Survivors - 3.11 Long Live The King

A lot has been happening since the previous episode. After some initial manoeuvring we discover Agnes in paramilitary uniform hoping to set up a currency and national council in Greg's name. As Agnes points out, it doesn't matter whether the currency is really backed by a million gallons of petrol any more than whether it mattered the Bank of England could have really paid out everyone who held its notes. For a fiat currency to work, people just need to believe in it.

And bringing forward the currency first is a clever writing move, because it prepares for the larger step that, because people met Greg in the past and trusted him, it doesn't matter whether he's still alive or not, which is good because he is revealed to be dead, though that wasn't difficult to guess from the beginning.

The bombastic GP posters and badges, and the flag with GP on it, are quite clever too, they seem very ridiculous, but they're meant to be over the top, they're deliberate propaganda to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of stability.

The world was ravaged by the plague and since then the survivors have coped with typhoid and flu and smallpox. But they also appear to be extraordinary susceptible to fascism, this must be the 5th or 6th time we've had people calling for order and strong leadership (from them). I think it's a bit cheap to push all this onto Agnes just because she's blonde and Nordic.

The Captain (namechecked in the previous ep) is in this to show us that one danger of order and strong leadership is that they can be hijacked by gangsters. But in person he doesn't present the threat that he should. Why is he up and walking around if he's had smallpox for weeks anyway? Remember how ill Dr Adams was at that stage. And no-one reacts with alarm to his pustules.

Jenny has some metatextual lines. 'I'm sick and tired of these everlasting changes of plan. It's always the same' and 'Greg isn't here. Again.' She's as fed up with series 3 as we are.

There's a freeze frame when the episode title caption comes up shortly after the start. That hasn't been done before - though the delay between the start of the episodes and the caption has been very variable, it takes over a minute in some cases.

Some of these themes are to be found in David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman, in which a post-apocalyptic wanderer puts on a discarded US Postal Service uniform and finds he's accidentally created a self-fulfilling prophecy of restored order. Don't watch the film of it though, it's shit.

'We're supposed to be going to Scotland, aren't we.' It's interesting that - the coronavirus having delayed my own plans to head north - I should have found myself having second thoughts about going after seeing the English countryside so much on display in Survivors. And even more interesting that as series 3 comes to an end, my resolve should return when I find one of the subplots is about a quest to reach Scotland.

Dating: Charles says that Agnes last reported seeing Greg 'weeks ago'. Possibly referring to the events of the previous ep.