Awesome / Jeremiah

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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Season 1

• In The Long Road:
  • Theo and her soldiers get a good Establishing Character Moment when several bandits try to rob their town's marketplace. They gun down the thieves from strategic locations, then have kids gather up the used shell casings to recycle them, and take the best of the robbery loot for themselves. Jeremiah also gets some points in that scene for asking if Theo is engaging in Screw the Rules, I Make Them! thinking, which causes her to give some compensation to the man whose stolen batteries she won't return.
  • Both of Theo's speeches to Jeremiah about how she saw the value of protecting things and people that other kids didn't in the early days after the Big Death, namely a school-with its civil defense shelter, fence, and roof- and kids smart enough to learn mechanical engineering,
  • Kurdy stirs up a mob of people against Theo (who is holding Jeremiah prisoner) by dropping a few Apple of Discord comments about the supplies not everyone in town has, providing quite the distraction to help rescue his new friend.
• In "Man of Iron, Woman Under Glass", Jeremiah borrows the mask and mantra of a wannabe superhero while delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to the men who killed that hero and raped his sister (while also setting their camp on fire), and deliberately letting nearby kids witness the event to act as a Hope Bringer to them.
  Jeremiah (pausing throughout the speech to deliver various blows): I am Captain Iron and I will use my powers only for good, never for evil. I will fight injustice wherever I find it. I will help those who cannot help themselves. I am a spirit of justice and I am a spirit of vengeance and I will kick the ass of the unrighteous.
• In "And the Ground … Sown with Salt":
  • During the escape from Michael's compound, one pigtailed girl is quite the Little Miss Badass as she guns down Mooks.
  • Julie's decides to blow up Michael's arsenal of weapons as the final act of her High-Heel–Face Turn (although that doubles as a Tear Jerker moment given the method she chooses).
  • Sometime before the episode, Michael faced off against the Valhalla Sector and made them back down.
• Claire taking out the Burners with a shot to a flamethrower tank in "To Sail Beyond the Stars".
• In "City of Roses", Jeremiah saves a rape victim from a Wacky Wayside Tribe and locks the rapists in the back of a truck that is filling up with exhaust fumes (although they narrowly escape). Additionally, the later scene of their traumatized victim coming out of her shell during combat training is also powerful.
• In "Firewall"
  • Major Quantrell gets a menacing Vagueness Is Coming Badass Boast about the Valhalla Sector's plans.
  Quantrell: You people are pathetic. You know that? You're pathetic. You've got all this, and you think you know what power is. You don't have a clue. You have no idea what power is. You don't even know who you're messing with here. You want to know what it's all about? Is that it, hmm? We're coming out. That's right. We've been waiting, biding our time, but now we're ust about ready to move, and when we do, we're gonna build a world based on power. Anybody doesn't like it, we'll push 'em aside or leave 'em behind, 'cause we've got the knowledge, we've got the technology, we've got the guns, and we've got the will. We're gonna bring back order and discipline. We're gonna do it our way, because you people have had your chance. You've had 15 years, and you've screwed it up. You've been sitting on your asses feeling sorry for yourselves, letting the world go to shit. Well, those days are over. Yeah, that's right. It's our turn now.
  • Jeremiah then turns that back on Quantrell, by pointing out the weak points and hypocrisy in his claims of strength.
  Jeremiah: Except for what? What scared you back under your rock? Scared you so bad you grab innocent people and test them for God knows what? You're coming out? If you're not afraid of the outside, why are you walking around in an airtight suit?
  • One of the first indicators of how much strength and infrastructure the Valhalla Sector has is when they send six gunships (when the heroes were shocked enough to encoutner two working helicopters earlier on) to respond to the capture of Quantrell.
  • With a little help from Lee Chen, Ezekiel sneaks into Thunder Mountain, kills Quantrell, and gets out again without anyone seeing him besides Jeremiah (who he voluntarily approaches). Keep in mind that, according to a Deleted Scene from the pilot, Thunder Mountain has a population of 2,000 people.
  • Markus's speech about the new direction Thunder Mountain has to take, in the final scene.
  Markus: Did you know that in the 15th century, when the black death was wiping half of Europe out, the churches kept all the knowledge of the secular world safe? Then one day, they took that knowledge back out into the world, and what followed was the renaissance. Some historians say that the renaissance would never have happened if the black death hadn't happened first. They never consider the possibility that the renaissance also wouldn't have happened if the churches had just sat on all those books waiting for the right day ... I've been thinking for too long. There's a military term I used to hear when my father was still alive: "Use them or lose them." We know that Valhalla sector is real. We know that they're armed and that they're gonna move soon, and we know that the world that they wanna make is not the world that we wanna make If we wait, we lose. The renaissance never comes...So we're not waiting anymore. We have resources. Let's use them. We need to start revealing ourselves to the world outside: Who we are, what we can do, but not where we are. Tell people they got a chance, that they're not alone, get them organized...And pray like hell that we're not too late.
