Survivors 10 - The Future Hour

There's a familiar assumption that gold is the thing to have if society collapses, and an equally familiar response that medicine, tinned food and ammunition will be the only things with any value in that scenario. Enter Rohm Dutt with his own take on the issue: his investment approach could be described as 'extreme value', in that he thinks gold will be worth something again one day.

I like the incongruity of having someone who's basically a Minder villain in the Survivors setting, but once I'd finished chuckling over it, there wasn't much else for me to enjoy in this ep. I was interested to see the continuing portrayal of Abby of someone who's clever, but not quite as clever as she thinks; clever enough to give Rohm Dutt a carefully managed view of their community, but not clever enough to stop the children spilling the beans to his henchman.

I wonder though, can she really be so naive as not to have realised that Rohm Dutt might try to kill them all rather than just scare them? Didn't she learn anything from the unknown period of time she spent fending for herself before she met Greg and Jenny? Though of course I keep forgetting that this isn't Triffids, 99.98% of the original population are dead, she may indeed not have encountered anyone at all except Wormley and his group during that time.

The rest of the ep hardly need be a Survivors ep at all, it's just two groups skirmishing with each other till the very convenient conclusion, which gets rid of Rohm Dutt and Tom Price without anyone else getting killed. I can hardly believe Rohm Dutt's men wouldn't have shot Abby and everyone else rather than just turning their fire on Price. Perhaps they secretly didn't like working for him. Having said that, parts of the ep are very choppily edited so it's easy to get confused about what's happening.

Really I just wanted this to be over so that we could get back to world-building.

Abby's love of nicotine foregrounded: on finding Rohm Dutt's huge cache of Rothmans, and trying to persuade Greg to let him nick a few, Paul says 'Abby must have run out of fags by now.' (She was smoking at the party in the previous ep btw).

Dating: Laura was on her own for 6 weeks after the plague (referred to as the Death again here) before she met Rohm Dutt, and she implied that he noticed she was pregnant 'after 3 months'. If she means 3 months into the pregnancy, then she must have been pregnant for no more than 6 weeks before the plague broke out. She's giving birth now, so if the previous supposition is correct, it must be June 15th at the earliest, and if it isn't - she meant 3 months after she met Rohm Dutt - so she got pregnant just before the plague broke out - it's July 27th at the earliest.