Nightmare Fuel / Life After People

Abandoned cities are pretty creepy. An entire world without people is much, much worse.

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General

• Total blackouts worldwide following mass power outage just a day or two after people count; it pretty much warms up the viewers for what else is to come.
• Eventually, given millions of years, there will be no trace of evidence that we humans were ever here save for perhaps some fossils buried in the ground and metal scraps floating in space if we get so lucky. All of our achievements, all of our buildings, all of our records now lost and buried with time. Like we never existed in the first place.
  • The one lasting exception? Invasive species - plants, animals, pathogens - which we've wittingly or otherwise transported to regions they'd never have been able to access without us. Our final legacy: a permanent scrambling of global ecosystems, that'll keep driving vulnerable native species to extinction long after we're gone.
• Seeing your home city being abandoned in the series combines both Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker.
• Seeing-eye dogs, particularly ones with breeds, fending or trying to fend for themselves. Especially as most of them aren't suitable for such a situation without humans.
  • The thought that our precious friends will become vicious hunters and forget their masters and humanity in due time.
  • The fact that the smaller and weaker pets, such as toy breeds, as cute as they are, will not survive along with some of the more poorly designed breeds and disappear after a month or so.
  • The huge amount of pets and other animals trapped in houses and yards doomed to die of starvation or dehydration. Possibly after a bit of cannibalism.
• The collapse of the famous human-made structures and buildings both in original special and TV series is almost certainly this. The damage these structures endure over years. After several centuries, most of those buildings will either collapse... or horribly decay. Moreover, many buildings seem to fall down right on YOU.
• Every single episode of the show (and original special too) features at least one place which has been already abandoned in real life. Which pretty much tells us what would certain places look like without people to take care of them (ranging from the wrecked steamboat named Arabia to the entire towns like Pripyat or Centralia). In the words of the narrator, these are places "where life after people has already begun".
• The narrator should get a job doing trailers for horror movies. He manages to make anything he describes chilling and real. No matter how disconnected from you, no matter how far in the future, no matter how seemingly outlandish, the disasters don't sound ridiculous or irrelevant when he describes them — they sound viscerally terrifying.

Original special

• The first scene following the narration. An alarm clock goes off in a house, but there's no one to turn it off. A TV is playing static because there's no one to broadcast anything. A coffee pot on a timer is overflowing. A lonely dog wanders around the first floor, confused and lost. Looks more like the beginning of a horror movie than a documentary! Then the narration begins: "Time has run out for man. Our hold on the planet is over. Welcome to Earth. Population: Zero."
• Prypiat, Ukraine. A ghost town which residents evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster. And they just HAD to add creepy child laughter in the background, too...

The Bodies Left Behind

• Mixed with a heavy amount of squick, the eventual decomposition of all human remains in general, particularly those in cryofreeze and tombs. Thankfully, we don't see the aftermath. Except when mummies are seen decomposing and turning into skeletons and so is Lenin's body in Red Square mausoleum.
• The International Space Station would crash into the Earth 3 years after people, taking the last digitized samples of the human DNA with it.

Outbreak

• Merely three days after people, Chicago would be flooded by the eponymous river during a rainstorm.
• With no humans around to deliver medicine, there would be massive rabies outbreaks among both wild and domestic animals which would last up to 300 years after people.
• Atlanta would be overrun with kudzu. However, 50 years after people, after the kudzu dries up, it forms a tinderbox. Once lightning strikes, the kudzu ignites and burns down most of Atlanta (pictured above).
• Elevators in the Sears/Willis Tower and John Hancock Center will eventually plummet after their cables and emergency breaks inevitably fail.

The Capital Threat

• The entirety of Los Angeles being engulfed by a wildfire 10-15 years after people is really unnerving.
  • This is topped by an earthquake 50 years after people that makes quick work of most of LA.
• Washington D.C. being flooded and reverted to its original state: a lone swamp in the middle of the woods.

Heavy Metal

• The slow degradation of the Chrysler Building which eventually leads to its collapse.
• One of the last signs of working electricity in the world would be a huge billboard located on Times Square in New York. After spending three years (coated in the darkness when nights would come), however, its lights would flicker out as well, since there would be no one to replace the lightbulbs. It really shows that sometimes, the failure of a power station is not always the main reason for a blackout.

The Invaders

• The fate of the Taj Mahal in India. 1000 years after people, it would be devastated by a serious earthquake.
• The Kennedy Space Center would be destroyed by a very powerful hurricane. The launching pads would be the first to be devastated.

