WRITER: Jimmy Gardner[SPOILERS] There are actually some good ideas in Survivors, which tackles its doomsday scenario with the practical no-frills attitude that befits its British breeding and limited budget. It often hits upon some daft yet strangely plausible ideas; like this episode's notion of a former-history teacher using his knowledge of ancient civilizations' dependence on slavery to setup a coal mining business using people entrapped by a trucker. Yeah, okay, it sounds silly when you write it down like that. I even enjoyed the predictable development that Greg (Paterson Joseph), the token black man of the show, became the instrument of slave rebellion by faking knowledge of geology and being placed in a trusted position to cause a mutiny.
DIRECTOR: David Evans
GUEST CAST: Roger Lloyd Pack, Emma Lowndes, Al Weaver, Christopher Fulford, Robin Pearce & Jack Richardson
This fourth episode was at its best when it focused on Greg and Tom (Max Beesley) trying to escape from the horror of being sent down an old mine to dig for coal to provide fuel for a looming winter -- although I still don't understand why coal's suddenly in short supply, because the tonnes that currently exist in the world aren't exactly going to hit an expiry date! Still, it gave us an episode that tackled the concept of slavery, while also giving us a fun prison break -- that proved laughably easy once it actually got underway, relying on the old "fake a stomach ache, steal the investigating guard's keys" ploy.
Everything else was slightly tedious, as Abby (Julie Graham), Sara (Robyn Addison), Najid (Chahak Patel), Anya (Zoe Tapper) and Al (Phillip Rhys) became flies trapped in the web of trucker Billy Stringer (Roger Lloyd-Pack), who delivered them to his kindly wife Sally (Emma Lowndes), blissfully unaware that they're essentially in a holding pen for enforced conscription to Smithson's mine. Fortunately, Sally swiftly cracked under the pressure of having to let such nice people become slaves, so told them the truth and allowed them to plot a way to infiltrate Smithson's operation and free their friends. This basically resulted in Abby and Anya arriving to barter with Smithson for coal supplies, leading to them all having dinner together involving a grandiose debate about the necessity of slavery to rebuild society versus the need to rise above mistakes of humanity's past and find alternative ways to survive.
For decent stretches of time, this episode was pretty good, but a lot of its good work was undone by some disappointing moments and a chronic sense of silliness that flows through most Survivors episodes. I mean, the moment when a lynch mob's leader committed suicide by hanging himself just seemed to come out of nowhere for a blunt, unearned shock... and a sickly prisoner called Kevin just wasn't given enough screentime to make us care about his predicament (although the moment when Tom suffocated Kevin to spare his pain from a ruptured spleen was handled well, and ghoulish enough that it worked on that level[*])
Overall, a mixed episode with a strong backbone; it kept me entertained and ended on a sequence of highs to make it all feel worthwhile. The final scene was particularly amusing, as it saw the return of Abby's missing son Peter (Jack Richardson), who it's revealed was one of the kids Billy had captured for the coal mine -- but, as Peter's unaware of what Billy had in store for him and his friends, he's set to release Billy from the tree Tom tied him to. And as Billy knows Peter is Abby's son, he'll predictably be back to use Peter as leverage to get revenge on Abby's group.
9 FEBRUARY 2010: BBC1 (HD), 9PM
[*] Incidentally, is it feasible you can kill someone by clamping a hand over their mouth and nose for, like, 10 seconds? Any doctors out there? Is this just something peculiar to the word of TV and movies, or is it genuine? I always imagine it's sanitized shorthand for an act of murder that would be far more difficult to perform and horrific in practice.
