How could I explain? You would not want to hear. -- Sarah McLachlan, Home

The Tribe: Episode 5

In which Bray runs off to find stuff suitable for infants, Trudy runs a fever, and the cars are still on fire.
Notably, though there is no visible gap between episodes 1 and 2, dialogue in episodes 3 and 4 claims that they’ve been living together for “a few days”. Episode 5 is set just hours after Trudy delivers, but everyone has had time to redo their ridiculous makeup (Everyone except Lex and His Big Dumb Sidekick have revised their looks).
I finally work out that Amber’s sidekick Shortround is named Dell. It confused me for a moment since the first time I notice it, they’re looking at a laptop. This is a very 1999 vision of the future, so they’re trying to use it by ooking up medical information on a shareware CD-ROM. Fortunately, this future isn’t a 2008 future, where all that sort of crap would have been superceded by the internet. Back in 1999, we hadn’t even worked out a consistent capitalization of “internet” (Seriously. I read a novel around then which insisted on talking about the “InterNet”. Since it was a very 1996 vision of the future, it talked about how the “InterNet” had been replaced by the “Global Information Superhighway”, a system under tight government control which connected, I think, all traffic control systems to hospital power supplies to toasters. So that an evil alien computer virus could go all SkyNet on us.)
Dell gets sent off on a suicide mission to find antibiotics, raising hopes that he won’t survive. Meanwhile, the little kids gorge themselves on Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet’s secret cache of candy and get sick, causing people to momentarily think they have the virus.
Which means that kids in general, and the survivors in specific don’t have any particular kind of immunity to the virus, which means that there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to why there even are survivors, or, more likely, the kids don’t understand how viruses work, or, most likely of all, the writers don’t.
This episode’s best line:
Zandra: Can’t you just imagine me in lingerie?

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