As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
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Fridge Horror
- When the time comes to open up the food dumps, the medical officer in Sheffield Control has no alternative but to limit rations to 1000 calories a day for manual workers, and 500 calories a day for the rest of the population. For comparison, in one of the worst of the Nazi concentration camps, Mauthausen, where tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death, daily calorie intake did not reach this level until the last year of the war. Even if they manage to get the rations, large parts of the survivor population will die anyway from malnutrition, especially given the untreated effects of radiation sickness and other medical conditions resulting from the war. They are likely to be too weak to work without brutal treatment, and that'll more than likely lead to them dying off anyway. Things have become so bad that not even dying with any sort of dignity is possible anymore: You can die of radiation sickness, starve, get beaten to death by enforcers for not working enough, or you can take the easy way out - if you even have the strength or means to actually go through with it.
- The inclusion of references to real life media becomes rather disturbing when you consider that their presence means those involved in the creation of the works in question must exist In-Universe and would therefore have been caught up in the nuclear attack along with everyone else. The film makes it pretty clear that Anyone Can Die when it comes to nuclear war, and if the immediate effects don't get you, the long-term effects will. So when the kids in the makeshift classroom ten years after the war are being shown a (badly worn) video recording of Words and Pictures, chances are those featured in the episode note are either dead or facing the same struggle to survive as the rest of the population.
Fridge Brilliance
- In one of the later scenes, some of the kids born into the post-apocalyptic world are being shown a videotape of Words and Pictures. The fact that the episode being shown
is themed around skeletons is particularly apt for the setting, especially since the complete version opens with a song which includes the line "she saw the bones lying around", as well as a reading of Janet and Allan Ahlberg's 1980 picture book Funny Bones. The latter is about two human skeletons and a dog skeleton that live in a cellar, and ends by saying they still live in this cellar. Jane's maternal grandparents both died in their cellar and, since no mention is made of their bodies being removed, it's very probable that their skeletons are still there ten years later.
