I'm not sure about the operation, maybe it was an off the hoof idea to calm Burke down once they realised he wasn't proving as amenable as they would have liked. It was a thread that didn't go anywhere.
I think the creepiness was an act with Pam , to some degree, but perhaps something she evolved into before remembering who she really was. I do think they overdid it early on though.
I think Sheriff Pope may have had a similar arc if he hadn't been killed because you got the initial impression that he was a decent enough bloke who'd just made some bad choices (of course he might just have remained loyal to Pilger). After what happened to group A I guess it would have been easy to imagine that it was in everyone's best interests if group B were kept under a tighter reign, or at least easy for Pilger to convince everyone that that's the right thing to do, and once the ball starts rolling...well, the sad truth is that not everyone involved in the Holocaust was naturally evil, sociopathic or lacking in moral decency.
The whole house of cards does fall down upon closer examination though. Surely the logical thing to do would be to wake people up one at a time and slowly make them aware of where they are/what's happened. They had psychologists on hand, they could monitor how well people were reacting to the truth. Those who couldn't handle it could be offered the option of going back in the freezerinos. Sure it would take time but they seem to have plenty of that.
Of course the better option would have been to only freeze volunteers, or at least choose your targets with greater care. In at least some instances they did seem to just grab people off the street. Kidnapping people is bad enough, but taking people away from families just compounds the problem, take Kate's husband with his fiancée or Juliette Lewis' character with her child. That's just going to make adapting to a new world even harder/
I keep having an image in my head of Matt Dillon waking up in his cryotube to be confronted by a man in an ape mask "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
As I've said already, the similarities with the Wool trilogy are significant, although having checked they seemed to be written around the same time so there doesn't seem to be any suggestion that one author ripped the other off. Going back many, many years I used to read The Survivalist books and they segued into something similar after a while. Guess there are no truly original ideas (See the Hunger Games/Battle Royale).
