Cora does her thing.

She's keeping in perfect time with the beat in the back of her head, telling her to chase it. There's no reason to stop running. If she could, she would spend her whole life running.

And then she passes the baton, and she has to wait.

Jackson watches proudly from the stands, commenting to a neighbor that:

"You should see how she uses that energy in the bedroom."

Danny pretends not to know him.

It's a cold, bitter night, and Dorothy is, as usual, letting herself get caught up in the moment. The pathetic fallacy strikes a chord, playing fast and loose with her emotional state. She's white-knuckling it. She has a job, for all that no one will ever thank her. She records, she doesn't get recorded. At the high school reunion, no one will be wondering, "What ever happened to Dorothy Madison?".

She's getting distracted. This shot composition is complete garbage. Dorothy tries to focus on the matter at hand- the athletes, doing all that running around they do so well.

Clouds begin to gather. Faster than clouds have the right to do. Someone should have asked them to provide a permit.

Danny looks up, surprised.

That's about when the first few hailstones crash down from the sky, as it fills with the sound of thunder and the flash of lightning.

This is a storm to end all storms.

Cars are crushed under falling hail, people in the crowd start screaming as flesh sizzles, and the clouds continue to hover menacingly above, as if they belong there.

It would take an act of god to stop Cora Hale from running, if what she wanted to do was run.

She stops, turns, and rushes the bleachers.

"Jackson! Get to the car!"

Jackson, who has been screaming and looking around, panicked, for somewhere to take shelter, lets Danny drag him along.

"I'm dialing 911," he says, mostly to report the rote, useless gesture as they head for something with a roof. It's unlikely the police can do anything.

If his skull is caved in by an errant hailstone, there's at least a chance it'll destroy his phone, and then his mom will never see the pictures he keeps on there.

Jackson appears reluctant to leave the bleachers, which are appealingly protective, but seems to accept that the car idea when one of the people running around them lights on fire.

He fumbles his keys, but catches them, and continues running.

It's really a matter of luck, isn't it? Getting caught out in a storm like this- the likelihood that you won't be affected at all is low.

Luckily for everyone involved-

-they only get struck by lightning, not impacted by hailstones or anything serious like that.

A few teenagers

are thrown through the air

...but somehow, despite this being quite spectacularly dramatic

it appears to do them no serious harm.

Cora is the first to get back up.

"In the car, Jacks."

She grabs Jackson and drags him to his feet.

Dazed and confused, he follows, teetering slightly as he goes.

Which means Danny has to be the one to shake the yearbook girl to see if she's even alive. In this storm-

What storm? The sky is clear.

-in this storm, which has done concerning amounts of brain damage to him and he needs to get checked out immediately.

"Are you okay? Count to five for me."

"One, two, three, four, five."

Dorothy tries to calibrate. Her camera is - there, crushed by the impact. Danny Māhealani is helping her up. This is the kind of inversion of the high school status hierarchy that only happens in teen movies, so she considers what to do about it.

"I broke my camera," she says, half-hoping he'll offer to replace it.

Danny opens his mouth, and then looks at the burn marks on the stands, where a fellow student once stood. He closes his mouth.

"We should all go home. It's been a long day."

That sounds wrong. That sounds like- there's definitely a correct action to take here. Call the police. Call an ambulance. Call the news?

Instead:

"Did we get hit by lightning?"

"If we'd been struck by lightning, do you you think we'd be standing right now?"

He says, sensibly. Having been struck by lightning? It must have missed. He didn't feel anything, and he should have, if it didn't kill him. He's quite sure that the human body is not designed to safely handle a lightning strike.