Recap / Designated Survivor S 3 E 08 Scared Shitless

Scared Shitless

Hannah Wells is dead. There is a plague in the country. The president decides to quarantine affected cities while keeping the pandemic secret. It gets out, though, and riots happen.

Tropes

• Brutal Honesty: Mars tells Isabel he appreciates her tendency toward this.
• Central Theme: Stigma around health issues.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Tom calls Penny his favorite daughter. She reasonably points out that she's his only daughter.
• Plot Parallel: Dontae's boyfriend is coming around to Dontae being HIV-positive, a condition he is understandably cautious about disclosing. Emily's mother's cancer has gotten to where she wants to kill herself, a decision which is frowned upon in most States. Aaron is trying to prepare for the racial viral plague without letting it leak that there is a threat of a racial viral plague.
• Too Dumb to Live: The scientist who realizes the new guy in the lab is a bio terrorist stands directly outside the lab door to call Eli and isn't even alarmed when she looks through the window and sees he's gone.
• Twofer Token Minority: Isabel, Seth and Dontae discuss racial discrimination, genocide and experiments. Isabel mentions the history of Puerto Ricans being used for experiments, Seth comments that people still assume he's a Muslim terrorist, and Dontae points out that he's a gay black man and that "trumps everything".

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