Tony makes it through.
It’s the end, to coin a phrase, but the
moment has been prepared for.
Survivors, like several other ideas in
the mind of Terry Nation, has lived on far beyond its creator, and has taken
directions that have made it chillingly relevant even in an age beyond that in
which it’s set. The coming of ‘the Death,’ the plague that wiped out most of
the world’s human beings, feels like a generation ago, a fact subtly underlined
in Jane Slavin’s opening episode of this box set, The Farm, by the fact
that young women of childbearing age can’t remember exactly how old they are,
because their parents died when they were young and so precision about such
things has been lost. The world our survivors used to know is gone, and even
the world of the immediate aftermath, of paranoia, fear, and violation-danger,
particularly for women, has curled around the edges into something more
horribly productively-minded. In The Farm, Jenny (Lucy Fleming)
is being kept, along with lots of other women, on the farm run by would-be British
Supremo, Meg Pritchard (Richenda Carey). The conditions are primitive and
unsanitary, the food rations small, and by the use of strict segregation of men
and women that might not be quite as strict as it’s made out to be,
there’s a degree of human-farming going on without anything so vulgar and
authoritarian as a forced breeding program.
But ask yourself – in a human farm, what happens to women when they hit the menopause?
Strap in for this one, it’s funny and
hopeful and dark and vicious and the silver thread of psychopathic human-using
evil runs glistening through Richenda Carey’s Meg Pritchard, as she tries first
to subvert Jenny to her cause, make her a trustee to be bought off with little
luxuries that mean the world, and then, when that fails, to put her and her
friends down as they make a break for it. Listen out for Issy Van Randwyck as
Beryl and Lizzie Stables as Victoria, a pair of characters that show from
different angles the commoditisation of women in this environment, each doing
their bit to harden Jenny’s resolve to break Pritchard’s power. Above all,
there’s a sense of realistic women together in captivity that’s too often
missing from modern TV drama, and which would be enormously welcome there. It’s
welcome here too, showing the strength, resilience and nous of women under
pressure.
If you want a story with an interesting
and intense single central set-up, you go to Christopher Hatherall, because he
has some serious form in Survivors when it comes to delivering nitty-gritty
stories about the actual, practical ‘hows’ of bad situations – in Series 6, he
wrung every last drop of tension from a story mostly set in a great big hole in
the ground (The Trapping Pit – worth a re-listen). Here, he takes us into a
coal mine, because yay, more holes in the ground! More seriously, Hearts
And Mines is more than just a play on words, it’s the beginnings of a
real fracture between our chosen group of survivors, the group loosely
identified as the Federation, with Craig (George Watkins) wanting to strike at the
heart of the survivors-come-lately, the Protectorate, run by Captain Robert
Malcolm (Hywel Morgan) on behalf of Meg Pritchard. Abby Grant though is torn
between what she knows is the right thing, ethically speaking, and what her
intuition tells her, which is that she has to rescue her son Peter (Joel James
Davison) from the clutches of Malcolm and the brutal military lifestyle in
which Peter’s been raised in her absence. The division comes to a head when the
Federation gang try to seal off a coal mine to save the workers from
Protectorate oppression. Tense, sweaty, and unexpected, the episode brings
common sense and instinct into sharp conflict. Where will Abby’s true loyalties
lie when every single chip is down? You’ll know by the end of this episode.
Fade Out, by Roland Moore, is a purposefully shocking episode of
Survivors, reviving some of the initial series’ horror value, as some of our
Federation friends hold out in an old cinema against the encroaching forces of
Robert Malcolm and Peter Grant. It’s one of those crisis-point episodes of
Survivors where allegiances crystallise, horror pushes people to extremes and
souls are won and lost – not everybody makes it out of Fade Out alive,
and the repercussions of the events here break friendships, force dark
alliances and finally push one character over a line of definition from which
there may be no return.
And finally, Andrew Smith, master of
early Survivors and its philosophical questions of exactly how you re-establish
a society you recognise or like in the aftermath of a cataclysm, returns to the
series for the final episode of the full-cast audio Survivors. In Conflict,
he forces events to what was probably always their inevitable conclusion in a
post-Death world – when there are groups with differing ideologies competing
for control of resources, you don’t get peace until you win a war, until your
enemies are routed, defeated or killed. There are historical precedents for
this idea going back at least as far as ancient Rome, and Andrew Smith delivers
a final clash between the forces of the Protectorate and the Federation,
between the brutal authoritarianism of Pritchard and Malcolm and the firm but
fair comparative civilisation of Jenny and Ruth (Helen Goldwyn), that has that
sort of epic scope, where instinct and rational decision-making are at odds,
where choices are made, a watching populace pick a side and there are fatal
consequences that decide what the future of Britain in the post-Survivors era
is going to look like. It’s by no means all happiness and light – our survivors
are irrevocably split, there will be trials and probably further executions,
and at least a couple of banishments give a note of realistic sourness to the
ending of a series as dark and bright and brilliant as Survivors on audio has
been. The very last note of the series is a careless welcome given to a
world-changing event – leaving us as listeners to imagine whether that welcome
will herald a brave new era, or the beginning of a whole new level of conflict.
Survivors on audio has been one of the
most traumatic, philosophically fascinating, realistically human, hopeful,
dark, gritty and horrifying series in Big Finish history. It has never been
anything less than breathtaking in its writing and its performance. It has
expanded massively on the legend established by Terry Nation and the TV
writers, and it ends with a set of stories as emotionally exhausting, as
pulse-racing and as inventive as any in the series. If you’ve come this far
with the audio version of Survivors, it’s a massive pay-off of all your
investment and a suitably bittersweet resolution of the long story-arcs that
have seen characters pushed to their limits and beyond by the challenge of
surviving the end of the world as we know it.
Listen to Survivors 9 – then take a long
breath, have a cup of tea, look at the world around us… and go back to the
beginning for one more apocalypse.
