Survivors 12 - Something of Value

Once again everything is nice and peaceful at the settlement, which means that a calamity is surely about to befall it. Lawson is so obviously a wrong 'un that I'm once again left in despair at the naive trustfulness of Abby and her friends.

Actually, on this occasion it's really just Abby's fault: Jenny, Arthur and Paul all had their suspicions but she's happy to leave it till the morning.

There's also natural disaster - notice how we're set up to expect a fire rather than a flood - which destroys most of their crops and supplies, so they decide to trade the petrol in the tanker with the next settlement. But they don't send someone over there to negotiate, no, they drive their whole stock of 1000 gallons of petrol, worth far more than its weight in gold, across a post-apocalyptic landscape on spec.

This ep reminds me rather of ep 8, Spoils of War, in the way that the first act is largely 'strategic' (how are we going to survive the winter?) and then the second act abruptly shifts gear into 'tactical' mode (how do we stop Lawson and his pals taking the tanker?). It is a very tense and exciting act, but like with ep 8, it needn't be happening in a post-collapse world at all. In the Survivors milieu you don't have to have people stalking each other with guns to create tension. I start nervously wringing my hands whenever they leave a vehicle unattended.

Dating: Greg says that they can't hope to harvest a new grain crop for 2 months, and (*searches) wheat, barley and oats are all harvested Jul-Sep in Britain, suggesting that the date now is between June and July. The previous ep, I calculated, was Jun 20-Aug 1, and although Emma says the baby has grown, we can see she's still a very young baby. I'm not a baby expert but I don't think more than 2 months at the outside has elapsed since the previous ep. OTOH for her to have 'grown' I suppose at least 2 weeks must have passed. With this and the grain evidence, shall we say then that it is now somewhere between Jul 3 and Jul 31.