Survivors - ''Corn Dolly''

Spoiler Level: High

Things start to look up when Abby, Jenny & Greg run into Charles Vaughan, Loraine & Mick.  Charles Vaughan has been accomplishing what Abby wanted to do-- he's started a farm and created a place where survivors can gather and try to work together. And unlike Wormly and the previous people she's met, Charles is actually a nice guy, and is keeping people together out of mutual need and help rather than out of fear. It's a much more upbeat and optimistic outlook.

Charles has also been able to gather some numbers as best he can; it seems that only 1 in every 5,000 people survived.  He has no record of any two people from the same family surviving, or any two people who knew each other surviving, or any two people who even knew of each other surviving.  It really puts just how devastating the plague was into perspective.

Sadly, when the group returns to Charles's farm they learn that nearly everyone is dying from food poisoning.  They had recently caught fish from a local river; apparently, it's become contaminated.  It's another example of how day-to-day life becomes much more hazardous for anyone who's survived the plague.  Jenny is considering staying, and Greg, who's becoming very romantically attached to Jenny, is considering staying with her. Abby of course won't stop traveling until she finds out what's happened to her son.

So of course it has to be too good to be true.  Charles's fatal flaw is that he's so hung up on the future if the species that he fails to see people as people anymore.  They're a resource; x number of people needed to keep the farm going, y number of people needed to start new towns and new communities.  He can't even bring himself to be upset about the deaths of the people on his farm; he's more upset that this means having to start over again.

And the real deal breaker is that he feels if the human race is to survive, it's imperative that as many babies be born as possible. So he's taken it on himself to impregnate as many women as possible.  Apparently without telling them about each other. And telling them all he loves them.  And then he starts moving in on Abby.

The worst part is, when it comes to the need for a new generation to be born, he's not really wrong; it's pointed out that with no two people in the same family having survived, no infants could have survived, so we've probably already lost an entire generation. And with such a limited gene pool remaining, there is going to need to be a lot of crossbreeding; most likely, traditional standards of monogamy are going to need to be thrown out the window.

But that doesn't mean you treat women like cattle.  Just because a woman can have a child doesn't mean she's obligated to become a baby factory, and quite frankly if the human race has fallen so low that that's the only way for the us to survive, then maybe our time has already ended.

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Survivors - ''Gone Away''

Spoiler Level: Medium

Things continue to come together as Abby, Greg and Jenny find each other and team up.  Even the wandering vagrant from the previous two episodes shows up at Abby's camp.  Every time I think he's done his bit and is gone for good, he shows up again in the next episode.  Now I'm expecting to see him again, so I probably won't.

Abby's group attempt to forage some groceries, only to find that the grocery store has been "claimed" by the militant group that Abby ran into in the previous episode, and they consider anyone who isn't a member of their group a looter. Wanting no part of them or their tactics, Abby argues that she has as much right to the food there as they do.  The result is a power struggle, with the obvious balance-tipper being whoever holds the guns holds the power.

What keeps it from being a total downer is Abby's optimism.  Even when she's becoming disenchanted with humanity itself, it's because she just assumed everyone would want to work together, that the plague had made everyone equal.  Even while she's becoming discouraged at how people are behaving, she's still inspiring people like Jenny and Greg, who are starting to see her as a leader-- the kind that people choose to follow out of trust and loyalty as opposed to the kind people feel forced to follow out of fear.  It's a ray of hope and optimism in the bleakest landscape possible.

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Survivors - ''Genesis''

Spoiler Level: High

The only thing cooler than Survivors having "Genesis" as their second episode title is Red Dwarf's having "The End" as their first episode's title.

We're introduced to some new players, and even though the plague is over, conditions are so harsh you're still never sure if they're going to survive or not.

In this episode, the various survivors are starting to find each other.  Some want to stay alone, but most want to band together to start new communities-- and of course, there are a few who want to make sure that they're the ones in charge.

The extremes are shown on a small scale in the case of Greg and Anne.  Greg is a survivor with nowhere to go and no plan in mind; he runs in to Anne, who needs help.  Anne has been staying with Vic, where they've been setting up camp in a quarry.  They were gathering supplies when Vic's tractor fell on him.  Greg helps get the tractor off of Vic and does what he can to help set his legs, but none of them are doctors, and there's a very real chance that they won't heal right and Vic will never be able to walk again.  Anne tells Greg of Vic's plan to try and gather supplies so they'll be secure for as long as possible, but elaborates on her interpretation of the plan-- things are the new currency, and with all the things they've been gathering, they can get other people to work for them in exchange for food. Disgusted, Greg leaves, but not without going into the closest town and trying to scavenge any medicines that might help Vic pull through.  Anne, by contrast, leaves Vic to die, and when she finds Greg returning tells him that Vic is already dead.

Greg is no hero, he has no master plan to put the human race back on track-- he just sees someone who needs help and does what he can.  Anne, by contrast, is not only unwilling to help anyone else, but she wants someone else to do all the work to help her.  Life means so little to her that she'd rather let someone die than exert the effort to help him herself.

I suppose it could be that having seen so much death, one of two things happens-- you either become desensitized to it and find life to be meaningless and valueless, or you cherish the life that's still left.  And while we see a lot of the former in this episode, we also see Abby, one of the few to survive from the first episode.  Her only plan is to build a community where they can take care of themselves and each other.  Hopefully, the new world will follow her example more than Anne's.

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Survivors - ''The Fourth Horseman''

Spoiler Level: Medium 

Survivors is Terry Nation's other claim to fame, after the Daleks and Blake's 7.  I watched the first two or three episodes back around 1994, and while I enjoyed it, it creeped my wife out too much so I never got back to it. Now that my friend Rich and I are all caught up on the DCU OVAs, I'm giving it another go.

The story, in case you're not familiar with the series, is one of our common societal fears:  that a superflu gets loose and starts wiping everyone out.  What makes Survivors stand out from other stories I've seen of this nature (such as Jeremiah or The Stand) is that it takes the entire first episode for this to happen.  We start out with life going just fine for everyone.  Oh sure, there's news of a flu epidemic, but it's mostly in other places and there's very little news of anyone actually dying of it.  But as more and more people come down with it and call out from work, things begin to start running poorly; the trains are all off schedule, the telephone lines stop working, and then areas begin to lose electricity when the power plants don't have enough people showing up to work to run them properly.

And that's another interesting aspect of this show; it's firmly set in what was then the present, ie the 70s. So when hospitals are told by the government not to release the actual numbers of how many people have started dying from it, they can actually keep it contained.  There's no internet, no cell phones, no Twitter, no way for an intern to post "over 200 dead today" and have the world know.  And with the disease traveling as quickly as it does -- about six days-- by the time people do realize what's going on, there aren't enough of them left to cause riots.  (It also makes me curious how this aspect was handled in the remake, but I won't be seeing that version for at least another 38 weeks!)

Another element that this show has over others like it is that it really drives home dependent we've become on our mechanical-based manufacturing society.  As one of the survivors points out, the resources that are left will only last for up to a generation, maybe less; once they're all gone, then who knows how to make more of even simple things, like a candle or a hammer?

So that's a big part of why I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of this series; this looks to be the most realistic post-societal survival story ever.

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