Genesis

 DVD, Survivors S1 (Genesis)

Bleak. Grim. Callousness. Cruelty. It doesn't start too promisingly, does it! We see the result of law and order lifted from humanity and the extremes of self-preservation or lust for power over others, Wormley and Anne the purveyors of all that's wrong in their kind. In that regard it's not a great watch: the worst instincts of our race shown to us. But it does at least finish with an optimistic flourish as our three wanderers finally converge after more close brushes, and it's surprisingly uplifting to see them, these few who demonstrate good qualities in some small measure that puts them high above the other characters we meet, purely for the fact they have any goodness to them at all! Greg is the big change from the first episode: there we concentrated on the two women, struggling to get to grips with their situation and make sense of it all and what to do next, but now we see someone who could be a leader, right from his first act: flying home in a helicopter, coming down from on high. That immediately shows his high competence in this new world where skills are king, Abby failing to react quickly enough to the passing aircraft that might have spared her the encounter with Wormley's gang of thugs, but it was for the best she went through that so her shocked eyes could understand what was coming.

Greg's shown to be just as human as anyone else by the fact when he goes home to his wife we realise they were estranged, he has no grief to spare for her, in fact saying he expected her to stay alive just to spite him, which suggests either he was a bad judge to end up with such a woman, or unfortunate - it makes sense of the story he tells Anne: how he was an engineer working in Holland when the event hit. It makes him both sympathetic and interesting, that he's had this life now rendered obsolete, but he seems like the sort that can adapt to whatever life throws at him. He doesn't give his wife a decent burial or anything, doesn't set the house on fire as Abby did (plus it'd take hours to dig a proper grave in hard, cold ground), I get the sense it's all irrelevant to him, he's not going back there, yet he must have cared enough to find out if Jeanie was still alive. He's a man that knows how to do things, his job was solving problems so he's the ideal person to be a survivor and Anne's quick to recognise that. At first you don't realise the depths to which this woman thinks - she 'must' be somewhat compassionate to go searching for help with her man Vic, whom it seems she joined solely because he was another practical type while she's absolutely not, a rich brat always dependent on others. But you see little signs of her scheming mind, always thinking of her survival, so in a way she's also the ideal survivor except she has no conception of the community, her selfishness not yet able to comprehend the need for mutual benefit, only an order with her at the top when she lays out her plan of trading things for payment to those working under her.

Arthur Wormley's the same: former national president of a union, he has a controlling streak in him and the language to make it seem legal, but most importantly the firepower to back it up. I must say the Colonel who defies him came across quite weak and not the brave soldier who faces his captors with disdain and pride, seeming unable to grasp the situation when you'd think someone of his age and position would have been more confident, but then this whole situation has shaken everyone. The parallels are clear between Wormley and Anne: both have stores of provisions and ideas about how they're going to order the world beneath them - the transitions between Greg and Abby's stories were particularly well done with Wormley's deputy carving a huge hunk of meat, then showing us Greg doing the same with a modest tinned spam, then we go from Anne pouring warm champagne out of a bottle to Wormley pouring tea into an elegant china teacup. They're two of a kind. His setup has the surface veneer of being very civilised: all mod cons, he's basically showing off to Abby, but beneath it all a raw glory in power - I didn't get the sense he was trying to recruit her. For all his self-assurance he proves not to be as much of a thinking man as he claims he's an organiser. Abby opens his eyes to the need for relearning all the old processes again to become less and less reliant on existing resources, while he's more interested in securing food dumps and gathering groups under his rule.

Abby's thinking about the general future and what they need to do to survive while Wormley's concerned with cementing his position and controlling what is, blinding him to the needs for actually living, too busy with the bigger picture with his grand plans of domination while Abby's only interested in the smaller group. At this stage she's allowed to go freely, Wormley hasn't quite fully become the little Hitler (or perhaps Stalin in his somewhat Communist outlook when it comes to others), so Abby dodged a major trap there. Which only makes it so much more satisfying when we find it's she who built the signal fire that draws Jenny and Greg into her orbit: three reasonable people in a world gone mad. Greg shows a lot of compassion in his handling of Vic, a Good Samaritan agreeing to the pleas of Anne to rescue him from beneath the crushing tractor, doing his best to set the damaged legs, reassuring, wiping his face, all the while Anne is absent of any caring nature whatsoever other than that which gives her protection or leverage (she's only latched onto Vic for her own good and now he's no use to her he's worthless), which explains her fury at Greg leaving. You can tell he's darkly disgusted by her proposal to have people work for them in exchange for food, yet also not surprised, perhaps throwing more light on his own wife and her nature. There's no hint of what's to come when he finally meets Jenny on the high street, but he's there once again because of a natural human feeling of duty to the sick or injured, going to get medicine for Vic. Jenny's so refreshing after horrible Anne, open and genuine, but at the moment it's purely happenstance that they go along with each other.

