Waking Up | More Plot Ideas
Someone who is in a tribe is secretly an uninfected person with memories.
They might be malicious or just trying to survive.
They might be in danger as the kids grow up.
The audience could learn through an episode unrelated to the tribe from a past time where they are a side character.
They could find a cure.
It would probably just work moving forward, not retroactively.
Maybe only one person is cured and it’s awful because they’ve never been around others with this condition so they kill themselves.
Maybe they learn methods to burn in new information/knowledge through repetition over time.
Remember Sammy Jenkins
Maybe they choose to fool themselves with their journals.
Why deal with the recent or brutal death of a loved one when you can just write down that they died peacefully long ago.
Why remember that your tribe was formed through violence and cannibalism when you can record it as a joyful coming together of kindred spirits?
If you are attacked one day, do you write it down? Try for revenge? Protect yourself in the future? Or don’t write it down and just forget it ever happened to try to live in peace?
Maybe we see a tribe from one view shortly after its formation and then a different view years later.
Maybe an accident or attack causes a tribe’s home and records to be destroyed and they have to react quickly to write everything down and set up a new system before they go to sleep.
Sleeping in shifts might help.
Maybe someone has an imaginary friend but we don’t find out until. Then in a later episode we see from another view that they are just talking to themself and we have to rethink that other episode to figure out what was really happening.
The imaginary friend would have been in the pre-pandemic memories, too.
That explains why they know each other and automatically have a friendship.
Being with people you knew before the pandemic would be extremely beneficial to your mental health.
Maybe some people adapt to use chemicals to stay awake for 2 or 3 days at a time rather than sleeping every day.
Rather than 3 eight hour shifts, it could be three 24 hour shifts so you stay awake for 48 hours.
Or you wake up at 8am and stay up for 36 hours, then sleep at 10pm for 10 hours until the next 8am. So a 48 hour cycle for each person. Then there could just be 2 shifts and they take turns so half of people wake up each morning. Then no one has to live on a nighttime shift.
Would the two shifts be in conflict? What if people had sex and a baby came but they are on different shifts?
Maybe there is conflict over if people should be required to have babies? Forced and then tricked to think they chose it?
Maybe there is an herb that helps people make weak memories if it is eaten that day?
Maybe a band of angry bully types who were preteens are now in adult bodies and wreaking havoc.
Maybe a bunker maker leads people from bunker to bunker, killing the inhabitants and taking their supplies.
Maybe the reality in dreams is different.
If people are sleeping for long stretches and with drugs to keep them under, lucid dreaming could become a common practice.
People could use dreams to escape from their lives.
Maybe when someone is lucid, they still remember the day before… or maybe they can remember everything that they learn in dreams… make new memories in their dreams that they can access when they wake up the next day.
Maybe it’s just one character who does it but it has an impact on the progression of the narrative in the real world.
Maybe some class of tribal groups, like priests in a way, take drugs to stay up for as long as possible, maybe even several days.
There would need to be a value in the continuity they’d be able to provide the tribe through their sacrifice.
They’d also work in shifts.
They’d probably go crazy over time from the abuse.
Keeping track of time and date and season by the sun and moon could become common again.
Maybe they use polaroids like Memento?
That could let someone keep a pet who they didn’t know pre-pandemic.
Maybe someone keeps a stash of secret knowledge away from the tribe.
It could just be extra info for themselves or something more sinister.
Maybe someone gets sick and for the few days of their sickness they are able to make new memories.
There could be a normal episode about that person, then another episode, but instead of starting pre-infection, it starts during the sickness and they have a few days of excitement and then wake up years later and then the opening credits run. So the episode is the same character but years later.
Or it could be one episode that starts normally, but they get sick and when they go to sleep the show does not end. Instead they wake up again with memories and the show keeps going. Maybe they wake up multiple times. Then one time they go to sleep and they wake up years later.
Maybe someone commits suicide with pills in the pre-pandemic but then wakes up years later because the pills didn’t kill them.
Maybe between the infection and waking up we sometimes see flashes of images, hear spoken quotes, or see video of loose memories and things that have been burned in as a way to show us what the person remembers when they wake up to start the show.