WMG / The Last Ship

Book

Series

Amy Granderson

• The elder Granderson is a Patriot. Now that she's in a world with electricity, she's carrying out Jackson Davis's mandate in another Crapsack World, to render the United States "pure".

The Vrenya

• We have not yet seen the last of the Vrenya. After the events of "Two Sailors Walk Into A Bar," the remaining senior officers aboard Vrenya stage a mutiny and eliminate Admiral Ruskov. Badly damaged but still seaworthy, the Vrenya seeks out the Nathan James; the mutineers hope to explain their situation to Chandler and gain some help or at least leniency. They eventually make their way to Baltimore harbor and show up just as Granderson's faction is seizing control of the ship. The distraction enables the crew of Nathan James to retake the ship, regroup, and form a plan to shut down Granderson with the help of their newfound allies.
  • Possible, if everyone doesn't die first, given that Sorenson is walking freely around.
  • Jossed. Niels showed up on a beach and it is clearly implied that the entire ship's population has since died.

The Immunes' Behavior

• The immune did not become Brainwashed and Crazy because of Ramsey and his cultists, but rather they are Brainwashed and Crazy because of the same thing which causes them to be immune. Except for Bertrise, every single immune we have seen seems to have an in-born cult-like mentality from the moment they discover they are immune. In fact, the reason Bertrise is immune is not even the same as the other immunes, but rather because she has and autoimmune disease which attacks the virus automatically. Unless five percent of the human race spread across the globe rather evenly suffers from the same autoimmune disease, it seems likely that there is some other factor contributing to their immunity. We also see that the immune (or "Chosen", as they prefer to call themselves almost universally) are far less stable and far more obsessed with spreading the disease than they should be, considering they seemed to be rather reasonable people before the Red Flu outbreak. Sorenson was trying to create a cure for the plague and seemed to genuinely want to save lives before, but after turning himself into a Typhoid Mary, he seems to have no problem infecting masses. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the Ramseys would have been allowed into the Royal Navy if they were as unstable before the plague as after. We even see this in the case of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, aka the new President, who, by all indications was a reasonable man before the plague, but is now just as much of a cultist as everyone else, even comparing the plague to The Great Flood. If the theory that the plague was engineered by an as-of-yet unknown source turns out to be true, it seems likely that this behavior would also have been engineered. To what end, however, is unknown.

The Presidential Succession

• One factor that complicated matters a lot in Jericho was the existence of multiple contenders for the succession to the Presidential office - some were truly legitimate, while others had rather flimsy Constitutional support for their claims and relied on their paramilitary forces' ability to keep control over territories big enough to establish self-sufficiency. There will be a more reasonable official than either Amy Granderson or President Michener, who will have a competing claim to the US Presidency and this will complicate Chandler's plan to steal Sean Ramsey's playbook and use a puppet President to assert control over the remaining functioning government apparatus.
  • Appears to be Jossed as of "Safe Zone". The main threat now is from Sean's faction who are claiming that the vaccine made by Dr. Scott is ineffective. However, in a situation portrayed by The Last Ship, the succession of the office can become fragmented and rushed. It is possible a legitimate contender for the succession could still complicate things.
  • Completely Jossed as of the finale. Michener gets sworn in as the legitimate President of the United States, and nobody contests his inauguration.

Season 3

• Doctor Scott will survive, but her attempted assassination will refocus Michener and Chandler on the need to restabilize the rest of the world. The Season 3 arc will have Slattery, now in command of the Nathan James, coordinating with the other remnants of the US Navy to help distribute more of the cure, while a breakaway immune cult in Europe will get its hands on a nuclear bomb or a biowarfare bomb. Slattery will have to use all his detective and military skills to track down where they are hiding and get the bomb defused before the immune cult can try one last strike against the "un-chosen".
  • Jossed. The series is refocusing on Asia, and Rachel is dead.

The virus hasn't actually mutated.

• Peng has been deliberately swapping out vials with placebos to hoard more of the cure for himself and who he wants to deem worthy of treatment, so as to clear the field for his seizure of power in Asia.
  • Confirmed. The cure doesn't work if a lectin coating is introduced to the patient before the cure.

