Survivors 13 - A Beginning

I like the first 20 minutes of this, where Abby is preparing her friends to manage without her. She and Jenny get a scene together again, which I like, it takes me back to the first few eps. But it's used to imply that she's been harbouring a passion all along for Garland, the Geoffrey Household hero from episode 6, and off she goes to find him.

There's some foregrounding of the precariousness of a life without medicine, and it's discussed in one of the earlier eps too - 'How many doctors are there left in England? Twenty?'. This prepares us for the idea that, far from dumping a casualty on them, the nomads have left Abby's friends a priceless resource in the form of junior doctor Ruth.

I know about Ruth because I read some of the series 2 summaries, because I originally intended only to watch series 1 as I wasn't interested in Survivors if Abby wasn't going to be in it. But I've realised that what I liked about Abby was her indomitability and her achievement in surviving the first week on her own. If she finds Garland attractive then she isn't the woman I thought she was.

I did like her reaction during the argument with Greg, when he grabs her wrist and she stares furiously and fixedly - not at him, but at his grabbing hand. Don't mess with Abby.

She also gets a fine speech later on:

Whatever we do, however hard we work, there's no going back. What we've got now is what we'll have for the rest of our lifetimes.

Now that does ring true. She burnt her house down in ep 1 because she realised even then that there was no going back.

I think the blue zip-up bag she takes on her journey is the one Jenny used when she travelled out of London in eps 1 and 2.

This ep starts the day before the longest day of the year - June 21 1976 or June 20 1977. If that was the only data we had, it could just possibly still be 1976, if eps 10, 11 and 12 had all happened within days of each other. But, Greg says that Abby has been sulking for the last 6 weeks, and there has been time for the seed they traded the petrol for to prove itself 'sour'. 'Sour' seems from searches to mean that the seed has sprouted, like in The Mayor of Casterbridge; if that's so, then it would have been apparent almost immediately, but if it means that it wouldn't grow, then more time would have to have passed for them to have realised.

Furthermore, Greg says that their wheat crop 'isn't even in yet.' He might mean that they haven't harvested it yet - or that they haven't sown it yet. Farming forums suggest that wheat can in extreme cases be sown as late as the end of May or early June, but that still won't do - he must mean that it hasn't been harvested yet.

And he refers to the possibility of having 'another summer like last year', ie as bad as last year. It sounds like he means a previous year during which they were farming. He can't mean 1975, the year the plague happened, he was an oil engineer then, he didn't care what sort of farming weather there was.

So I think that nearly a year has passed since the previous episode, and it's now Jun 20 1977. [I thought that when I hadn't watched series 2. There is different evidence about this question in a later ep, which I won't mention here for fear of spoilering you]

How does Ruth's story fit with this? She went 'up and down the river' with Peggy the nurse for an unknown time before they met the barge people and stayed with them 3 months before she set off looking for sulphonamide drugs (antibiotics). Greg estimates she's been ill for a week so she must have left the barge in early June. There is a suspicion, isn't there, that that's designed to fit with the year still being 1976. Dr Warlock (Bronson) left the school some time after ep 1 (Oct/Nov 1975) and before ep 5 (Mar 1976), so if it is 1977 now, he and the boys and the others were on the barge for over a year before Ruth and Peggy encountered them as she cruised up and down the Thames. What a picture that evokes. Way Upstream but after civilisation has collapsed.

(Or alternatively - it will be remembered that Nancy Blackett's real name was Ruth, but as her sister Peggy relates, she called herself Nancy because Amazons were ruthless. Did Terry Nation have a post-apocalyptic Swallows and Amazons scenario on his mind?)

Perhaps there'll be further evidence in series 2 to resolve this question? [Indeed there was]