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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