purplecat

So this week repeated last week's template of updating the original story in an inventive, original and, dare I say it, dramatically more pleasing way and then pulling its punches and serving up something that was, ultimately, far, far blander. I liked it but the show's lack of any real guts was painfully obvious.

I absolutely loathe Jimmy Garland from the original Survivors and what I particularly loathe about him is that in 1970 whatever it was the show was clearly and without any apparent doubts on his side. It's like all those Shakespeare plays where nobility will out. So I'm sitting there all geared up to loathe Jimmy Garland and up pops Maria's Dad from the Sarah Jane Adventures who, let's face it, is so thoroughly pleasant and innocuous it's hard to dislike him even when he's acting like an entitled brat scion of the aristocracy. He seems an odd choice for the part which was still written as an aristocratic survivalist (which, you know, Maria's Dad just isn't) and he didn't appear to have a great deal of chemistry with Julie Graham, which is a shame. The decision to both update the occupiers of his manor as a bunch of kids re-enacting Lord of the Flies and to signal more clearly that Garland was behaving like a bit of a brat was a good one. It's just a shame they then threw the whole thing away by revealing that the kids were basically good-natured and just in need of the sort of firm hand Garland could provide to set them on the straight and narrow.

The plot back at Samantha Willis' community was a fairly inevitable idea extremely poorly executed. Samantha's exasperation with Al was simply too sudden to be believable and, hello! Sarah! not exactly little miss pull her own weight! Her rejection of Tom because he lied about his past was also a little unbelievable. I would have expected her to try to co-opt him until it became much clearer quite how dangerous he was. I still don't understand where the show is going with the Tom Price character. I think it wants to present his particular form of ruthlessness, which seems to go hand in hand with a genuine desire to be an accepted member of a community, as the sort of character traits needed in this post-apocalyptic world but the show simply doesn't have the courage to actually say that anything tougher than middle-class niceness and negotiation is necessary. Witness how woefully unprepared our viewpoint characters still are to repel any kind of attack! Not to mention the fact that, now we can be expected to be sympathising with Tom, he's suddenly taken to just scaring his enemies a bit rather than doing away with them.

Poor old Greg was particularly poorly served this week. Though I feel even sorrier for Zoe Tapper since Anya has been stuck in C plots ever since Jenny died halfway through episode one. Mind you, she did get to, rather implausibly, single-handedly beat up two large assailants while poor old Greg was padlocked to a landrover.

Nit pick: It's nice to know, post the apocalypse, that a violent blow to the head does nothing worse than make you a bit woozy for about 10 seconds, as demonstrated by both Garland and Greg in this episode.