Kara (Foster) Green will become President.

• If not through appointment to the job after Michener's apparent suicide, she'll win the next election to govern as he would.
• Elevating this probability is that Shaw and the regional leaders have essentially taken out most of the upper echelons of the central US government, leaving only Kara to fight back and put down the coup.
  • Jossed (at least as of Season 3). Michener's VP, Howard Oliver, remains the President.

Season 4

• Season 4 will involve a civil war between the former United States. Chandler and co. will be able to reunite most of them, with the southern bloc probably being the last holdout. Senator Price, the Texan woman who has gotten much more focus than the other "Senators" (i.e. warlords), will be the season's Big Bad.
• The southern territory may even get pushed in until only Texas is left, which would make an interesting plotline because Texas, which entered the United States as an independent nation, is also the only one that can legally secede. If this happened, they might become very isolationist and backwards, like an American version of North Korea.
  • All Jossed. Season 3 ends with Shaw and the regional leaders all dead or imprisoned, Oliver reinstated and the US starting to recover from the whole ordeal. Whether this is all a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide.

Debut of the Zumwalt-class

• With the Zumwalt and the Michael Monsoor now up and running, who wants to bet that a Last Ship version of America's latest destroyer class will show up sooner or later?
  • Not this troper, considering that this class of ship is brand new as of 2016, several years after the plague hit in the show's universe. It will probably take quite a long time for fields such as shipbuilding to even catch up to where they had been before society temporarily collapsed, let alone make any advances. If this trope is confirmed, it will be a case of Anachronism Stew and Rule of Cool.
  • Documents in the show suggest that the in-verse year is 2014; as well it is probably Jossed given the serious economic straits the post-plague USA is in. Rebuilding just the existing class of ships may be a pipe dream for many years to come.
  • On the other hand, one can argue that the show is already deep within Anachronism Stew for a number of reasons.
    • First is the fact the Nathan James, Hayward and Shackleton all had hull numbers past 150 (DDG-151, DDG-157 and DDG-162 respectively), whereas the latest Arleigh Burke, the Rafael Peralta, is only DDG-115. That means there are at least forty-seven additional Arleigh Burkes in existence in the Last Ship compared to real life.
    • Second, it should be noted that the Flight III Arleigh Burkes are scheduled to start at DDG-124, yet the James and her sisters are all clearly Flight IIAs.
    • Third and further on is the case of the Achilles, which was supposed to have been built around the same time as HMS Ajax (the seventh and otherwise final member of the class). In real life, only the third Astute-class boat, HMS Artful, has been launched by 2014 while the fourth, HMS Audacious, isn't scheduled to be commissioned until 2018.
    • And finally, there's the Vrenya, which is designated an "older style" Kirov-class battlecruiser and having been originally mothballed during the 90s. If that's the case, then Rushkov was even more insane than he was presented, as outside the youngest Kirov, the Pyotr Velikiy, the class remains "in reserve" (read left to rot in their ports) because years of disuse have caused their nuclear reactors to degrade. To the point where it's too dangerous to recommission, modernize or scrap them.
    • All that said, technical accuracy seems to be of the least concern with the show writers, and an unlikely factor on whether the Zumwalt will appear or not.

Seasons 4 and 5

• Now that S3 has basically wrapped up all the threads left by the Asia arc, there is Europe to look back to, as well as a shaky rebuilding of the USA now that the regional leaders' coup has been put down. The next two seasons will thus focus on the remnants of the Immune cult and the instability in Asia caused by the power vacuum left due to Peng's death. Also, what's going on in Africa and South America? The series still has some worldbuilding left to do. It may be that another imminent threat to world peace could come from those quarters; Peng has already demonstrated the effectiveness of biological warfare.
• Season 4 ends up back in Europe where they are trying to cure a plant mutation of the disease. Season 5 is set in the Caribbean, with a Venezuelan Big Bad who attacks the USA with a cyber attack & air bombing.
• The new bad guys in Europe are Nazis, or something similar to it. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it sounds like they're trying to create a new Master Race, rebuilding the world in their own image.
  • The Season 4 bad guy Doctor Velik was actually trying to use the cure to turn humans into pacifists.