Wow.

I’m still a little stunned by Bonnie’s death, not the least of which because she went out like a total badass shotgun-toting mama.

Goetz killing her gave a special poignancy, however, to the scene last episode where Stanley and Bonnie are talking on the porch about how she survived the crash that killed their parents all those years ago. She survived a horrific car crash. She survived nuclear armageddon and its aftermath. But she couldn’t survive Ravenwood. And she did it to protect Mimi, a woman who a mere few months earlier she couldn’t stand.

Rest in peace, Bonnie Richmond.

I’m going to organize the rest of this discussion according to character, starting with the most natural connection to our beloved, murdered heroine.

Stanley

Bonnie’s murder, of course, will propel Stanley into doing the right thing, at least. Didn’t you just want to smack him when he was acting all jerky about Dale using his farm? “This is not Red Dawn!” he declares. He really didn’t get it, that it’s everyone together or everyone dies alone. It took his sister taking a stand to make him realize that Jericho had to continue to stick together, now against Ravenwood, in order for anyone to truly survive.

Now Mimi’s critically wounded and has Goetz after her. Stanley’s going to need the rest of the town’s help. Hopefully, they’ll give it to him. You know that Jake already has forgiven him. If Jake stands behind him, most others will. We’ll see what happens next week.

Mimi

I don’t think Goetz realized just how smart Mimi is. C’mon, the woman was an IRS auditor! She knows her numbers. And she knows all the tricks there are to hiding them and how to properly conduct oversight and auditing. Given Goetz’s reaction to the news that Mimi could prove there was embezzlement, it’s exceedingly obvious he’s the embezzler. But just $10,000? You’d think he would have really gone for it.

Trish

Trish is going to turn in Goetz. She’s the only other person who knows why Goetz went to the Richmond farm, and she has the fact that Goetz was uninterested in investigating the embezzlement. J&R is meticulous in its record-keeping and she knows that Mimi’s too smart to have made a mistake.

Goetz is going down. The only question is whether Mimi will have to die before that happens, too.

Dale

From pissant snot-nose geeky kid to true hero of the hometown. Sure, he’s looking after his own bottom line. Sure, he’s smuggling in booze. But he’s also trying to make sure that everyone has the medicine and feed and everything else that they need that J&R isn’t supplying them.

Even Skylar wasn’t annoying this week. Go Dale!

Heather

Jake was totally right that Heather had to be brought in on everything. She’s the only one outside the military with access to Beck’s office now. And that’s pretty amazing in and of itself.

Heather’s a straight-up, no-nonsense, exceptionally smart girl. While she didn’t want to believe Hawkins, she knew that what he was saying made sense in a sick, twisted sort of way. And if Jake was vouching for Hawkins, then it had to be true.

She hates lying, though (another good feature of her character), and it nearly killed her to lie to Beck. Lying to the other soldier wasn’t that bad. But she knows she has Beck’s trust and she admires him. To lie to him straight-out like that was really tough for her. I thought she was gonna cry when he accepted her denial at face value.

I do have to say, though, that if Heather’s going to do any more espionage work, she’s going to have to look a lot less guilty, furtive and totally freaked out than she did.

Jake

Jake truly is the heart and soul of this town. He’s the one everyone was turning to when it came to figuring out how Dale was going to continue doing business. He figured out how to spring Dale from the MPs taking him to the Loomer Ridge prison. He was there for Stanley when Bonnie was dead.

Put a cape on this man and just call him SuperSkeet (lol, kricka!).

Seriously, though, Hawkins has to trust Jake a bit more. Jake has pretty good instincts on who can and can’t be trusted. Even his telling that reporter wasn’t a mistake. The reporter could be trusted. He just made the stupid mistake of calling his paper and getting caught.

Hawkins

Speaking of the other half of awesome and awesomer (Jake was awesomer this week, they trade titles every now and again), he now knows that “John Smith” is telling the truth. Besides the bomb, Hawkins now has a report, written by J&R in 1993, detailing what would happen if all these cities (gee, the same cities that got nuked in September 2006!) got nuked. No wonder the J&R and Ravenwood folks were in such a good position to do all the work they’re doing. The company’d prepared for this moment for 13 years!

At least this partly explains why Columbus, Ohio, was on the list (no offense to anyone who lives there, but, c’mon, even you had to wonder, why Columbus?). Perhaps in the report, the plan was that the feds would reconvene in Columbus, as they are now.

Hawkins played Beck like a fiddle, though. He got exactly the info he needed to into Beck’s hot little hands. It doesn’t matter any longer if Beck believes that Hawkins is hunting Sarah Mason or not.

Beck

Which Beck doesn’t appear to believe any longer. It took him, what, half a second to recognize Valente in that video? He knows that he’s in the middle of something absolutely huge.

But Beck’s a good man. He’s a soldier, but not an unquestioning soldier. He has morals, he has character. He knows right from wrong, and he knows the most important thing for him to do as a soldier is not to follow orders blindly, even if the person giving them is morally bankrupt. He is supposed to be helping the citizens of Jericho, and by God, he’s gonna do that. His uniform, don’t forget, may have the Allied States’ flag on it, but it still says, “US Army.”

He was trained as part of the U.S. Military. That’s who he swore allegiance to. And if he finds that the people now giving him orders are traitors, well, I’ve got to think that he’s going to do his level best to bring them down.

Image courtesy of CBS; motivator by Erika/kricka