I caught the first episode of the BBC’s updated Survivors last night and in general I have to admit that it was quite enjoyable. The premise is similar to the original 1970s series: a mysterious pandemic spreads rapidly across the world and quickly kills almost 90% of the world’s population. The UK government are totally unprepared for the rapid spread of the disease and spend much of the first half of the program lying through their teeth about how bad things are getting.
The characters seemed fairly interesting; even though each one seemed to be the standard disaster prerequisites: The frantic mother, cocky rich yuppie, dangerous criminal concealing his past, pragmatic survivalist, traumatised young teenage girl and a young boy. There were a few interesting spins put on these tired clichés such as the boy being a self confident young Muslim, but overall they were still the same old stereotypes. The only one missing so far is a character who has suffered a dramatically induced case of amnesia that is revealed to either hold the cure or be responsible for the creation of the plague in the first place. It’s funny that in these disaster shows the people who survive always seemed to be those that are least well equipped to make it. Yuppies that have never done an honest bit of hard work in their life survive better than people who are capable of farming the land and providing for themselves. The only two characters I reckon that would make it in a real are the Dangerous Crook and Black Survivalist: everyone else seems too weak in spirit or lacking in skills to make it.
There are quite a few plot holes and problems although only a few of them were bad enough to break my suspension of disbelief. So instead of a fair and balanced review of the show itself I think I’ll poke the plot holes and see what falls out.
Firstly the effect and speed of the plague seems wholly inconsistent. It was mainly portrayed as having flu like symptoms and taking several hours. In one pivotal scene a devout Muslim boy and his father enter a packed mosque to pray. The prayer hall is packed with people and the boy’s father tells him to head for B. The scene then cuts away as the Imam begins to lead the assembled congregation in prayer. When we finally returned to the mosque after a few more scenes of the dead and the dying we know that something must be up. The entire hall is silent and the whole congregation is still bent in prayer. The boy wakes up having somehow fallen asleep or passed out while bent in prayer. (Not sure how this could happen as Muslims prayer tends to be fairly active and involves standing up, bowing and then kneeling.) He shakes his dad’s body off and looks around to find that everyone in the prayer hall has dropped dead in mid prayer. To be fair the scene was fairly dramatic but it was also utterly implausible. The preceding half hour of the show has developed the plague as a progressive illness. It even dwelled on the slow deterioration of several people important to the main characters to emphasise the loss and suffering they feel. In short it functioned like a realistic and terrifying illness: a creeping doom that slowly engulfs and kills the population. This wasn’t dramatic enough for the writers though so the plague has suddenly gone from a progressive flu like illness to the magical death lightning from outer space plague™ that kills people while they pray.
Okay maybe I can accept that the virus might become more and more virulent as it mutates and adapts. Instant death magic virus however seems a bit too much of a swing. What was wrong with everyone gradually dying off over the course of a couple of weeks rather than being struck down by a thunderbolt from the heavens?
This sudden mutation into an instant death syndrome quickly leads to another annoying plot hole. As the few survivors start to wander out into the world they find people dead inside their cars. These cars however are all safely parked at various jaunty angles suggesting that the driver died while in the process of driving. Not one of them however had crashed or even suffered the slightest bit of cosmetic damage and these immaculate cars are another point that annoyed me. Every single car that the characters drive, or even pass by in the street, looks like it’s just rolled off the showroom floor after a fresh valet. One character was driving a top of the range Audi that probably didn’t have much more than delivery mileage on it. Another started out with a shiny and clean 4×4 and then switched to a brand new looking Alfa Romeo when she ran out of petrol. The only halfway sane character that seemed to have an idea what he was doing was driving a brand new land rover loaded with supplies, but even his supplies were all in brand new containers etc. He did have a half second scene of looting the stuff from a hardware store though so I can forgive the newness in this instance.
Speaking of looting there was another deeply strange scene where two of the main characters, the Frantic Mum and the Black Survivalist, came across a man looting petrol from a service station. The looter freaked out when he saw them and threatened them to get away from his petrol. Then when they wouldn’t he connected up some bizarre arrangement of car batteries he had wired to the stolen petrol and blew the whole service station sky high. What the hell was the point in that? Who goes to steal a volatile liquid like petrol and then rigs up a bunch of sparking batteries as their only defence against it being taken off them?
The final implausible part of the whole story was near the end, and incidentally was probably the part most critical to the whole series. The Dangerous Crook had just been picked up by a young man and the disturbed teenage girl. The girl discovers a pistol in the crooks bag so the crook flips out and threatens both of them if they don’t keep driving and forget about it. They manage to overpower him and throw him out the moving car. He lies on the tarmac for a while bleeding to death only for the Traumatised Doctor to emerge from the undergrowth and save him. Out of the blue the Frantic Mum and Black Survivalist appear on the same section of motorway and stop to help. The scene cuts to the Arrogant Yuppie and the Muslim Kid who have stopped in the middle of a motorway for a kick about with a football. While they’re showing off their ball skills the other characters pull up in the land rover. The bunch of them argue about what to do next until a standard issue sanctimonious lecture from Frantic Mum shames them all into promising to work together. It’s amazing that they all managed to arrive on that deserted section of motorway at exactly the right time isn’t it? To an extent this act of deus ex machina is forgivable. The writers need to get the characters together somehow so why not just throw them all together on a stretch of motorway. I can’t help but think that maybe they should have tried just a little bit harder to bring them together.
One final thing that continually caught my eye was the presence of bottles of Drench the mineral water made by Britvic. The survivors were guzzling the stuff like it was the type of water available on Earth. I know that product placement is par for the course nowadays, but the BBC is supposed to be independent of this intrusive type of advertising.
In spite of all of this I do think Survivors was far better than a lot of the other crap on the TV at the minute and I look forward to the next instalment.