Bound and Buried

• A San Francisco cable car's cable snaps, sending it careening downhill. It goes so fast that it ploughs through a car.
• Centralia, PA is introduced with music and lines that create such a creepy, unnerving atmosphere that, if you didn't know better, you'd swear you were watching a horror movie trailer:
  In a windswept park, an engraved stone marks a mysterious vault. It appears to refer to a town, and yet... there's almost nothing there. Battered signs mark streets and regulate parking, but there are no cars. Graveyard walls are in disarray. Streets are paved and lined with curbs... yet there are no structures except the occasional house. A nearby road is bizarrely buckled, as if seized by a strange force of nature. This was indeed once a thriving town called Centralia... but what happened...?
• It just gets better when they tell you what happened: the coal mines underneath the town caught fire, which, of course, grew and spread over the decades. Now a raging, uncontrollable wildfire is burning under the town and will do so for the next 250 years.
• The Petronas Towers collapsing into each other and crumbling together after five centuries pass.

Sin City Meltdown

• The fate of the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Doesn't help that it's similar to what happened to chunks of the boardwalk in Hurricane Sandy.
• The fucking abandoned amusement park. Who knew that the park would have degraded so quickly after only being abandoned in 2002! And two decades after people, we get to see that it aged even worse, with one attraction flat out crumbling due to corrosion.
• Cheesy or not, the titular meltdown of wax sculptures in Las Vegas 3 days after people may be somewhat unnerving.
• While neighboring state California is notorious for seismic activity, Nevada is no stranger to earthquakes. 300 years after people, one such quake destroys what's left of Las Vegas, including the Stratosphere Tower.

Armed and Defenseless

• The fate of countless dairy cows across the whole planet. Even though some of them manage to adapt to the new life, most of them will eventually die off.
• Soviet nuclear warheads would detonate on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 25 years after people. Even worse, the shockwave would be created (with radius being 1 km.), which would kill any living sea animals within the blast radius. Even worse, those warheads belong to the K-129 Soviet submarine, which already had a tragic fate to begin with.

Road to Nowhere

• An oil refinery near Houston explodes just an HOUR after people.
• 4 days after people, the waterpipe system under Detroit fails, which leads to the entire city being flooded from beneath.

Waters of Death

• The mind-blowingly slow death of a lone caiman in a zoo's water tank. It won't escape, but being a reptile it will take it more than a year to die of hunger, and this wait will be entirely in the dark because the lights will go out long before that. Not like the other fish fared any better. Most of them would end up choking to death once oxygen levels go down. The rest would eventually die of starvation. Keep in mind this is within a week after people. Additionally, this is exactly what happened to the aquarium's occupants during Hurricane Katrina. When the staff came back, they could smell the Gulf of Mexico exhibit from outside and nearly all the tanks were filled with decaying aquatic animals.
• The devastation of New Orleans due to several hurricanes.
• And of course, the episode explores the areas of New Orleans that were abandoned post-Katrina.

Wrath of God

• The whole episode may be terrifying if you are devoted to God. It really shows that not even religious legacy will survive for long (with several exceptions).
• Christ the Redeemer's eventual downfall. Firstly, as the time goes on, the statue's hands plummet to the ground below. Eventually, the statue itself collapses after being covered by plants. The church bell which is playing during the statue's destruction does not help at all.
• How, according to the narrator, the fate of Kolmanskop, Namibia illustrates The Bible's description about the fate of Man: "From dust, you came. To dust, you shall return."

Toxic Revenge

• Remember the aforementioned Chernobyl disaster? Imagine that happening to every nuclear power plant on Earth.
• 10 years after people, methane gas would originate from Grand Central Terminal and then leak into the adjacent to it MetLife Building, causing a violent explosion.
  • That explosion would also play a crucial role in MetLife Building's collapse.
• The chlorine gas would spill out of tanks and spread across the adjacent areas, slowly poisoning and killing everything in its path. It would also turn water of the lakes into deadly acid. If the lake is not large, every living creature in that lake would be as good as dead.
• The introduction to Picher, OK, "the most toxic town in America," destroyed by leaving literally mountainous chat piles of toxic metals all over the place, sinkholes, and poisoned groundwater: "Now all that remains is poison that can't be removed and a land that can't be fixed."

Crypt of Civilization

• The fate of the titular "Crypt of Civilization". Around 6000 years after people, the plants would penetrate the walls of the crypt. Then corrosion would devour everything located in the time capsule.
• A cargo ship carrying wheat would be infested with rats who would get a horrific fate in hindsight. While they would experience a population boom, starvation and cannibalism would inevitably pick them off over time, with whoever survived becoming a prey to seagulls.
• The collapse of the Gherkin in London. The skeleton of the building survives the collapse of the floors into the ground 150 years after people - but still crumbles after yet another 150 years pass.