Anne proves she's not merely selfish, but actively evil when she lies and claims Vic's dead to stop Greg going back to the quarry - again, she shares with Wormley the lack of any moral compulsion, and just as Wormley didn't personally pull the trigger and execute the Colonel, she diverts needed aid, effectively condemning Vic to death. You feel for poor Jenny, alone and so desperate for company she wants to go along with Tom Price - I love that they bring back characters from time to time since they are inhabiting the same general area, not travelling far and wide, and with so few people alive it's a big thing to find another human face. We find another kind of reaction to the catastrophe in Tom, someone who's living a fantasy life, hasn't accepted that someone isn't coming to save them: the 'Yanks' in this case, whom he's still claiming to believe will come up with a cure. But cures are irrelevant now, as are status symbols such as the white Rolls Royce he takes from a showroom, as well as raiding a clothing shop. In his mind he's living the high life, failing to accept reality and just enjoying his freedom unfettered by law, his philosophy being to avoid people as much as possible since he still thinks germs are the problem. In his own way he's as callous as Wormley and Anne, denying Jenny human companionship (the Rolls last seen abandoned, perhaps crashed, as Abby drives past with brief interest, another failure to connect in people's stories, so who knows what would've happened to Jenny if she'd gone with him), but again, just as when Abby escaped the clutches of an evil regime, she gets in with the right people by the end.

Once again there are a number of ideas and themes that call stark attention to the plight of anyone left alive. Fired by Doctor Bronson's talk in the first episode, Abby's had time to think about what's needed, how no object is the exclusive creation or distribution of one person, even 'simple' products require knowledge, tools and skill to create. Loneliness was a major part of the episode though we don't get a strong impression of it since we only see a little of their daily living. I almost wish there'd been an entire episode focusing on, say, Jenny, simply doing everyday tasks, but for that era of TV I'm sure it would have been considered too much of an indulgence and they only had a certain number of episodes to play with, not to mention wanting to keep the audience hooked. Abby has all these ideas that come gushing out once she's settled at Wormley's with food, liquor and cigarettes (another running theme, but then it was the Seventies!), luxury loosening her tongue and the pent-up thoughts of days of ruminating. And of course Jenny, whose bedraggled appearance in muddy clothes, and the heartbreak of just missing Abby again when she heads to the smoke from the earlier fire by the road, finds it hard on her. Greg seems like he could be quite content without anyone to talk to, but for him it's more like a period of adjustment, falling in with Anne and Vic, then falling out, but with the decency to go back and help.

Abby's awakening from grateful relief at such basic amenities as hot water, to horror at Wormley's presumption at declaring capital punishment (the value of human life at an absolute premium now there are so few), was expertly portrayed with the image of her face looking through the bannisters at Wormley's kangaroo court, like a child sent to bed. You realise the fragility of individual people's personal safety in the face of self-deluded tyrants (he even claims, while not being a 'religious' man, that God must have left him alive to administer justice and control, a dangerous position to take), whose only real concern is that someone else will 'corner the market,' and then we see humans are at war already, only days and weeks after society collapsed. It shows what society is and that it depends on the majority agreeing on basic ideas, so it makes sense that war would break out when the fundamentals of life are at stake, though I didn't get the impression the Colonel's forces were any kind of ideological crusade against tyranny, merely the need for food - of course we only hear Wormley's side, it could just as well be that the house he commandeered belonged to the Colonel who was only trying to take back his own, but he wasn't shown to be much of a military mind, though again, we don't see any of what went on.

Anne, typically, is the one to vocalise the seriousness of even minor accident or injury with no healthcare or medication to hand, though she's most clear on one thing: she's going to get her full share of everything that's going, an understandable attitude, but one without any grace or sense to it. Even her clumsiness at dropping one bottle of champagne is meaningful, the camera looking at the spilled liquid as if in judgement at her carelessness about such things as can't be replaced. They do a good job with these little touches, like the sheep roaming free on the motorway, scared by the helicopter flying overhead. But even with all these interesting ideas and the cautious, gradual drawing together of our main characters, it's still quite bleak, and while enjoyable on the level of entertainment and wanting to see these people we've been following meet each other and work together, it's still full of unpleasantness. It does strike me that with one very competent man (played by someone called Ian!), one sensible woman, and one younger woman, all they need is the Doctor to recreate the early years of 'Doctor Who'! Sadly no sign of a time machine to allow escape, but I did notice a car in the background just flashing past when Tom was driving the Rolls, so the roads weren't as empty as we thought...

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