Last Time, the ‘Next Time’ trailer was rather misleading. I expected Bunker Action, and lots of it… but what we get This Time is another largely standalone episode which gives us a bit of the Abby/Greg dialogue I’d hoped for, though over a glass of bubbly rather than in a shoot out somewhere, and barely any Men of Science (other than a short, but major set up for next week’s series finale – I’m calling this confidently, absolutely this time). These sort of scenes always require delicacy; get it wrong and you get plasticky cheese slices for script pages, know you haven’t a hope in hell and you can only really send it up. Again, it underlines how risky Survivors really is where it counts – ‘proper’ sci-fi fans may well hate this sort of argument about how you can’t really be expected to be consistent about who you fancy; others may start to feel a bit constrained, that the show isn’t moving fast enough. It doesn’t need saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the lines are just about well enough choreographed to keep it credible and watchable, and the acting works for me, from Tapper and Beesley again. A ‘Screwball cultist’ isn’t the most original idea for getting your actual danger and delirious OTT villainy into a drama, and you might wonder if it’s the sort of thing a series with the luxury of a twenty-two episode run per the American model might have been better doing, over something only running for six episodes this year. But ‘end of the world as we know it’ scenarios do promote exactly this kind of conflict. Kudos to the script for keeping balance with a clear explanation for a very earthly psychosis, but some sensitive dialogue that doesn’t rubbish the worthiness of more romantic notions of fate and hope. There’s a suitably dramatic finale with the killer within Tom almost coming out for all to see – but they’re in a church, and mercy is demanded. That’s gotta have consequences. Perhaps it would have been nice to explore how much more complicated mental illness could have been, and keep John around for a bit longer to develop him. It’s still a largely subtle series, though, so forgivable. It can’t be a coincidence that a major character revealing she’s not of traditional sexuality happens in the same episode as religious fundamentalists – albeit, baby-making ones. But this doesn’t form any kind of clunking moral TM and thank God for that. Check out our review of episode 4 here. Survivors – series 2 commissioned 23 December 2008
