I wouldn't make that assumption. If you are talking about a major power attacking the US with ICBMs or with submarine warheads, sure. However, you could have a coordinated terrorist type attack with rudimentary atomic weapons.

Maybe some EMP effects, but I doubt it would make everything collapse. Range limitations of the VHF radios might be a problem also, in terms of reaching an ATC center that was still operating. This could also effect ground navigation signals (VOR, ADF etc), but airliners typically still have inertial nav or GPS systems that would probably still operate ok. Even assuming all that failed, you still have your eyes, and can fly a plane just fine with those, and land almost anywhere. There are tons of county airports out in the sticks that offer runways long enough for virtually any airliner to land on in an emergency.

Did anyone else find the special effects in this episode painful?

And I mean like... The rocks in the salt mines that they drilled through and... the RAIN looked incredibly fake. It looked like a student production.

Can the acting in this show be anymore pathetic? I had to laugh at the scene with Ashley Scott telling Skeet Ulrich that "he is the one that is supposed to be dead". Also they have to stop with the storylines for the cheating brother, the tax auditor and the farm guy and the High School kids. Its boring and forced.

After a great pilot, i also agree the show is slipping. Too many annoying characters

Yes the High school kids stuff is so stupid. That 'cool chick' who walked in after the storm and chastised her friend for hanging out with the school weirdo, hell i wanted to bend her over and anally rape her to teach her a lesson !!

The cheating husband substory is stupid.

Let's hope like Invasion last season things pick up

This episode definitely did not do a whole lot for the show.....the previews for next week leave some hope for an interesting show. "They're coming" makes me want to watch to see who "they" are so I will hold out a couple of more episdoes before deciding to dump the show from my viewing list.

Come on..its the equivalent of CSI taking a low res security camera shot and turning it into a 10 megapixel photo!

hell, at least CSI seems more believeable, cause who knows what super-duper technology they have... but even then, i laugh every time they do that on the show (and they do it a lot... just last season they read a barcode from a plane ticket that was caught from a distance on a security camera).

I agree the show is unbelievable, but sorry, no show ever created is as unreal as CSI is...But its still just TV and a good way to kill an hour (Jericho that is).

Im almost positive I saw a man of some Asian origin watching the broadcast. I couldnt tell if he was Korean or Chinese or what, but I cant believe no one in a small town like that wouldnt assume he understood and ask him to translate (let alone not notice that he was there).

They were probably afraid to approach him, since all Asians are martial arts masters.

The logic of this show confuses me. At first everybody without a basement needed to get to 1 of the 2 fallout shelters. Then when one of them doesn't work they go to a mine. Yet the dork just puts some tape on the windows? If everybody could just tape up there windows wouldn't things have gone alot faster?

Maybe he lived in Jericho all his life and people knew that he wasn't from an Asian country. There for they set aside their natural racist tendencies (being from a small town and all) and didn't think to ask him.

And use up the towns tape supply? That's suicide!

Am I the only one who thought that the whole point of the Geiger counter was to show that there actually wasn't any radiation in the rain and that the Hawkins guy lied to get everyone to hide so that he could get that barrel of whatever to his basement without being seen. And the suit he put on was to protect him from the barrel (or something else in the storage shed), and not the rain.

But maybe I misinterpreted. And yes, the show is horribly bad in its consistency and the lines they wrote for the characters.

Wow, I didn't even pick up on that. I was under the impression he really did think the rain was radioactive (hense his HazMat suit when he did get his stuff). But you could be right. Either way, the geiger counter was to explain that it wasn't radioactive one way or another.

Well, he was the one who got them all thinking that the rain was going to be radioactive. And being in a hazmat suit wouldn't protect him from radiation (just from being drenched by radioactive water) unless it was lead lined, and then that suit would weight about 300 lbs.

And clearly there's something fishy about that character. No idea if he's a good guy or bad guy, but he is definitely hiding something from the town. Then there was that weird exchange between him and his wife about not allowing the kids to go to the party because they're not "ready".