Survivors - 2.5 The Face of the Tiger

'A year ago we were just happy to be alive,' says Ruth as they all bicker about who's working the hardest. It's clever that this quarrelling and division has already made Alastair think of leaving, even without the whole 'them finding out that he killed a child while insane' thing.

This is basically a remix of 1.9 Law and Order, with Hubert in the Tom Price role. Good to see that Greg is - by implication - haunted by the way that 'murder trial' turned out, and is determined not to make the same mistake, or even a similar one, again.

Ruth has another good line, 'We may be primitive by circumstance, but we are civilised by choice'. If I was one of the survivors I'd say that whenever opportunity offered, until they all got fed up with me and made me make soap.

Alastair met someone on his travels who may or may not have been Jimmy 'action hero' Garland. So long as he isn't in this episode, I don't care.

Very strange closing scene. Firstly there's a voiceover, which hasn't been done at all in the show before; up to now we haven't seen or heard anything which wasn't literally happening. Then there's a very odd shot which has Charles standing on the left of the scene, pans off him to the right, across the landscape, and onto Charles again standing on the right of the scene. It's the most confusing thing I've ever seen in 70s television, I thought for a moment they were trying to suggest he had an evil twin.

Dating: it's now March. The plague was 'over a year ago'. The quarantine hut had 3 of the survivors staying in it a fortnight ago, the implication being that that was when Ruth, Greg and Charles returned from London. That suggests that 2.3 and 2.4 took place in late Jan, or Feb, and that would put the plague in November 1975 rather than late October based on the evidence in 2.4.