The Last Supper

• Abandoned supermarkets. Especially the meat and deli departments. All that rotting food is the stuff of nightmares...
  • In addition to the simulations, the episode features the real-life case of a Fort Worth grocery store^note  (later identified by some viewers as Mexica Supermarket) that was abandoned by its owners after going bankrupt — with all of the food still on the shelves. When he health department entered the building three months later (after the neighbors complained about the stench), they found, among other things jugs of spoiled milk that had exploded on the shelves, packages of lunch meat covered in gray slime, and clouds of flies so thick that the cleanup crew (who had to wear hazmat suits and oxygen tanks) couldn't see more than a few inches in front of their faces.
  • Where do most of these vermin come from, you might ask? Why, the FDS allows a certain amount of bugs, rodent hairs, and insect larvae in processed foods. (In fact, it's estimated that the average person unintentionally eats 1-2 pounds of insects this way each year.) Think about that the next time you open a jar of peanut butter or a bag of potato chips.
• The clouds of dust in a sugar refinery igniting violently. We get to see the fireball race along the conveyor belts and catwalks before hitting the silos. Eventually, the fires get so hot that the moisture in the concrete structures turns to steam and the entire plant explodes like a bomb. Worse, it's stated that at least 4 such fires currently occur in the U.S. every year.
• Taipei 101's mass damper, which initially protected the building during typhoons, eventually fails, bulldozing the below 88 floors and crash-landing below ground level, bringing down the rest of the building.

Home Wrecked Home

• The gas explosion in the empty kitchen which happens just a single day after people. It is also implied that such explosions would occur worldwide.
• The San Remo apartments burn down after rags soaked with linseed-oil paint spontaneously combust.
• The collapse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Just imagine the tallest building on the planet falling over on you.
• The Co-op City in Bronx part of New York would collapse into the watery grave one hundred years after people.

Holiday Hell

• Salton City. A once-bustling resort town turned into what could best be described as "a desert with a lot of garbage in it".
• The power in the Always Christmas store going out in the beginning. Unlike previous episodes, where the power grid failures were not given special attention, in this episode, as the power goes out, the Christmas song which had been playing in an empty place without humans, becomes more and more distorted until it completely fades into obscurity and the animatronics shutting down en masse.
  • And what happens to it in a span of decades is not much better. 80 years later, and the roof has collapsed completely, with some snow covering the floor. Even the narrator describes the store as looking "much less like Christmas".
• The fate of domesticated reindeers. The ones who don't die during the first days after people or join their own wild counterparts (caribou), will be eventually hunted down and slaughtered by predators.
  • An even worse fate awaits domesticated turkeys served for the Thanksgiving Day. Partially, Cruel Mercy occurs here, as they are spared from being slaughtered...only to die in a complete isolation while being unable to get out.
• A year after people, the wind turbines at the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm would be spun by the wind so fast they would eventually fall apart, one by one. By the time 20 years rolls around, only a small handful are barely working, unable to keep the power grid of Palm Springs from failing.
• Palm Springs itself would be completely engulfed with sand and erased after over a century, with the sky tramway complex being the last to fall. Specifically, it folds in and plummets in the abyss below after a cable car crashes into one of the towers.

Waves of Devastation

• Just 10 years after people, Sacramento's Folsom Dam will break and the resulting floodwaters would demolish everything in the city.
  • In the Sacramento airport, many airplanes would be carried off by the waves towards the terminal so fast that they would crash through the windows of the waiting lobby like projectiles and then devastate the whole building (with the empty city being next on the course). Just imagine being in that building at that moment... Oh wait, you don't have to, since the crash is seen right from the lobby's P.O.V, with the airplane heading straight at the viewer nose-first.
• Similarly to Sacramento, many cities in the Netherlands would end up flooded within months.

Sky's The Limit

• Within 5 years, the flare circuits in Air Force One fails and deploys the plane's false target flares, creating a fire on the plant-covered tarmac. And since the plane is always filled with fuel, this causes it to explode!
• There is something very eerie about KTAO Radio station still broadcasting after the disappearance of humans for fifteen years non-stop before shutting off after the main computer processor overheats.

Depths of Destruction

• The statues, which are located in Underwater Sculpture Gardens (outside of St. George's, Grenada) were already designed in a creepy way, but in the end, they would eventually decay, get covered by the eel, and then turn into the coral reef.
• The Geysers geothermal power site in California would blow up long after the power outage because of overheating. Even worse, we see a small group of deer whose curiosity got better of them wandering into the plant's territory before they are engulfed by the explosion.

Take Me To Your Leader

• The slow decay of Ulysses S. Grant's Mausoleum.
• The San Francisco Naval Shipyard is used as the demonstration of what the Hiroshima bomb was capable of doing. Yes, THAT bomb. No wonder the site was abandoned for good afterwards. The eerie music during the exploration of this place doesn't help matters.

Latinoamerica Sin Humanos

• One day after people, many favela regions and slums would suffer fire damage due to numerous short circuits in the electrical boxes.
• Lake Texcoco would reform, wiping away most of Mexico City. What does remain of it will be mercilessly destroyed by a volcanic eruption one thousand years after people vanish.
• Christ the Redeemer looks even more damaged by nature here, complete with several vines growing out of his eye. His collapse is not any better than in Wrath of God.
• The closing credits show Sun expanding so much it eventually consumes Earth and several other planets in the Solar System, ensuring that the last traces of human legacy will be gone forever. Even worse? Since every star has no indefinite lifespan, Sun entering supernova and engulfing everything is inevitable, no matter how long it may seem to be living.

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