True Survivors Can Stand Alone

The Sixth Series Of Big Finish's Survivors Audio Dramas Offers Four Parallel Standalone Stories And Heralds The Return Of A Much-loved Medical Practitioner...
 

- Rich Cross

“We’re trying something a little different this time,” explains Survivors’ producer David Richardson. Over the course of five well received series, Big Finish has delivered twenty original stories that intertwine with, and extend, the established canon of Terry Nation’s acclaimed 1970s post-apocalyptic TV drama. “We had made five successful box sets with big story arcs, and I loved them all,” he says. “But it excited us creatively to take a different path this time, and follow the kind of episodic storytelling that they had done on TV.”

The fifth series explored the seemingly unstoppable spread of a mutation of the Death plague, but ended with that new outbreak being contained. Scriptwriter Andrew Smith, who penned that series’ thrilling finale Come the Horsemen, says that the story arc needed to conclude with a renewed sense of optimism, despite the calamity’s death toll. “I think we almost have to end on a note of hope, just to give our survivors some respite,” he suggests. “We had to draw a line under this second outbreak of the Death… and it’s nicely uplifting for them all that this particularly devastating period is behind them.”