Survivors - 2.2 Greater Love

Effective scene with Arthur going through the old census data and dividing by 5000 to work out how many nurses there are left.

Charles and Greg drink a toast to civilisation, then later on Charles is getting out the brandy that he was saving 'for a special occasion, for a bigger world, better days' in much grimmer circumstances.

Some retconning/backstory about the original plague - not everyone who had that had lumps under their arms (Jenny's friend Pat did, and so did Abby). Ruth says that that was assumed to be a mutant form of bubonic plague - though Dr Tyler in ep 1 said it was a mutant virus, and bubonic plague is caused by a bacillus not a virus. What Paul's got doesn't respond to antibiotics, so, as Ruth explains, it must be another mutant strain. I suppose we are to assume that the original plague has got into the rat/flea population and carried on mutating.

Ruth's PPE made out of tomato compost bags is very disturbing. It's partly Threads, it's partly much too close to the bone coronavirus-wise.

Good bit of characterisation with Ruth challenging and defeating Charles' 'towns are out' edict in favour of a quarantine protocol. I like Ruth but I wish she hadn't regenerated. I wanted to see series 1 Ruth doing this stuff.

Greg talks explicitly about how conditions have changed for the better since series 1. It's clearly going to be less Day of the Triffids and more The Good Life from now on.

Dating: it can't be long since ep 1, only a day or so probably. Charles says civilisation was 'just a year ago', he's probably speaking loosely as previous evidence has shown it must have been 13 months ago at least.

Paul says that he was in London - as described in series 1 - 3 months after the plague. In series 1 he also describes doing other things before he joined the survivors in March. If the plague was at its latest possible date (early Dec 1975) he would have had to do them very quickly in order to fit in the visit to London as well. That suggests it was earlier in the possible range, back towards the end of Oct 1975.