Pizza? Please tell me there will be decent pizza in the fifth millennium. (To go with the beer, too, though I prefer Fanta to be honest, and there won't be any football to watch, which is also fine by me.)

I liked the star because she's the Sheriff's wife. In fact, isn't the badge of the Secret Service also…?

That is what it means, but only in a technical sense. The rat wouldn't feel that it has lived longer, and neither would you in its place.

Heh. Nature doesn't really see it like that, though (if we want to anthropomorphise her); it's only devolution for the same reason Europe is a separate continent: ego. Civilisation actually is kind of an aberration, and it appears that the "Abbies" are much more effective predators than us. Evolutionarily speaking,…

Aw, don't talk like that. Every little duckling is like a child to her. I'm sure she's given them names, too.

He could wake up on Mars and still be fine with it if it meant he was popular.

Clearly they choose their subjects carefully, and only pick those who wear seatbelts, drive carefully and maintain their cars well. On the backs of such considerate people will the future be built.

It would actually be better from a psychological standpoint. More positive and hopeful. Morale is important.

Car crashes… No doubt the Burkes are all considered dead in their own timeline. (Then again, the car wasn't actually found, nor were any bodies obviously, so it's just "missing, presumed dead".)

That would be a good source of despair for me in such a future: living in an utterly isolated provincial American monoculture with severely limited reading material, while most architecture, literature, music, cuisine and fashion in the world disappeared—everything Hannibal holds dear, in short. I'd expect a true…

I found her reply annoying; the way they were talking about the creatures didn't suggest that there were many of them together, but simply that more than one existed. I don't know whether people who believe in Barefoot's existence think there could be but one such creature in the whole wide world, who lives forever,…

Kids can be lied to more effectively, though. They won't question as easily what they are told, and even the more querulous ones will be given responses that in their inexperience they will consider incontrovertible. Plus, their egos are being stroked with all the talk about their intelligence and the fact that they…

That's what the world has come to… Real Americans wouldn't stand for this communist nightmare sixty years ago…

Quite. "Oh, they're coming this way, whatever shall we do to prevent them from interfering with our plan? Wait, I know! Take them on board, so that we ensure they don't blab, and we keep our all-important sheriff-to-be happy as well! Two birds reckoned with a single slash!"

There are statues of Washington in Roman garb, though… Maybe Ben's special power (the real reason he's in Wayward Pines) is his ability to see more than the rest of us… Anyone else will see just a head on that coin; he sees the whole body!

Conservative coinage, what can I say… (Hmm… Now I'm trying to imagine a situation whereby the Director of the U.S. Mint were an elected official.) We weren't shown the reverse, though; that would have been really interesting (and speculative, naturally).

It has to be the future, if only to account for the time discrepancies between the various residents, some of whom were unfrozen several years ago and have visibly aged. Other than that… Maybe Wayward Pines is in the middle of a large park with artificial ruins sometime in 2106 and the coins are artificially aged (or…

I know you are being facetious, but does being in suspended animation count as "being alive" any more than being brain dead does? Philosophically speaking, this procedure does not extend your life, but rather it divides it into discrete episodes, as it were.

But how would this actually work? The inhabitants of Wayward Pines seem to consider their prison a slightly unnatural but otherwise unremarkable town. Are we supposed to believe that they built the houses with their hands, in a place in which they don't even know why they are in the first place? They haven't…

That's the strangest thing about the time frame: too little time for the "Devolution of Homo Sapiens" to occur unaided, but at the same time too much time for the infrastructure to survive in a condition virtually identical to what one would encounter in the twentieth century. Even with the best of maintenance, any…