T.V.Blues

Well, the New Year got off to a faltering start, with a little help from the weather.

Survivors returnred with a bang, and a few dodgy plot points.

Bit of a weird co-incidence that the hospital exploded just as they visited, but them's the breaks. (OK so it was torched deliberately but the torchers didn't check too carefully for inhabitants, like the knife-wielder in the closet.)

So with Greg furiuosly flashing back in his gunshot induced delerium Anya and Al get trapped under the rubble, causing Sarah to sell herself for a trolly jack. I must admit I thought he said they'd need a dolly jack to shift concrete, which I assumed to be some special building-site device for lifting and moving large weights. Surely it would have been quicker and easier to find a trolly jack in a garage or the back of a van? Ah well, it did the job.

With barely a pause for R&R it's off to find Abby, who had just about escaped with help from her abductor's wife anyway. I'm sure she appreciated the lift home though.

Pulling it all together Greg recovered enough to chuck Tom out, more from his own iffy past than Tom's. Tom didn't go far but did manage to provoke the neighbours enough to spark retaliation. And then his first mistake: getting out of the truck without the gun long enough to get shanghaied. This compelled Anya to pick it up, demonstrating that you have to slacken your principles in order to survive.

Good to see Roger Lloyd Pack on the screen again as Billy - I last saw him on stage at the Theatre Royal in Windsor - even in this less-pleasant incarnation. Billy seemed nice enough, as a trucker would be in a world with almost no traffic, but having the right Land Rover spares to hand was a bit of a stretch.

Then Tom's second mistke: letting himself get caught so easily. The show trial was obviously going to have one outcome, but with a fistful of surprises. Greg did what could be seen as a betrayal, but for the right reasons, after Tom had given up his past ostensibly for the 'court', but really for Anya. And Samantha really had to blow her 'justice' story to get the verdict she wanted.

And it all turned out to be for a hidden reason: Dexter, who had shown the first public signs of moving to take over during the trial, was the real target. Previously he'd been a bit of a one-dimensional villain, in the process giving Tom enough reason to want to kill him anyway. But now he reveals some depth, although the Tai-Chi seemed a bit effete for him. Tidy-ish ending with Samantha selling Tom & Greg on to the next episode.

Trapped in a coal mine Tom didn't find Greg's coming back for him quite made up for judging him guilty in the first place. So Greg ending up with him achieved poetic justice at least!

As Al said to Najid, nothing screws up a plan like changing it. Good thought, but since Greg was in the middle of one plan, and Tom had started another, having Anya and Abby turn up left everything in turmoil. Three plans lucky as it happened. Tom's plan of 'turning up in a truck' kind of came off in that they all got away with new recruit Sally.

I can see that the freed miners were a bit ticked off, but in a world so low in resources would they really have smashed the place up in preference to hunting down their captors? Now the 'Family' (as the BBC dub them) have both the band of disgruntled miners and the disenfranchised 'stakeholders' to trip over in the wilds.

But it looks like Billy is going to trip over them first!

Despite the odd plot stretch I feel that this is an improvement on the first series, which seemed like a low-budget zombie movie with empty streets everywhere. Now some time has passed the people encountered have got past the initial shock and are establishing new patterns for their lives. Being drama it tends to focus more on the régimes like Smithson's coal mine than the ordinary people who lived near the hospital, and on Samantha's power-plays rather than the water purification plant (I'd like to have seen more!), but it is getting more interesting.