Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘Blaze Of Gory’

2) “The Night The Sky Fell”

To be honest, part of this is on me. You see, watching last week’s episode, what little we saw of Iris and Hope’s recollection of the night the apocalypse hit, made it seem like the destruction we saw in Omaha (Or…is it Lincoln?) was, primarily, due to a plane falling out of the sky (Similar to Flight 462), with so much of the girls’ flashbacks focusing on them and their parents running into the crash site, and the fires and destruction not looking anywhere near as spread or as numerous as what we’ve seen of the destruction of Atlanta and Los Angeles (In The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead, respectively).

I was incorrect in that assessment.

As we learn from Iris, Hope, and Elton (As well as Felix, but, we’ll get to that in a bit) and their description of the titular “Blaze Of Gory”, it seems that, indeed, Omaha (Or Lincoln, whichever) was among the many cities which became the recipient of the military’s Operation: Cobalt, the government’s plan to try to eliminate as many empties as possible.

This raises questions based on what we already know. For example: In the first episode of The Walking Dead, Morgan tells Rick that the government told people to go to certain major cities, like Atlanta, where they’d set up refugee centers. Was Omaha or Lincoln such a city? Why? Was there a specific reason? Was it because of the relative distance from major population centers, like Chicago?

Another question is why was the city so (Relatively) undamaged? I know that, realistically, there was only so much destruction that they could probably do on set, but, in universe, if the city was bombarded by the military (Which it was), then, why does there seem to be so little evidence of it? Sure, plants would have grown over some of the houses or craters, and, eventually, the weather would wear away many of the scorches on the buildings and streets, but…all of them? All but the one crater we see after the kids’ first run-in with an empty, and the one destroyed building survived the bombing unscathed?

It’s all very confusing to me. Maybe, as we learn more about everyone’s backstories, we’ll learn more about what happened, as Iris, Hope and Felix refer to it, “The Night The Sky Fell”.