• In "Red Kiss"
  • The kids from the enclave where the main action takes place help dispatch the villain with slingshots and a dropped hoist pulley. Then, because they think he is a vampire, they run a stake through his coffin in the final scene.
  • The parents of those kids catch a bunch of bandits who are about to rob them off-guard by pulling their own guns first and taking back the rover those men stole from Jeremiah and Kurdy earlier.
• "Journeys End at Lovers Meeting" has a brief car chase that ends with Jeremiah driving backward to run their pursuers off the road.
• In "Thieves' Honor":
  • As nasty as Rasmussen is, he handles his coup with style, marching into Theo's office, having her guards pull guns on her, sitting down in her chair, talking about the "profit sharing" system he used to win supporters (after Theo earlier mocked him as a "bean counter"), and then telling Theo that she and her supporters (two of who, he has secretly recruited to kill her away from prying eyes) have 24 hours to get out of town. He then caps this off by killing, cooking, and eating Theo's pet cockatoo.
  • Lee Chen and an armed guard emerge from the shadows in a grand and stylish manner to confront a suspected spy as he makes an unauthorized radio transmission.
  • Markus refuses to decide the fate of the accidental spy, who wasn't actively selling out Thunder Mountain but is making unauthorized radio messages that Theo intercepted, and realizes that society and democracy may never fully reform if he keeps being unchallenged on every big dispute.
  Markus: From now on, when there's a significant crime, a contentious dispute, an irreconcilable conflict, the council is judge and jury.
  Lee Chen: How's that going to work?
  Markus: That's my point.
  • When Jeremiah and his companions are caught by Rasmussen's enforcers, Theo appears and launches a convincing Bavarian Fire Drill where she claims to have just killed her opponent and taken back the town, causing the guards to think she is really in charge and drop their guard before she helps knock them out and release the prisoners to repay an I Owe You My Life debt.
• In "The Touch":
  • Kurdy intervenes with a group of zealots lynching someone for breaking a no touching rule and gives a harsh "The Reason You Suck" Speech, has a Go Through Me moment trying to save their victim, and beats up three goons before being knocked out by a cheap shot.
  • A shackled Jeremiah overpowers a goon taking his blood, wraps the chains around his neck and threatening to inject him with the syringe of blood, which Jeremiah falsely claims has a bacterial infection. The man quickly orders his bodyguard to let Jeremiah go.
  • Young mother Naomi breaks the decree by hugging her daughter, mockingly says she has committed a horrible crime, and makes a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech that is followed by Kurdy, Jeremiah, and Naomi's daughter exposing the local leaders as murderers in front of the whole town.
• In "Mother of Invention", the scene that reveals how self-sufficient Michelle and her community are (fishing, hydroelectric generators, etc.) and the reveals that she is both the Mouth of Sauron of the community and the leader (enabling her to play mind games with their enemies and make allies less guarded about talking in front of her). Then, to top it all off, she reveals that she already knows where and what Thunder Mountain is due to collecting information and that she holds them in contempt for their earlier isolationist tendencies but is doing the same thing as them (giving tools, blueprints, and crops to other places) and knew Jeremiah and Kurdy were coming even before they arrived.
• In "Tripwire":
  • Ezekiel fights a sniper shooting at Jeremiah and Markus, kills the man, and then vanished before any first responders come despite having a bullet in his leg.
  • Kurdy does a Sherlock Scan over a dead Valhalla Sector assassin, and points out that the fact that the man has new underwear proves the Valhalla Sector has unprecedented resources and is also confident enough with their arsenal to divert those resources manufacturing.
• In Moon in Gemini:
  • Jeremiah and an equally nimble Villain of the Week dueling each other on foot with lances actually provides a tense, closely matched battle that is mostly played seriously.
  • Black separatist leader Kwame stands between a gun-totting Overzealous Underling and Kurdy and Elizabeth to keep his paranoid companion from shooting the Thunder Mountain ambassadors.
