Five Decisions Will Define the Smith Family This Weekend
A door. A neighbor. A trigger pulled by a seventeen-year-old. A prayer. A rule that didn’t exist five minutes ago.
Episodes 3 and 4 of Survival Dispatch: Remnant drop Saturday and Sunday. By the time the credits roll on Sunday night, the Smith family will not be the same family the audience met in Episodes 1 and 2.
Five decisions are going to do that to them. Five moments where there is no good answer, only a less wrong one. Five places in the next two episodes where Mark and Sarah and Jake will look at each other and understand that the old life ended sometime in the last twelve seconds and they are now living in whatever comes after.
I’m not going to tell you how any of them go. I am going to tell you what they are.
~ Chris
A NEIGHBOR
The Smiths have lived three houses down from the same man for nine years. They have waved from driveways. They have signed for a package once. He is a widower and a quiet drinker and the man who shovels his own walk in February, and the man who is now standing in his bathrobe at the end of his driveway facing the wrong direction at seven in the morning.
Twelve-year-old Emily is the first one who notices what the adults almost miss. The way he is standing. The angle of his head. The fact that he has not blinked in forty seconds. Mark and Sarah see what she sees a beat behind her, and the world inside that house changes in the time it takes a daughter to lift a pencil.
A DOOR
Sarah lays down a rule at the dining room table over coffee that is too strong because she is not done thinking yet. She says it out loud and she means it. We don’t open the door.
Then somebody knocks.
A TRIGGER
Mark Smith has owned a Glock 19 for four years and has not fired it at a person in his life. He raises it for the first time in Episode 3. He notices, in the part of his brain that is still keeping score, that his hand is steady. He thinks, that is interesting. I would have thought my hand would shake.
But Mark is not the one who finishes it.
His seventeen-year-old son is. Jake puts the round that ends it. From twelve inches. In his own kitchen. With the family dog standing over the body and his mother behind a basement door praying in a rhythm only Sarah Smith would recognize.
What that does to a boy who was playing lacrosse three weeks ago is the question Episode 3 leaves on the table and Episode 4 begins to answer.
A PRAYER
Sarah Smith reads her Bible in the early mornings. She has done this for years, privately, the way a person carries a thing they do not want to explain to anyone who has not also carried it. Her faith has been a quiet thing for most of her marriage.
By Sunday night her faith is no longer quiet. She prays at a basement door with her forehead against the wood and her hand flat against her chest, and she prays for someone she does not know how to help, and she prays for someone she is about to have to fight, and she prays for her husband and her son to have steady hands and clear judgment because she does not know what else to ask for.
It is the kind of prayer that does not show up in church. It is the kind of prayer that shows up when church is gone.
A RULE THAT DID NOT EXIST FIVE MINUTES AGO
By the end of Sunday night the Smith family is operating on a set of rules they did not have on Friday. Some of them are tactical. Some of them are spiritual. All of them were paid for in something the family is not going to get back.
The hardest rule is the one Mark gives Jake in the front hallway with a small body leaning against the front door. He gives the instruction in seven words. The boy says it back to him. The boy is seventeen years old. The instruction is the right instruction.
It is also the kind of instruction a father carries for the rest of his life.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
Five decisions. Two episodes. One weekend that the audience is going to feel the way the Smiths feel it.
Episode 3: The Man at the Mailbox — drops Saturday.
Episode 4: The Child at the Door — drops Sunday.
Subscribe to Remnant now so both episodes hit your inbox the second they drop. Paid subscribers get early access, bonus content, and the version of this show I’m building specifically for the people riding it out with me from the start.
Godspeed,
Chris Heaven, CEO
Survival Dispatch
Keep scrolling for a message just for paid subscribers …