Don’t you just hate it when despite the fact that you eat enough citrus to have your own newly discovered species of Fruit fly follow you around, and that you nightly smear your skin with garlic cloves like someone attempting to ward off Count Dracula or a slumber-party’s worth of tweenage girls holding a TWILIGHT-readathon, and then some kind of walking vector decides to cough in your face in the line at the grocery store, or sneeze all over you whilst you’re in a movie theatre not-watching NEW MOON? It’s amazing that we’re in Twenty-Ten now, and not only do we not yet have personal rocket packs and robot sex droids, we still have to put up with our not-so-fair-weather-friend, acute primate viral pharyngitis, otherwise known as the Common Cold. Some little bastard decided to share their snot with me a week or so ago, and although my favourite orifices are now almost mucous-free, I’m still saving up my used tissues in case I find out who did it, so I can reinfect them and run like hell. Yes, colds are a nuisance- but what if they were much more than a nuisance? What if a rhinovirus came along that was so virulent it made the 1917 Spanish Influenza Pandemic look like a case of the Munchies? Well, mainline some cough-syrup, put some chicken soup on to boil and stock up on hankies, as we look under the microscope to see just how contagious SURVIVORS [Sundays, Nine, 9:30pm] is.
The 2010 version of SURVIVORS is a British Sci-Fi drama series loosely based on the Seventies series that was written by Terry Nation, the DOCTOR WHO writer who is credited with creating the Daleks (I’m sure Davros would have a few choice words to say – or scream megalomaniacally – at that). When he wasn’t unleashing insane, conquest-minded alien xenophobes that looked like pepper shakers on the general populace, Nation liked to relax by unleashing lethal alien plagues on the general populace instead. SURVIVOR deals with the emergence of a pandemic even more deadly and detrimental to society than Oprah’s Book Club. A super-lethal strain of influenza spread to humans by domestic pets (but don’t go flushing Nemo II down the toilet just yet; later episodes hint the virus was genetically engineered by a shadow-government) is unleashed, first in Britain and then rapidly across the rest of the world. This Flu is really serious about the whole ‘pandemic’ thing and kills 99% of everyone it infects, making it more lethal than Malaria, Ebola, or Disco Fever. With the world’s entire human population sneezing itself into extinction, the global population is reduced from around 6 billion people to around 6 thousand- which is a terrible tragedy but which would also make it a lot easier to get front-row seats at AVATAR screenings. The show follows a disparate group of ten British people who have not succumbed to the virus- due to natural immunity, accident, confinement or sheer blind luck, as they attempt to relearn how to exist on a planet that is now all-but wiped clean of humanity. On the plus side, there’s plenty of food to go around and a hell of a lot more ease of parking. On the bad side, some of the other human survivors have obviously read Cormack McCarthy’s THE ROAD a few too many times and have gone violently, homicidally feral. And the killer virus is waiting in the wings (literally-pet birds are its main vector) to resurge with a new and mutated strain that will kill off the survivors of the first pandemic. Bummer!
At first glance, SURVIVORS plays out a lot like DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS without the plants, or 28 DAYS LATER without the screaming great zombies. They all feature a small group of unrelated individuals forced to band together and save themselves (and by extension, humanity) after a massive calamity that has decimated the human race, and all of them feature sweeping and creepy vistas of a vast, empty, rubble-strewn London with nary a person in sight (these shots will naturally not be as disturbing to residents of Perth, who are, of course, accustomed to the city being largely empty at any given moment). The primary difference is that where the main threat from DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS came from mobile, venom-spitting killer plants (now there’s a sentence you don’t write every day) and 28 DAYS LATER featured people infected with a virus that seemed to turn them into very angry champion marathon runners, SURVIVORS’ main antagonist (aside from the killer flu) is other human beings- the folks whom have not dealt at all well with the collapse of civilisation and have decided that Looting and Pillaging need not have gone out of fashion with the Vikings.
Unlike the original Seventies version of the series, in which the Killer Flu seemed to be defeated by a lack of melanin in the skin (i.e. all the survivors were white), this time around the disparate group of survivors actually are, you know, disparate- with a whole bunch of different racial, socio-economic, gender and sexual orientations being featured.
Get a booster shot and catch this show!
Gavin Pitts
