As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
How come only Ruth's eyes are messed up?
- When Ruth dies, she appears to be blinded and prematurely aged by intensified solar radiation caused by the destruction of the ozone layer. Why has nobody around her suffered the same affliction?
- It's likely that most of the apparently elderly people seen towards the end are also Younger Than They Look as a result of prolonged exposure to radiation.
Those are Skewed Priorities, y'all.
- There is also a scene set at least a year after the war where one of the characters steals grain from a storage building. We hear a helicopter hovering overhead. Why are the authorities wasting precious fuel on patrolling the air instead of posting guards around the site?
- Watsonian answer: Maybe they felt they were in a position to waste aviation fuel. During the post-strike recovery phase of the 1980 Square Leg
exercise, logs were made of county authorities' requests for military support; in one such instance, Gloucestershire authorities 'requested' assistance for "Ministry of Agriculture officers who have been prevented by [a] hostile crowd from arranging the dispatch of food from a market garden", and the military 'response' to that incident did include a Wessex helicopter. Now, these logs were 'recorded' two months after the 'strike' as opposed to Threads' longer timescale, and in any case Square Leg probably was as ridiculously optimistic as any other nuclear exercise of the period, but the producers of this very film did supposedly consult the exercise logs to help determine just how bad things would get, so... - As for Doylistic answers, perhaps the production team momentarily forgot just how bleak their post-strike Sheffield was supposed to be and succumbed to Rule of Cool (insofar as a practically nonexistent government's helicopters hovering over a post-nuclear hellscape can be deemed to be 'cool'), or perhaps a third party's helicopter was close enough to the filming location to be audible and the production team was unable or unwilling to reshoot the sequence, or perhaps they did reshoot the sequence but the take with the accidental helicopter noise proved to be more usable...
- Assuming the strategic fuel reserves survived the war, what remained of the military and law enforcement got most, if not all, of it: that would explain how they were able to fly helicopters for a bit longer. Local supplies from places like farms and rural petrol stations would have allowed survivors to use machinery in the first post-war harvest.
- Watsonian answer: Maybe they felt they were in a position to waste aviation fuel. During the post-strike recovery phase of the 1980 Square Leg
Existence Post-Nukes.
- When the bomb fell, Ruth would have been in her first trimester of being pregnant. (The bomb fell in May and her daughter was born in December).The amount of radiation would have most certainly caused her daughter to be born severely deformed or even stillborn. However the movie shows her daughter is born with no deformities and in a healthy condition.
- It is possible that the radiation could have affected Ruth's daughter. This could explain her English and inability to feel emotions.
- On the subject of her infant daughter, it’s amazing that she survived into becoming a teenager what with the radiation - chances are Ruth would have struggled to breast feed (malnutrition, radiation, ptsd etc.). Again it just seems so strange that a baby would survive with all the odds stacked against her.
- And how do we know that child's name is Jane, since we never hear another character use it? All There in the Manual, such as the script?
- Her name is mentioned in the credits (played by Victoria O'Keefe).
- Also, when Jane's about to give birth, it's clear that she knows what is happening since she repeatedly says the words "baby" and "coming". But how does she know? Her education is far below the level of a pre-war teen like her Aunt Alison, having consisted of little more than watching ropey videocassettes of educational programmes like Words and Pictures with a "teacher" who just sits mouthing along with the dialogue on the tape and makes no attempt to engage the kids she's meant to be teaching. So presumably Jane's sex education has been essentially non-existent, meaning she wouldn't necessarily associate the symptoms of pregnancy and the signs of labour with her encounter with Gaz and Spike, much less what happened between her and one of the boys in the barn.
- It's possible that, before she died, Ruth did teach her a bit, though, perhaps, Jane did learn a little from observation, as people can reproduce (not well, but still).
- Yet-uglier thought: Ruth apparently resorted to trading sexual favors for food to sustain herself and Jane. It's entirely possible that Jane's wasn't her only childbirth ... just the only one in which the baby survived. Ruth's daughter may have known what was happening to her because she'd seen it happening to her mum before.
