i kind of love how from the very beginning this show establishes the cruel and often random nature of tragedies. they'd gotten the water to work and everything seemed good, and then the ammonium nitrate is discovered and the explosion happens before the crew has a chance to get out of the way. the fire started because an employee forgot to take the aluminum foil off his burrito before he microwaved it. tragic, random. terrible things like this happen every day.
toward the end of the ep, judd says something to owen about the different reactions to the ways they both lost their crews, owen's being a highly publicized incident that happened in nyc while judd's crew died in a manure fire in texas.
and there's something about that, rewatching the pilot after the show's over, the way so much came from this tragedy. so much meaning, so many lives changed. if it hadn't happened, these people wouldn't have been brought together in austin, wouldn't have made all of these memories. so much would be different. but ultimately, all of it did happen because of a random, tragic event, which is.... how it goes, a lot of the time. there's no sense to be made of it. it didn't happen for a reason, it just happened.
that can be said about so many things on this show, and i really like how the emphasis is not necessarily about deriving a specific, deeper meaning from tragedy, but taking what's broken afterward and doing what's possible. honoring loss and trying to make the most out of every day.
