"Spoil of War" was the first of two episodes written by M K Jeeves. If that name sounds like a pseudonym it is, one assumed by Clive Exton, rather a posh playwright who had co-written Hammer horror spoof The House in Nightmare Park; he'd already written the screenplay for Richard Fleisher's 10 Rillington Place and would later write Red Sonja and later the Jeeves & Wooster TV series. So a heavyweight really. His first episode is the first with the group firmly established at the Grange.
Well, we were due a fucking stinker. Actually, "Gone to Angels", again from Jack Ronder, isn't outright bad, just a big step down from the first four. Generally episodes of Survivors concentrate on a single plot line and this works as it allows the subject at hand to be explored thoroughly, and the casting structure largely reflects this in that we only have three fully-fledged regular characters with the rest recurring and hired as needed. However, "Gone to Angels" splits the leads fully and the result is scattershot.
The problem with a concept like Survivors is that it would quite rapidly get depressing to just watch everything break down and everyone die. Terry Nation's concept for the series was more about how people would deal with the result than the plague itself, which was really just an excuse to get society in a good position to be explored. So here, as the name suggests, are the first kernels of a new start for the characters. A handful of isolated cases over the next few episodes aside the plague has done its' killing - but worry not, as Nation will show, there are plenty of other ways to die horribly in this brave new world. For now though we've hit a level where most of the people who would die from the death or initial death-related stupidity have done so and the survivors are beginning to respond.
