Heartwarming Moments: Despite the post-apocalyptic setting, there are plenty of moments of human decency.
Fernando Martinez happens upon an old army bunker and finds three dogs that were left to starve. He decides to take care of them, and even promises that they can all join his family when they find them.
12 days after the impact, Noah and Shiang finally come across other survivors on the island. Noah immediately notices that one of them has an injured hand and offers to help; when they run off, Shiang leaves some medicine for them and is hopeful that they'll come back.
Shiang becomes increasingly despaired when she and Noah are seemingly doomed to die adrift at sea. He gets her spirits up by pointing out the presence of seagulls, meaning land is nearby. Sure enough, they come upon the coast of Southern China, where they're rescued. They even have a family together.
Michelle and Henry Vuton are reunited with Catherine after months of separation. Even more, the people who found her didn't know that Michelle and Henry were her family, meaning they decided not to harm them or their group (after a tense moment) of their own kindness. Perhaps not all hope is lost when the world ends.
The entire situation is more Nightmare Nitro than just fuel. Imagine going about your daily life without a care in the world, when suddenly you learn that a super comet is on its way and will impact in 18 months. The world tries to do everything in its power, creating one of the most powerful explosive devices to deflect the comet...and it does absolutely nothing. You try to find shelter and hope to make it past the impact. Even if you do, you still have to make it through the fatal Heat Wave caused by ejecta from the impact. Additionally, the ash in the atmosphere blots out the sun, darkening the sky and killing off plants. And then you have to contend with the starvation and severe cold that comes with the absence of sunlight or reliable food sources. Needless to say, 75% of living beings will die, and you're equally likely to be one of them.
Poor Fernando doesn't have it very good throughout all of this.
He spends almost the whole time without any human contact, and therefore has no idea that he's heading closer and closer to certain doom. He barely catches sight of the wall of fire in time to hide in a concrete military bunker right before the flames overtake everything above ground.
What does he find when he emerges from the bunker? The entire landscape is a Death World, where the ground is too hot for him to stay. Even when it does cool down, the whole place is a literal desert hostile to life. There are not just no other living people in his area, there's nothing alive at all aside from him and the three dogs.
Things are downhill from then on. He runs out of food, he wakes up to find that the dogs have abandoned him, and he has to scale a large loose-dirt mountain. He successfully climbs it through sheer determination...only to find himself at the crater of the comet's impact, with nothing alive around him. He dies alone, all of his efforts to find his family meaningless.
Shiang and Noah arguably have it better, but that doesn't mean they were completely out of the woodwork.
Noah is exposed to a dangerously acidic rain that would have chemically burned him to death if he hadn't run inside the building in time.
The heat wave caused by reentry of small particles in the atmosphere comes very close to killing Noah and Shiang. They barely survive, and many others were not so lucky.
An earthquake nearly buries them under rubble from a nearby cliff while they are building a makeshift raft to get them off the island. What Shiang says next makes it worse: this was just regular activity. Evenbetter, the volcano on the island erupts, this time without anyone to take people off the island, leaving the magma free to wipe out any scant survivors across the island. Luckily, they escape just in time.
What's the first thing that comes close to directly killing Shiang? A realisticmundanger in the form of a shark. She and Noah are sailing on a yacht along with a group of fellow survivors, and she spears a shark thinking it's a fish. It drags her into the water and comes very close to getting her. The comet also destroyed the ocean's food system, leaving the waters filled with desperate, hungry sharks.
After this, a massive storm destroys the yacht and kills most of the survivors. Noah and Shiang survive, but are left stranded and floating on driftwood from the wrecked boat with no shelter, food or drinking water.
The Vuton family are no better off.
When the ejecta from the comet strike starts falling, the family dog Sarah runs off. Michelle runs after her, and she and her parents run through the city of Paris as it descends into chaos. Falling debris destroys the city, and the family barely makes it to an underground area on the river that shields them from the 400 degree heat.
Henry fixes up a car, only for it to be stolen with Catherine still sleeping inside of it. He and Michelle are left alone, wandering the city as darkness induced by the ash cloud overtakes the entire world.
As time progresses, Henry and Michelle have to battle a bitter winter that ensues as a result of lack of sunlight. They gradually lose food and hope as it becomes clear that the cold will kill them if they stay.
Michelle and Henry's group makes it south to the Mediterranean, but the first group they encounter immediately prove themselves hostile by grabbing Michelle in front of her father and threatening everyone else with knives and makeshift spears. Thankfully, the hostiles weren't bad people, just wary of the actual bad people in the area.
Even the Pygmy tribe, accustomed to a world that is more hostile than city life, suffer nightmarishly. Being a primitive tribe, they're completely Locked Out of the Loop when it comes to the coming disaster, meaning everything is even worse from their perspective.
They have absolutely no idea what that enormous fireball streaking through the sky is. All they see is something on fire streaking through the sky and causing the ground to tremble beneath their feet. For them, this thing seems like a furious deity flying overhead.
The worldwide heat wave leaves the Baka tribe in desperate prayer, as they have never experienced such a blistering heat before. They have no idea that their rituals and prayers are in vain. Eventually they're forced to take shelter in a cave to escape the heat, though their conversation makes it clear that many of them didn't make it and were burned alive.
The ensuing global winter reaches all the way down to the equator, where people have never experienced cold. There isn't even a word in their language to describe the strange white, cold substance that covers the ground. The cold (combined with malnutrition from lack of food) makes many of the surviving tribe members sick. To top it off, the disaster leaves their home completely unrecognizable, like an Eldritch Location.
Paranoia Fuel: Just the fact that this has happened before and it's what wiped out the dinosaurs. The ending may be hopeful, but that still doesn't erase the fact that this is a very real possibility in the future.
The Vuton family dog runs away from them during the chaos of the comet strike. Michelle runs after it, but they never find the dog. It's likely the poor dog was baked to death by the heat wave.
Fernando's journey ends with his three dogs abandoning him after he runs out of food. He dies without finding his family, who are all likely dead anyway.
Riddle for the Ages: What happened to Fernando's family? They likely evacuated along with the rest of Mexico's population once the comet's impact site was pinpointed; however, that doesn't mean they survived the tsunamis, the global firestorm, or the cold, starvation, and disease caused by the impact winter.
The Woobie: Fernando Martinez. He fails to find his family (who are implied to be dead), the dogs he looked after abandon him, he runs out of food and water, and his journey ends with him breaking down in despair at the impact crater before dying alone.
