Tuesday, 5 December 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series Seven by Tony J Fyler


Survivors has always been a particularly British apocalypse – the pandemic plague that laid waste to over 90% of human beings is a worldwide event, absolutely, but the domestic grimness of the storytelling has always been true to Terry Nation’s original vision. That said, the Big Finish audio Survivors is now reaching its seventh box set, while the TV version in the Seventies stretched only to three series. That means two things are happening to the audio version. Firstly, it’s reaching and exceeding the point in the storytelling where the original series left off. And secondly, the nature of the issues facing our band of survivors is changing – we’re long past the initial devastation of ‘the Death’ now, past the point of panic which led to religious cults and cannibalism, rape-gangs and forced breeding, just a few of the highlights of earlier box sets. The world, while still far from getting back on its feet, is beginning to normalise in its post-Death realities – food is gold, work is silver, sex is sellable, and medical care is practically priceless. A new social order is beginning to emerge, based on knowledge and skills – engineers, teachers, farmers, heavies, they all have their place, whereas, for instance, the more effete disciplines, like accountancy, are significantly less valuable and less in demand. But the excessively sharp edges of the world are, for the most part at least, rather worn off, meaning the dilemmas our survivors face in Series 7 are rather more philosophical and character-driven than they were in previous box sets. There’s a theme here: forces of societal progress versus forces of individual greed, destruction and protectionism.

That means there’s more time and space in Survivors Series 7 to deal with character issues, and many of our original survivors come to points of particular personal crisis in this box set.
In Journey’s End by Roland Moore, for instance, Abby Grant faces a long dark night of the soul when her quest to find her son Peter comes to an end. There are some twists and turns here that play with your ingrained Survivors expectations of what people will be like, and some guessable issues around the trustworthiness of information, but you won’t care much about any of that, because Carolyn Seymour’s performance in this episode as a mother who’s been kept alive and kept going by the quest for her son, and whose quest is over, will blow your hair well and truly back. There’s a rawness and a viscerality to her reactions when she finally finds Peter that you can only applaud, and get out of the way of. Journey’s End leaves you wondering whether, and how, Abby will go forward beyond this point, having had answers to the questions that have kept her searching and moving all this time.

In Legacy by Simon Clark too, we’re dealing with the impacts on people of big discoveries about the people they love. Greg Preston, the series’ itchy-footed engineer, is evoked here in one of his final ‘off-screen’ adventures, having left his wife Jenny and their son at home and gone off to clear a railway line and run the train that served it, bringing connections, trade, news and other invaluable commodities, including people, to and from a series of settlements. Legacy splits its storytelling between Greg at some point in the past, getting the railway up and running, and falling foul of a settlement that’s run on the basis of indentured servitude, offering food for work on an ongoing basis, and Jenny (Lucy Fleming) riding the train without him, some time later, and confronting the very same community. Each of them makes their own impact, bringing a degree of freedom to the enslaved workers, but there’s a distinct separation between them, and it’s more than hinted that they never got back together after Greg left to go on his quest to bring a bit of civilisation back to the world.

For all the power of the first two episodes though, Old Friends by Matt Fitton is the undimmable bright spot of this box set. Jackie Burchall, played by Louise Jameson, has always been an odd survivor. In Old Friends, Jameson’s back as Burchall, and the world in which she lives is one of ghosts of happier times as she wills herself to waste away in secrecy and solitude, unwilling to carry on living in the ‘real’ world, and yet, discovering a sliver of faith, unable to simply take her own life. When fellow survivors Ruth and Evelyn come to find her, move her out of the way of a new generation of post-plague anarchists, Jackie has to decide whether to hold on to her happier ghosts or face the world as it is. It takes dark, bright, scandalising confessions, tough love, and the urging of a very particular ghost in her ear to push Jackie to a final decision. There’s not a dud note across the hour’s length of Old Friends, with Jameson as Burchall, Helen Goldwyn as Ruth, Zoe Tapper as Evelyn and John Banks as Jackie’s friend Daniel all turning in vibrating, pitch-perfect performances that keep you glued all the way through and mean you’re never entirely sure which way Jackie will jump. Old Friends brings the drama down to a single cold question: when everyone you care for dies, would you want to survive?

The box set rounds out with Reconnection from Christopher Hatherall, a more plot-driven story that takes the Survivors world forward. Jenny, en route to re-starting a hydro-electrical power plant, she bumps into Abby, and faces opposition from the forces of greed, nationalism and unreconstructed machismo. Without spoiling the end, it’s a story that balances the progress of plot with some blistering characterisation and dialogue for Jenny and Abby, and shows how far our particular clutch of survivors have come since the immediate impact of the Death.

Series 7 of Survivors more than pulls its emotional weight, but more than usual, there’s a sense here that even in horrifying, dark times, good people will still exist, and sometimes, they’ll even triumph. In that, Survivors 7 is a box set that speaks to the mood of 2017 and 2018, like catharsis in audio, and for that, as well as the powerful performances and character development, it’s definitely worth a listen.


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