Survivors - 5 Gone to the Angels

I always resent the 'British Government', Torrance, Bill Gore types who turn up in these dystopias and spoil everything. I suppose people are divided between those who would see the collapse of civilisation as a chance to be free, and those who would see it as a chance to push others around.

Jenny says, with strange precision, that not many five-year-olds could have survived the plague. I was a 'rising five' when episode 1 went out on Wednesday April 16th 1975 - indeed my first day of school was Monday April 14th. It looks like I probably perished :( .

Further to the dating question in the previous episode - in the newspaper scene Abby says the plague had not yet begun on September 8th [year 1], which lends some weight to my argument in the previous article that episode 1 takes place no later than October, but doesn't rule out the November possibility either.

Everyone has winter coats on still in this, I'm guessing it's late Feb or early March.

The discovery that Abby, having had the plague, is still carrying it and can infect those not previously exposed, is a shocking one, rather like the poisonous (infected? polluted? radioactive?) fish in the previous episode. Jenny brings up the idea I mentioned in the last article, about pockets of continuing civilisation, which, she says - even if they existed - would be destroyed if they found them. And that the same would go for Peter if they ever found him.

But there's a glitch here, Jenny and Greg speak as if they had had the plague just the same as Abby. But they didn't - as I observed in my reaction to episode 3, they had natural immunity. Yes, the immune might still be carriers*, but my point here is about who has had the plague and who hasn't. I'm guessing this is a continuity issue between the first 3 episodes written by Terry, and the subsequent ones from other pens.

*Might they? I'm a software developer not an epidemiologist. I don't even know about real plagues never mind this particular fictional one.