Fridge Brilliance
- At first, Pete choosing to blow up the Burnt Part rather than just sabotaging Jake personally (for instance, hiding all his mining stuff, framing him for something he didn't do, causing him injury so he couldn't go to work, etc) seems quite extreme, even for someone who loves his action movies... until you realise that it's intended to be cyclical. An explosion on the Burnt Part is what started everything ten years prior, and Pete intends to end it in the same way. This makes sense if you consider his ethos; Pete would most likely have viewed it as the only fitting way of sending his father off and protecting Jake, because explosions are what he associates with the mine and, in turn, his suffering.
- There are several moments in the musical that emphasise the cyclical nature of the plot: the 24-hour chronology, the monotonous lifestyles of Jake and Chet ("Eight hours digging, eight hours drifting, eight hours drinking, five days a week!"), the repetitive nature of the climbing songs... but what makes the cyclical theme especially brilliant is that despite Pete's best efforts, things don't come exactly full circle. If they had done, then all the kids would be dead and the musical would have ended immediately after 'Countdown'. Instead, they survive - and literally break out of their own suffering. Their own cycle of grief. The kids are naturally distressed after the mine gets blown up for the second time and they get trapped down there, but part of that distress (and the eventual reason they're able to get over their grief) is - quite crucially - because they didn't expect to survive. As Pete says about his father, "No man can disturb [his] deep deep sleep" ... but something disturbed what was supposed to be theirs.
- Jake and Chet were both eight years old when their fathers died... and they both structure their lives in eight-hour pieces. As if they can't break the cycle.
Fridge Horror
- All four main characters whose fathers died in the mine have spent over half their lives living in grief. This in turn means that Jake and Pete's mother has been depressed for over half their lives, Frances' mother has struggled with alcohol abuse for over half her life, Chet has been an orphan for over half his life... and so on.
- Frances was three years old when the incident happened, so she no doubt spent her most innocent years watching her mother gradually get worse and worse... and don't even start to consider that Chet was eight when he was orphaned. Eight!
