Adapt or die…

Ken Bentley’s ‘Albion’ kicks the set off with Abby and Jenny continuing their journey south. The last couple of sets have done a lot of really good work exploring the reset their world is undergoing after the brutal fall of the government and that continues here. Abby and Jenny are off the map and Carolyn Seymour and Lucy Fleming excel here as they always have. The deep-seated, pragmatic decency of the two women is challenged by Jacob Barclay (Nicholas Asbury), a farmer sent here by the now defunct government. His clashes with the Tribe, including Boo (Hannah Raymond-Cox) and Pup (Ewan Goddard) echo the government’s own clashes but on a far smaller, more personal scale. Bentley’s idea of having Barclay’s faith be both his guiding light and obsession is a good one, and Asbury does a great job as a man holding the line through sheer force of personality who thinks he’s doing so through faith. There’s something almost Western-like about this story and it’s focus on personal ethics and the price we pay. Also the crunchy, tense violence that has always been something the series excels at.

‘Fallout’, the sole Matt Fitton script in this final set, takes the race against time that Bentley sets up and uses it to do three things, all interesting. The first is challenge, and eliminate, your concerns over the Tribe and what at first seems to be the tired old trope of ‘kids raised post apocalypse who’ve gone feral’. There’s about ten minutes at the top of this one where the Tribe really grate, but it feels a lot like that moment where you first step into a swimming pool. You get your ‘ear’ in really fast and are rewarded by three excellent performances. Raymond-Cox’s Boo, Goddard’s tortured Pup and the magnificently lugubrious Sal (Wanda Opalinka) all provide you with different perspectives on how the Tribe do things that reveal different things about their core ideals.

This is continued by the crowd-pleasing reintroduction of Ruth. Helen Goldwyn’s one of Big Finish’s best and it’s great to hear her acting again, especially as Ruth’s presence in the series serves two purposes. The first is to explore the consequences of the nearby Dungeness nuclear power plant and whether it’s connected to an outbreak of illness. The second is to throw a spotlight on the one thing the Tribe have evolved that is actively damaging yet deeply understandable and, its own way, compassionate. For them ‘Kindness’ is euthanasia, an accepted part of their medical procedures. The Tribe have come to accept this, even embrace it and the script does a great job of using Ruth to explore just how dark that concept is and lead them back towards something different.

Best of all though is something we’ve almost never had in the show: flashbacks. Nicholas Khan has a deeply poignant cameo as Father, a nuclear technician at Dungeness who led his people to sacrifice everything in order to keep the plant safe.  Benji Clifford’s sound design on these sequences is brilliant, using repeated phrases and fade ins to take us in and out of the past. The world is ‘saved’ in this instance and the characters’ job is to work out what happens next. That’s a powerful theme and one that unifies the stories here and arguably the entire New Dawn chapter of Survivors.

Ken Bentley returns for ‘Requiem’ which continues this approach as it closes the series out. The clash between the farmers and the Tribe is front and centre and plays out across the blasted plain of collapsed society that the last couple of sets have explored. No one is doing anything more than surviving and Abby and Jenny’s relentless, more than slightly exhausted, compassion is the key to all of them realizing that. Here, Kent and its odd inhabitants aren’t just a welcome break but a new, different start. The threat, the chaos Abby and Jenny have fled, is still very much there but as the story and the series winds down it becomes clear that they can do something about that. Not saving the old world but protecting the new one. A world they don’t have a place in.

The ending here is the show to a T: determined, polite and with its heart on its sleeve. Seymour, Fleming and Goldwyn do extraordinary work in the final moments here as it becomes clear these three incredible people are right where they want to be. Goldwyn’s Ruth was born for this world and her friendship with Raymond-Cox’s Boo is subtle and understated and kind. It also folds back into both the origins of the Tribe and their future. Robert Whitelock’s Dan also has some impressive stuff here as does Issy Van Randwyck’s Mother. No one side has it right. Together, they have a much better chance and the ending here is a moment of quiet revolution as only Survivors could do. Everyone gets to live, everything has to change and as Abby and Jenny leave they realize that for the first time in a while. Better still, they realize what they’re leaving isn’t a ruin of the old world, but the start of a new one.

But the ending here has to be just Abby and Jenny, and it is. Seymour and Fleming have inhabited these roles for decades and their calm, almost stoical compassion has been the north star of the entire series. Here, they honour those they’ve left behind and follow that north star somewhere new and while we know there’s more for them to do we also know we don’t need to hear. They’ve survived. The world has survived. Now it’s time for them to live.

Verdict: Survivors has been an extraordinary series to experience and write about. During its run I’ve done work in the post-apocalyptic genre myself and the series has always been a compass point. Listening to it through the early years of the pandemic too has been a deeply powerful experience. Hearing it take these tropes and beats that you think are familiar and showing you something new with it, even more so. Thanks to everyone who has been responsible for this remarkable series, and this remarkable capstone to it. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

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