Todd Komarnicki’s Earth Abides is based on the novel by George R. Stewart and centered around Ish. In case you are not familiar with the source material, I should warn you that other than the devastating fictional (?) disease that wipes out a major chunk of the human population, there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on here. At least that’s the impression I got after watching the pilot episode. The show imagines how this planet would evolve if humans stopped eating away at its resources and whether or not the select few survivors’ attempts at rebooting civilization will be a success. Given how the novel that this miniseries is based on was written in 1949, I guess this premise seemed fresh and interesting back then. But since we’ve seen countless iterations of this story, I’m not really sure if it’s going to be as impactful as it was in the ‘50s. Anyway, let’s talk about Ish and how he reacts to waking up in a post-apocalyptic world.
Spoiler Alert
Ish Buries His Parents
Episode 1 of Earth Abides opens with Ish scribbling stuff in his journal, having his coffee, not picking up the phone call from his mother, and then leaving his cabin in the woods to venture out into the mountains in search of interesting rocks because, well, he is a geologist. While he is looking at these stones, he fails to notice the rattlesnake hiding in plain sight and gets bitten by it. He tries calling 911, but since he is panicking, he drops the phone into a crevice. He pulls out his pocket knife, makes an incision near the spot where the snake has bitten him, and tries sucking out the poison. As the cold sweats begin, Ish rushes back to his cabin and then collapses into his bed. He keeps slipping in and out of consciousness. Forest rangers or someone from emergency services arrive at Ish’s doorstep to see if there’s anyone in the cabin. Since Ish is unable to respond, they just leave. I don’t know what the protocol is for checking a place where the owner’s car is in the driveway and the door is probably unlocked (because I don’t think Ish was in the state to lock the door behind him), but not stepping into the premises to do a thorough investigation seems odd. However, that ends up being a sort of blessing in disguise because, as Ish sleeps off the effects of the snake bite in his cabin, the world around him crumbles away due to a deadly pandemic. When Ish finally begins to function normally again and leaves his cabin to do a supply run at the town nearby, he realizes what has happened as he sees rotting corpses everywhere and reads that the U.S. government has been suspended. He rushes to his parents’ place and finds out that they’ve died. He buries them in the backyard and tries to make sense of this new normal.
Ish Meets Survivors in Las Vegas
After that pretty effective opening act of the episode, we see Ish taking a trip through the town and come across dead bodies literally everywhere. He goes to the retail store to resupply his stocks and get arms and ammunition for his survival. He decides to drive across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to see if there are any survivors in the city, only to find out that it’s barricaded such that there’s no way for his car to pass. So, he turns his car and goes all the way to Las Vegas. The resort city has power, which is why all the lights are on, but there are no people. Ish enters one of the hotels, and when he realizes that there are no guests, he enjoys the place’s facilities while walking around stark naked. That’s when he comes across Ann and Milton, two people who have miraculously survived the apocalypse. No, they are not married; they just happened to be at the same place at the worst time imaginable. Milton, who has conveniently recorded all the news for the past few weeks, fills in Ish on everything that he has missed. Apparently, a COVID-19-like virus spread all across the world; only this time, none of the remedies and vaccines worked, and people dropped like flies. Ann says that some kind of mysterious immunity has allowed people like her, Milton, and Ish to pull through, but she doesn’t see it as a blessing because she has to bear the sadness of living while her loved ones are all dead. Ish wants to leave the place and search the country for survivors, but Ann and Milton have given up such aspirations and want to die by suicide after using up the hotel’s resources. They’re more than happy to include Ish in this plan of theirs, but since Ish isn’t that nihilistic yet, he decides to leave the premises and Las Vegas as well. As he is leaving, we hear two gunshots, which means that Milton has shot Ann and then himself.
Ish Sees Smoke On The Horizon
It’s unclear if Milton and Ann would have killed themselves if Ish didn’t interfere in their lives. I don’t exactly know why Ish’s presence motivated Milton and Ann to quicken their plan of dying after using up the resources available in Las Vegas. I guess Milton and Ann had already processed and moved past all the emotions that Ish was feeling, but watching him experience the pain and despair that they had once felt deteriorated their resolve to live longer than they actually wanted to. And even though these two people were total strangers, their death was devastating for Ish. He tries to kill himself by driving his car at breakneck speed, but when he sees a dog in the middle of the road, he puts that plan on the back burner and decides to restart life with his canine friend at his parents’ house. He essentially goes back to school to read up on everything that one can learn about life. He keeps himself busy by working out, eating as healthy as possible, looking after his dog, and driving his car in circles while telling himself to keep it together. A whole year passes by in this fashion. But, at the end of Earth Abides, episode 1, Ish notices smoke on the horizon. Well, that can mean only one thing: there’s another survivor in his vicinity. I don’t know why it took Ish this long to notice that there are other people around. Maybe that other survivor was trying to be inconspicuous in order to avoid attracting the attention of survivors who could resort to unethical actions, now that all boundaries of morality have gone for a toss due to the apocalypse. It’s only after they realized that they were alone that they began loosening up. In that case, Ish is going to need all the luck that exists on that godforsaken planet while approaching this survivor because if they are too anxious and jumpy, Ish might end up with a bullet in his head.
