Survivors - 2.4 Lights of London pt 2

The interest here is in seeing how they laboriously turn the plot round so that Ruth can leave London with a clear conscience. But before we got to that point, Greg and Charles threaten to take her back to the settlement by force - I wonder if she'll be able to forget that?

It's an interesting position that Ruth's in in this world. She's a very valuable resource, so she's important and people usually defer to her, but equally they're also liable to fight over her and allocate her services without considering her wishes. It's a little bit like the setup in one of the early Day of the Triffids chapters where the sighted people are being exploited in a similar way.

Like some of the series 1 episodes, there's a sequence with people shooting at each other which goes on too long, but it's not quite so tedious as those earlier ones because our friends are directly threatened.

Greg speaks of their settlement as being in the West Country. I had the idea it was out Gloucester/Worcester way.

Dating: it's 5 days since Ruth came to London, the night when Mac the radio engineer died. He had been sending messages for 14 months. That's a pleasingly precise bit of data: if it's still January (1977) then the plague could indeed have been in October or November 1975. If more time has passed between ep 2.2 and ep 2.3, then December is back in the picture. It is reassuring that we keep coming back to this Oct-Dec band of possibility.