• In "Out of the Ashes", a group of library patrons armed with blunt instruments arrive to back up Kurdy and the librarian against book burners. When the lead thug tries to bluster this isn't over, Kurdy steps up to firmly tell him
  Yes it is
• In "A Means to an End", Markus gets an uncharacteristically Machivellian moment after the council picks the wrong time to assert itself and vetoes his plan to bring in Theo and other leaders who they need to ally with to have a hope against the Valhalla Sector. Markus tells Lee Chen to personally radio Jeremiah and Kurdy (who are escorting Theo) and tell them to stand by, on the orders of councilmember Andrew. Jeremiah and Kurdy, who are unpredictable at the best of times, dislike and distrust both Lee and Andrew, and refuse to acknowledge their orders to abort the pickup, just as Markus anticipated. Having Theo inside the mountain brings the debate into the open while letting Markus maintain plausible deniability.
• In "Things Left Unsaid Part 1", Ezekiel uses a crossbow to kill one Valhalla Soldier attacking Jeremiah, then vanishes for a minute and comes back driving a truck into the middle of a firefight to help Jeremiah, Kurdy, and Elizabeth flee.
• In "Things Left Unsaid Part 2":
  • Kurdy rams the truck into a Valhalla Sector Jeep that has a turret gun after realizing he won’t beat them in a fight.
  • The Valhalla Sector gets a villainous moment when they interrupt the Continental Congress meeting Markus is holding at a football stadium. Their soldiers rappel down from the higher stands and when some of the armed attendees fight back, the soldiers fire a missile into one of the empty stands as a warning shot, and resistance ceases.
  • Mysterious Informant Wylie makes the most of his brief screen time as he lays out every Valhalla Sector secret he had uncovered and gives Jeremiah and the audience one "Eureka!" Moment after another.
  • The flashback scenes of Devon and Mary leaving with a rifle to break into Devon's lab take on a whole new Hero of Another Story meaning as it is revealed that Devon was trying to expose the government creating the Big Death and distribute the research about the virus while there might still be time to save some of the adult population.

Season 2

• In "Letters from the Other Side Part 1":
  • Jeremiah is told the President wants to see him and asks what the man is president of. Upon being told “The United States, asshole", he snarks that "The United States Asshole" is an interesting and fitting title and the initials are still U.S.A. As soon as the President Evil shows up, the appropriateness of the comment is confirmed. It doubles as a funny moment.
  • Markus is being roughly interrogated and is offered a deal if he names his remaining allies. He responds with a defiant quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• In ''Letters from the Other Side Part 2":
  • Lee Chen reveals that, unbeknownst to most of Thunder Mountain, they still have a working fleet of over a dozen military choppers that Markus has been quietly maintaining (training pilots with flight simulators, etc.) for just such an emergency.
  • Lee gets a chilling Pay Evil unto Evil The Chessmaster gambit: he tricks the Valhalla Sector into thinking that Typhoid Mary Meghan survived the Big Death because of a vaccine that immunized her to it and that the Thunder Mountain leaders will trade her for Markus and the others. Then, right as the trade is happening, he has Kurdy lead an attack on the Valhalla Sector (after traveling there with Thunder Mountain's helicopters) so that its people will lock themselves inside (with Meghan) to ride out the attack.
  • Meghan is fully onboard with Lee's plan and strolls through the Valhalla Sector, cheerfully shaking hands with everyone important she can find before they realize she is infecting them, paying them back for taking Markus prisoner and causing the Big Death in the first place.
  • When the Valhalla Sector won't release Jeremiah and his father before the lockdown, with some quick prompting from Lee, Libby smuggles Jeremiah and his father food, blows up their cell guard with a homeade chemical bomb, and then locks herself in a lab, allowing all three of them to survive the bunker outbreak.
  • Mr. Smith strolling through a firefight without a concern in the world due to his Mission from God confidence in and then greeting Kurdy.
• In "Strange Attractors", Jeremiah poses as a Valhalla Sector operative to question Theo in front of her captors and they trade a series of mocking barbs about her capture that subtly tells him how many prisoners are in town and where they are being kept. Then she kicks Jeremiah in the crotch to make their antagonism seem more convincing.
• In "Deus ex Machina":
  • Smith makes a Card-Carrying Villain have a Villainous Breakdown and/or Heel Realization and kill himself and his men, letting their captives go free, just by whispering a piece of personal knowledge in the man's ear.
  • Before Smith rescues Kurdy and the other captives, Kurdy refuses to leave without the others when their captors make a Spare a Messenger offer.
  • Jeremiah asks Theo how she knows for a fact that Michael exists and is really so powerful when she has never met him. She replies with a story about how she saw fossilized dinosaur footprints as a child and that even though she never saw dinosaurs in person, she knows they were there by the enormous and intimidating tracks they left. Then she emphasizes that the tracks Michael has left are far scarier.
