“Try” is the inevitable in-between episode. It’s the fallout from the Noah/Aiden fiasco, the time of tension and suspicion before shit really goes bananas. We got a strong whiff of those bananas in the episode’s closing moments, but most of the hour was spent catching up with our side players and dropping hints about what’s to come.
When you aren’t invested enough in the lives of your fellow humans to fight on their behalf—to spot them a bullet or a fist or an improvised mace when certain death is lumbering toward them—there can be no such thing as community.
This is why the “last person on Earth” fantasy is less attractive to adults than it is to children. To say nothing of our sexual desires, we’d be thrown into the greatest existential black hole there is: What is human life without the context of other humans?
A caveat to this new distinction is that a show’s producers can petition to get it considered in the category of their choosing. It’ll be fun to see what shows will try to skirt around the rules. Downton Abbey as a comedy?! No one will see it coming.
Anyone can enjoy the good life, because the usual prerequisites for those trappings—income, status, lineage—are either irrelevant or nonexistent. Wealth is arbitrary. It’s a brave new world, indeed.
