Tom’s Reviews > White Noise > Status Update

SIMUVAC conduct a disaster simulation. Steffie plays a victim. Denise steals the Dylar and refuses to give it back until she is told the truth about what it is.

Jack gets the Dylar analysed by a colleague who says that the drug is unknown and extraordinary.

The wind changes direction. They have to evacuate again. A rumour starts that they are to release organisms into the cloud that will suck up the toxin and decompose it. This makes Babette feel scared.

"Scared of what?"
"The sky, the earth, I don't know."
"The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear."
“Why is that?” she said.

AI.

Heinrich comes into his element talking about the event. Babette reads horoscopes and predictions to the blind. Heinrich talks to Jack about how nobody knows anything, how if you went back in time, you wouldn’t know how to make glass or what a nucleotide is. Jack is told that death might be inside him. Murray reassures him.

The airborne toxic event. Really great seeing this family dynamic we’ve learnt so much about and how it bends to this disaster. Delayed symptoms. Description of black cloud. Heinrich gleeful.

More back-and-forth between Jack and Heinrich. All really good. Babette appears on TV.

It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I'd seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I?

Bee’s presence makes them all self conscious.

Tweedy and Bee show up in Iron City. A plane almost goes down and a survivor tells Jack all about it.

Misinformation in the family. They go shopping.

Wilder cries for nearly seven hours straight.