  • Theo, of all people, rallies a meeting of faction leaders into trusting Markus as someone who doesn't use violence when he can and utterly demolishes the argument a rival leader is making as he tries to recruit those people.
• In "Rites of Passage", a flashback shows Dr. Weil (Ezekiel's father) try to create a distraction to allow his son, Mary, and Devon escape from the Valhalla Sector. He kills five soldiers and takes three more hostage offscreen, then defiantly yells at them that the virus he made killed the whole world, and it will take more than them to stop him. His suicide quickly turns the moment into more of a tearjerker one, though.
• In "The Mysterious Mr. Smith", the first battle between the main characters and the Army of Daniel has a definite David vs. Goliath feel when the enemy soldiers arrive in an armed, fully-functioning tank. Jeremiah then forces the tank crew to abandon their vehicle by throwing a road flare down the tank hatch.
• In "Voices in the Dark":
  • Smith adapts a convincing New Jersey accent and bluffs his way past a suspicious guard who Smith charms so much the man never even looks at his (nonexistent) ID papers.
  • Resistance leader Rachel beats up one goon while using his gun to shoot another without even taking it out of his hand.
  • The speech Rachel makes about how she began opposing Shadow Dictator Daniel because she can see that what he is doing is wrong, and if she chose to wait for someone else to oppose him from within, that someone might never come.
• In "Crossing Jordan", Smith rallies the citizens of a town Sims is attacking to fight off the people preparing to enslave them for the crime of picking a side in the coming war. He has had the occasional action scene before, but here, he displays efficient marksmanship and rousing leadership skills that turn the tide. Making things more awesome, sad, and heartwarming all at once is how his efforts are driven by a desperate effort to Screw Destiny and keep Libby from dying in the battle like the voice in his head said she would.
• In "Running on Empty", the main cast and some soldiers ambush the goons who attacked towns in the last episode by tricking them into trying ot hijack some trucks. The walls of a truck dropping down to reveal two people with mounted machine guns and Jeremiah going Guns Akimbo.
• The first battle of the Unskilled, but Strong soldiers whom Kurdy has been training throughout "The Question" has most of them working well as a team and the previously cynical Gina carrying a wounded comrade to safety and later slugging the one man who abandoned the others.
• In "The Face in the Mirror":
  • Dr. Monash making a telegraph device out of a battery and a bike and sending a morse code S.O.S.
  • Kurdy escapes from an ambush where Sims is after him, Jeremiah, and the defector in their truck by rendezvousing with about twenty other scouts in identical trucks and then having different convoys of three cars drive in different directions so Sims doesn't know who to chase.
• In "State of the Union", Jeremiah, Kurdy, and Smith blunder into one of the Army of Daniel's camps and end up destroying a valuable piece of infrastructure with the group’s own weapons.
• In "Interregnum":
  • The Army of Daniel unveils heat-seeking missiles that shoot down an Alliance chopper and then have their fifth columnists inside the base rendezvous and plan out a coordinated campaign of sabotage and attacking the areas where Markus is strongest.
  • Sims gets some chilling Wicked Cultured Evil Is Cool moments throughout the two-parter as he plans battles and makes surrender demands while sipping wine at a picnic table or studying a chess board.
  • After being taunted by Dragon-in-Chief Simms during a radio call, Markus reveals that Simms is serving a lie by asking him an Armor-Piercing Question about how much he knows about his leader and then challenging Simms to think of another way Markus could have known that without ever meeting the people involved.
  • Smith marches off to kill Sims with a Badass Boast then gets within sniper range after being captured. He then gets a Defiant Captive moment when Sims mocks how Smith claims to hear God, saying Sims will meet God himself soon.
  • Sims gets a good comeback when he threatens to fillet Smith like a fish but then declares him Not Worth Killing and quips that when a fish is too small, you throw it back into the river, causing his men to toss Smith off the bridge (he swims to shore on a very Negated Moment of Awesome fashion).
  • Lee uncovers a dozen covert acts of sabotage in one day and then lures the fifth columnists into attacking an empty room before he, Markus, and some other soldiers wipe them out. Even cooler is how Markus is wearing a bow tie and dinner jacket when he gets summoned to that fight, giving him quite the stylish look throughout the shootout.
  • Jeremiah and Simms finally having a duel with fists and knives after a half-season of buildup.
  • The mass Mook–Face Turn that forestalls what would have been a bloody and tragic battle, with the soldiers confronting a founder of their government over his lies and willingness to send them to die for that lie.