On a mission in Denver to find books for Thunder Mountain, Kurdy gets involved in defending the library from a book-burning gang, while Jeremiah helps out an old friend.

Lee sends Jeremiah and Kurdy to Denver to retrieve some technical books for use when they begin rebuilding the world. The library is one of the few still in existence, protected by Edgar, a librarian with a shotgun.

The Order of the Final Grace, an armed group, have been causing trouble for the librarian. They steal books and hold burning rituals to stir up support. They believe that the previous generation's over-reliance on knowledge was its downfall.

We get a little more flavour of Kurdy's literary leanings here, after his poetry reading in "Journeys End in Lovers Meeting" and his interest in history in "The Red Kiss".

Jeremiah's mother was a teacher, and used to read poetry to him.

Jeremiah lived for a while in Denver. He looks up his old friend Red, who is now living with a disabled woman called Maggie who makes "angels" by melting plastic spoons. She was crippled when she was hit by a car when she was ten. She promised she would scatter her father's ashes in the middle of the river, which turns out to involve the use of a disused mining rig.

Despite care-taking the library, Edgar never learned to read, as the Big Death came shortly before he was old enough to go to school. Kurdy begins to teach him. It is implied that he has a form of dyslexia that has prevented him from succeeding when he has tried to learn in the past.

"I've got a thing about libraries, man… they're more sacred than churches to me," says Kurdy. To which Edgar of course responds, "if you help me defend this place, you could even wind up Assistant Librarians."

An excerpt from the pilot provides the contrasting view: "All these books. Not one of them tell you what to do when you run out of water. How to make bullets. How to bury your mother and your father."

"Whatever your problem is, Edgar, it's not as stubborn as me." - Kurdy.

Edgar and Kurdy quote from "Harlem", by Langston Hughes, part of Montage of a Dream Deferred. Hughes was a black poet from Harlem who died in 1967. It's not hard to see a parallel between Egan's choice of this poet and his mention of James Baldwin in the previous episode. The theme of the poem is obviously linked to both Edgar and Maggie's storylines, too. The full poem can be found here.

Interesting thematic branching here - Jeremiah's homily to Maggie suggests he lives only for the present, whereas Kurdy sees the books as a vital link to the past to be preserved for the future. Of course, Jeremiah's drive to find out what happened to his father has more in common with Maggie's seeking closure in the scattering of her father's ashes than he would like to admit.

The scene from the pilot is unusual in that it doesn't seem to have made it to the broadcast version, making the appearance of the blonde girl in this episode a little odd. Possibly the scene was filmed for "The Long Road" and edited out for reasons of time.

Was Maggie's father killed by the Big Death? It seems unlikely that formal cremations took place when hundreds of millions were dying a week. The timing of her "promise" is a bit suspect too - the car accident happened when she was ten, and it was already too late to take her to a hospital, so she must have made the promise some time before that, which seems a little young to agree to such a specific request.

A typical Sam Egan episode, this - the Jeremiah half is another absurd premise that somehow just about works; the Kurdy half is a bit dour but, as with "The Bag", invests a certain thematic resonance into aspects of civilisation that have become very rare. At this stage in the season, it's hard to see it as much more than a filler episode, but there's little really wrong with it.