Summary
More aftershocks send Ollie, Ben, and Blake outside. They run through the streets with other screaming people. When they stop to catch their breath, Blake says she can’t believe Daniel just took off, calling him an “asshole.” Blake says she needs to find an electronics store. Ollie offers his San Francisco guidebook, saying it has everything. In Dr. Hayes’s office, he and his students analyze the data they have from monitoring systems along the fault line. He tells the journalist this is not over and that they need to get on the air to tell people. They run to the media center and enlist students to help hack into news broadcasts to get the information out that more earthquakes are coming.
In the abandoned electronics store, Blake, Ben, and Ollie look for a landline to rig up a means of communication. Blake calls Ray and her mother in the helicopter. Blake tells Emma that Daniel left her after talking to a security guard. Emma is incensed. Ray tells his daughter to get to higher ground at Coit Tower, where they once had a birthday party. She asks how Emma and Ray are together. Ray says they’ll explain later. After the call ends, Emma phones Daniel’s voicemail. She tells him, “You left my daughter. If you’re not already dead, I’m going to fucking kill you.” She shares a smile with Ray, who says, “Attagirl.”
Daniel walks, missing a boot, with other stunned people. A building falls and a rush of debris comes down the road. People run for the sides of the street to grab onto things. Daniel pulls another man away from the drainpipe he clings to so Daniel can cling to it. The man falls back and is blown away in the wave of dust as Daniel survives.
In the helicopter, Ray and Emma discuss the photos Blake keeps of their trip to San Francisco in her memory box. They are over Bakersfield, ninety minutes from San Francisco. An engine suddenly blows up. Ray says they have a gearbox failure and calmly informs his wife that they’re going to have to crash. Ray descends and pulls up, trying to set the helicopter down carefully. However, his propellor hits a lamppost and the helicopter spins into a storefront. The strip mall is being looted and shots are being fired. Ray and Emma go to the parking lot and check car doors until they see a truck with its door open. Ray begins to hot wire it, seeing that it has been hot-wired once. A man looting TVs puts a gun to his head. Ray turns and punches the man, taking the gun. He starts the truck and drives off with the man out cold on the ground.
At Caltech, the journalist interviews Dr. Hayes about the mechanics of the earthquake. Dr. Hayes says San Francisco will get hit again. Their models are predicting a 9.5 or greater. He says that even though it is happening in California, “you will feel it on the East Coast.” He turns to the camera and warns the people of San Francisco to either flee or drop everything and hold on for their lives.
The scene cuts to Ray and Emma speeding North along the highway, 184 miles from San Francisco. They argue about Ray’s reticence since their daughter Mallory died. He says he doesn’t want to talk about it: she’s gone, and now Emma’s gone. Emma says this is why she didn’t stick around. They pass a couple waving at them from the side of the road, apparently needing help. Ray ignores them, but soon has to stop suddenly, just before a massive gap in the road. Ray and Emma get out and identify the rift as the San Andreas fault.
Emma and Ray drive back to the elderly couple and thank them for warning them. Ray sees the man’s aviation hat and asks where he got it. They give the couple their truck and get in a small plane at a nearby airport hangar. Emma and Ray get in the cockpit. Ray tells her he didn’t know how to deal with Mallory’s death. He says it was his idea to take her rafting that day.
As he speaks, there are flashbacks to his daughter falling out of the raft. Ray says that afterward, nothing was perfect in the way it used to be. He says he should have let Emma in, but he didn’t know how. He says he’s sorry for how things ended. Emma says if he couldn’t save their daughter, then no one could have. They both say they miss her so much. Emma puts her hand on Ray’s leg and says, “Let’s go get our daughter.” Ray fires up the plane and takes off.
Ollie leads Blake and Ben to the pickup spot using his guidebook. Ben asks why Blake wears two of the same necklace. She says one belonged to her sister. They come upon an abandoned fire truck and pull out an armored box of emergency supplies. There is a radio. Blake says they can listen in on the channel for first responders, which every city has. Ben then sees that the tower is surrounded by dust and flames. Blake says they need a plan.
Ollie says the highest point is Nob Hill. However, Ben stops them, seeing that everyone else in the city is walking in the opposite direction, toward the water and the Golden Gate Bridge. Ollie tells his brother to trust Blake because she knew about hacking the landline when cellphone signals are down. He agrees, and they set off.
Analysis
Peyton builds on the theme of ingenuity with Blake’s phone call to her parents in the helicopter. With cellphone signals down, Blake knows from her father’s rescue education that she can still call him if she finds an electronics store and hacks into a phone line. Meanwhile, at Caltech Dr. Hayes also relies on ingenuity to broadcast a warning about further earthquakes to come. With the help of media lab students, he can hack into national media broadcasts and hopefully save lives.
In an instance of dramatic irony, Blake learns during her call to Ray’s helicopter that her legally separated parents are together amid the chaos. Blake also tells her mother about how Daniel abandoned her when she was trapped—evidence that he is nothing like Blake’s father. The news of Daniel’s cowardice enrages Emma, who leaves Daniel a threatening voicemail. This development delights Ray, who wishes to repair his relationship with Emma.
Although they just narrowly escaped a near-death experience, Ray and Emma quickly encounter another when Ray’s gearbox fails, forcing a crash landing in Bakersfield, California. They land in the middle of a shootout between business owners and looters who are taking advantage of local first responders being preoccupied with earthquake-related emergencies. Ray and Emma must use ingenuity to escape the situation and continue with their rescue mission. In an instance of situational irony, they find a truck to steal that has already been stolen once, making it easy to hot-wire again.
But in an instance of dramatic irony, Dr. Hayes makes a nationwide broadcast about his models predicting an even-larger earthquake still to come. While he warns everyone to flee San Francisco as soon as possible, Emma and Ray speed toward the epicenter of the next quake, ignorant of Dr. Hayes’s prediction. Ray and Emma are preoccupied with rehashing the issue of Ray’s reticence around their daughter Mallory’s death. Repressing his emotions and avoiding discussing his grief, Ray simply says that Mallory is gone, just as Emma is gone. Emma admits that this tendency toward emotional repression is why she left Ray.
However, after nearly driving into the San Andreas Fault itself, Ray and Emma reconcile the argument. Having traded the truck to an elderly couple for a small plane, Ray confesses to Emma that he never knew how to talk about his grief because he felt responsible for Mallory’s rafting-accident death. Emma reassures him he can let go of his grief because if he couldn’t save her, no one could have. Having restored intimacy and trust, the couple sets off to save their other daughter while they can.
The theme of grief continues with Ben’s question about Blake’s necklaces. Unlike her father, who has suppressed his feelings and avoided talking about Mallory, Blake displays her duplicate necklaces as a reminder of her dead sister. With this symbolic of her active effort to memorialize her sister, Blake shows she has had a much healthier approach to confronting her grief than Ray has. This way of actively grieving also explains why Blake keeps photos of their family trip to San Francisco in her memory box—a fact that seemed to surprise Ray when he told Emma in an earlier scene.
