Survivors - 3.3 Law of the Jungle

One of the two classic patterns for Survivors episodes is for our friends to get into a sticky situation with the aberrant settlement of the week, and then to extricate themselves, with varying degrees of difficulty. This is one of the stickiest, as villain of the week Brod is more determined than usual for them not to escape.

Charles describes him as 'like a robber baron from a fairy tale' and there's something weirdly Game of Thrones about him and the way he's corrupted Edith's two sons. Luckily for the survivors, he's also got a massive class-based chip on his shoulder which impairs his judgement, and if that wasn't bad enough, he's also impotent. Jenny goes about to seduce him. 'I have to pretend to fancy him,' she explains earnestly to Charles.

Hubert - who isn't one of the targets of Brod's class issues - elevates himself out of the comic relief category by cutting the Gordian knot: he shoots him and pretends it was an accident.

Jenny's experiences seem to have hardened her: she shot that man in 3.1, and in this one she peremptorily tells Charles to kill the trapped pig. 'With a shotgun?' he asks. 'Shoot it through the eyes!' she says impatiently. I don't like seeing Brod hit her though.

Brian Blessed is great as Brod - there are some odd shifts of tone in the episode, but Blessed makes them seem plausible. Like when Brod suddenly starts ranting about his wife running away with a tax inspector. They're literally on a train to nowhere after the apocalypse, and what's bothering him is her fancy man's job.

Road signs being used as archery targets. Very Threads.

The feral dogs in series 3 are a much more convincing threat than the ones in series 1.

Copy of Middlemarch treasured by Edith. Poignant.

Geography: Charles repeats the thing from series 2 about their settlement being in the West Country. A search shows that that term is sometimes meant to include Herefordshire.

Dating: it's 8 months since Jenny last saw Greg, so it's now approximately March 1978. (As previously, we don't know what the year is, but for brevity's sake I'm continuing to assume the plague struck in late 1975).