How did the children eat?

Given how the virus seems to drive you crazy while it's killing you, perhaps a side-effect was that it kept the children mentally as children and any that began to mature would go crazy instead of maturing?

 

The brain is part of the body. If the children's physical development was arrested, their brain development would have been arrested also. Would you have been capable of learning how to scrounge and forage for food, let alone know how to plant crops, when you were 8, 9 or 10 years old? Maybe if you were born and raised on a farm, but the Onlies all seemed to be city kids.

 

But are those changes due to physiological changes in the brain or psychological ones? Or both? A physiological halt caused by the virus would retard the kids development, but if such changes are just psychological teacakes point is worthwhile, why don't they grow different from one another if not what we call adult?

 

Canned goods only stay good for a few years. Realistically after about 5-10 years they would still go bad (and that is really pushing them past their shelf life). MRE's, freeze dried food or food placed under nitrogen would last 50-100 years.

They would have to forage and hunt for food to survive which is feasible for the older children. The episode is a good story but in reality those children would have gone through a very traumatic experience and face all kinds of survival hardships such as no electricity, the elements, predators etc. that would not have been palatable to show on TV back then.

 

I loved that episode as a kid but when I watched it as a grownup after having kids of my own I found it terrifying.

 

There are examples of canned food going back to WW1 that are still good. And honeyed goods from centuries ago that are still fine!

 

I first saw it on its original network run when I was 15. I didn't believe Michael J. Pollard as a 12 year old kid even then.

 

I'd accept 100 years, 300 years is maybe a bit too far. Still there might be a can here and there that maybe could survive.

Honey can survive indefinitely but can you live on honey?

Can fruit trees survived 300 years untended or maybe little trees just self-seeded?

 

I agree! In fact, I'm doing a presentation on the episode for a class I'm taking about the horror genre... It's easy to make the argument that this episode crosses into horror as much as it is sci-fi.