Tony’s still surviving
There’s a looser feel to
the fourth series of Survivors, though pinpointing the reason why that feeling
persists is more difficult than you might imagine. The formula is still strong
– in the first episode, The Old Ways by Ken Bentley, we go right back to the
point of the Death becoming unmanageable, but we see it from the vantage point
of Westminster and Whitehall, the top brass shuttled into an underground bunker
to wait out the inevitable. And in Bentley’s tight, taut, violin-string piece,
we see how the society within society collapses when the Death takes no prisoners
and no notice of rank or status.
The remaining three episodes
deal with events at the Belief Foundation, a colony near to White Cross (the
home of some of our main Survivors, including Greg, Jenny and Jackie). It’s
here that Molly, the woman left deeply troubled after her time as the sex-slave
of a rape gang, seems to have found some peace, under the charismatic care of
Foundation ‘leader’ Theo. As the episodes progress though there are callbacks
to the bunker, as some of its Survivors are rescued and brought to the
Foundation.
It’s hard here to escape
the sense of jumping ahead – Greg and Jenny’s baby from the third box set is
now old enough to be left with other people, and features not at all in this
set, beyond that explanation. And because the whole first episode is given over
to the bunker storyline, by the time we get to Greg, Jenny, Jackie and Molly, there’s
a sense that we’ve forgotten something, or missed something along the way.
That said, episode for
episode, there’s some good strong Survivors fare here. Bentley as a director
has long been one of Big Finish’s safest pairs of hands, but as a writer he’s
taken time to come into his own. Here, with The Old Ways, it’s fair to say he’s
done just that, pitching the tension perfectly, and never falling entirely one
way or the other on the question of right and wrong in terms of how people in
an enclosed environment survive – and the different realities they have to
embrace to let them do so. Strongest among the characters in this first episode
are a couple of women (Survivors continuing its strong and well-deserved
reputation for delivering impressive female characters), Mildred Sanderson, the
wife of the recently-deceased Prime Minister, played by Jane Maud, and Evelyn
Piper, the departmental administrator who finds herself actually unable to do anything of any value in the new
Survivors’ world. Nevertheless Evelyn, played by Zoe Tapper, finds herself a
key player in the events at the Belief Foundation, having teamed up with a
mysterious, guilty young man named Michael, played by Laurence Dobiesz. When
Greg, Jenny and Jackie turn up at the Foundation to visit Molly, they find
themselves getting involved in events there, investigating mysterious fires and
odd disappearances in For The Good Of The Cause, written by Louise Jameson.
Jameson’s written a few episodes of Survivors now, and acquitted herself
strongly each time. Is For The Good Of The Cause as impressive as her Series 2
episode, Mother Courage? Prrrrrobably not, but there’s not much in it, Jameson
bringing out real humanity in her characters, for both better and worse. In
fact, all the writers this time round have applied strong Survivors principles
all the way through when it comes to characterisation – there are few ‘easy’
answers here, few characters who are entirely good or bad, showing the shades
of grey of a post-apocalyptic world.
In fact, that greyness is
a strong thread throughout the box set – the things we do in the world gone mad
that we’d never do when it seemed sane. From Jackie’s longstanding secret about
her children, through Michael’s past and Molly’s, Theo the leader encourages
them all to unburden themselves, find a new way forward with new names in the
service of ‘Gaia,’ the Earth, to free themselves of their guilt and put it behind
them in the new world.
That’s another big theme
in this box set – set some years after the Death decimated the world’s
population, the clash between the way things were done in the old word and the
way people find to make their way in the new is paramount here, especially when
the bunker full of essentially hermetically sealed civil servants are released
and brought to the Foundation, to become farmers and labourers – tension
between the advocates of the old and the new is unavoidable, and only skilful
management at the top can stop dissent from spilling over into bloodshed – if
it wants to.
That’s more or less the
explicit theme of Episode 3, Collision, written by Christopher Hatherall (like
Jameson, someone who’s graduated from simply acting to both acting in and
writing Survivors). Can Theo keep control of a new world rapidly challenged,
and even threatened, by an influx of the old – and, having worked to establish
his new world community, does he really want
any such cohabitation with what he sees as the sickness of the previous regime?
As the box set goes on,
the nature of Theo’s character becomes more and more complex. He’s absolutely
clear in his own mind that there’s no religious connotation to the Belief
Foundation (perhaps a little bizarrely, given the name), and that he himself is
not some Svengali dictator. Nevertheless, things to which he takes a dislike get
mysteriously burned, people seemingly go missing or leave, and Greg, infected
with the habit of uncovering the truth behind too many Survivor-world utopias,
disobeys Theo’s advice, turning against a man he genuinely believed might have
some solid practical ideas to help develop his own ultimate goal – a federation
of communities.
While Greg provides
another example of the things we’re forced to do in a crueller world than the
one to which we’re accustomed, things at the Foundation take a dark turn in
Matt Fitton’s episode 4, Forgive and Forget, as the events of the past come
back to haunt three of our Survivors, threatening to plunge what looks
increasingly like a cult into anarchy and lynch-mob violence. Fitton’s writing
is perhaps the hardest hitting in the box set, though both Bentley and Jameson
give him a solid run for his money. The final episode of Series 4 brings a kind
of absolution for at least a couple of characters, if not the one perhaps most
desperate for it. Certainly the world will be different for our regular
Survivors after the events of Series 4, with alliances if not exactly shifting
then going through a kind of catharsis, some emerging stronger than ever
through a trial by metaphorical fire, others shedding layers of interference
left over from the darkness of the past.
In terms of performances,
across this box set one has to applaud Zoe Tapper as Evelyn Piper – it’s not
easy to play someone with no discernible skills of use, and still make her
sympathetic, especially in this world of harsh extremes. Louise Jameson’s on
superb form, but then in her case, that’s equivalent to saying ‘Louise Jameson’s
breathing in and out’ – while clearly taking her work seriously, she has the
gift of making the more emotionally charged and difficult scenes feel
effortless and real. Jane Maud as Mildred Sanderson and Paul Panting as Colonel
Stephen Adams make the first episode spring sharply to life as opponents in a
power struggle that frames an ethical conundrum from the very heart of
Survivors, and Fiona Sheehan, when given the words, most especially by Matt
Fitton in the final episode, steps up to the emotional plate and knocks the
world-tearing trauma of Molly right out of the park. But through episodes 2, 3
and 4, one performance in particular is worth the box set on its own – that of
Ramon Tikaram as Theo. His is a role that could so easily overbalance the
tension of the set, but never does, maintaining the character’s patience, his
work ethic, his belief in humanity and himself all the way to the end, only
taking actions he feels can be legitimately justified. It’s an extraordinary
anchoring performance that goes some way beyond Greg Preston’s black-and-white
worldview, and never casts Theo entirely as the bad guy, never lets him
entirely admit any wrongdoing. He’s the philosophical question-mark at the
heart of the Survivors idea – how far from what we think of as ‘normal’ can you
go before you become something entirely new, something entirely dependent on
the conditions of a devastated world to work? Tikaram makes this particular
storyline work, and helps prolong the
tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop all the way through the fourth
series box set.
Survivors still delivers
great drama with ghastly philosophical questions at its heart, four box sets
on. With at least three more sets already scheduled for release, the grimness
of its world, and the hope of our survival, is showing no signs of softening
just yet.
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