey guys! this thing works!”.
The weight of the entire world(s) is on their shoulders, all desperate to get answers.
It’s the singular defining purpose for humanity, but somehow only Nora thought to ask to build a second machine?
Well, there are about 140 million people in the two-percent world looking for answers, not “billions”.
awkward phrasing on my part. “Billions on people between” vs “billions on both”
One item unmentioned is why the physicists rejected Nora initially is that her psych profile was poor. She profiled as someone who wouldn’t take to going through, and they were right. I think the only reason they let her go through the second time is that she threatened to turn them in otherwise.
It was a singular machine build by desperate people unnerved by a supernatural event. They had a measurement and took a guess and blasted away. The way the machine worked, there was no way to get anything back, so no way to test. And I’m guessing only people can be transported that way, since only people left in the departure? You can’t transport messages or any inanimate objects through this method, it seems.
So it’s an illegal machine devised by a single man used to send a limited number of people through. People that have been specially selected to not want to come back. The inventor of the machine didn’t want to come back, evidently. I don’t think anyone in the 2% world could have done it, that world is going to be falling behind the 98% world for quite some time.
We don’t even know how often the machine works. Nora just knew of herself and the inventor. Maybe 1/3 of the people die attempting to go through. Not really responsible to release that to the public. Maybe the machine in the 98% world broke and the people running it can’t fix it, or the two worlds drifted farther apart over time and the machine no longer works.
The other thing is that the machine was illegal. There are going to be leaders in both places trying to get things back to normal, and stamping out cults like the Guilty Remnant and the people running the machine.
I think a key event was Nora getting stuck in the bathroom when she wanted out. When she realized she was going to be kept in her bathroom and miss the party, she decided her freedom was more important than anything. I think that this is a reference to the choice she made while she was in the machine.
Yeah, I don’t really buy any of that.
Obviously (If Nora’s story is to be believed), the machine is able to get her to the 2%, and a new machine is able to get her back, so we’ve established that back-and-forth travel works.
Even if 1/3 or more of the people die in the attempt, just being able to conclusively send a messenger to the 2% world and back reporting “The machine works! The missing are all there, on a whole new Earth!” would be the single greatest, most important scientific discovery of humanity. The team that established communications would essentially be revered as combination Einstein/Neil Armstrong/Jesus figures, and would receive infinite funding from the entire world to build more machines, test and refine the process.
To think that the inventor that first went through, and all of the supporting scientists and other travelers that made it to the 2% world just collectively decided:
“Eh, screw fame, fortune, glory, the continuation of this project, science itself, and the hopes of billions of other people desperate for answers. I’m tired, and I’m just going to chill at a cabin in the woods with my family and tell absolutely no-one about the machine”
…and yet somehow Nora is the first person to convince him otherwise just strains credulity beyond belief.