(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s become a well-worn pattern in apocalyptic storytelling to portray the end of the world as a one-way, cataclysmic slide into oblivion for good old Homo Sapiens.
Whether it’s alien invasion or zombies or a pandemic, humanity is knocked down and comprehensively so, and if it does manage to stagger up to its badly shaken feet, it’s in no shape to rebuild society, settling instead for a hardscrabble existence full of deprivation, war and barely scraping by.
But some stories of late, such as Station Eleven, and now Earth Abides, based on the 1949 book of the same name by George R. Stewart, have dared to wonder what might happen if that tenacious can-do attitude, which has seen us, somewhat ruinously climb the pile to the stop of the evolutionary heap, might survive the end of civilisation as we know it and rise to not only help us survive but to build something new.
It’s a beguiling idea, and one that Earth Abides explores slowly and thoughtfully in an almost real time – though the six-episode limited series is marked by major year and multi-year time jumps which serve to underscore the progress made by survivors – in the aftermath of a plague that wipes out 99.9% of people.
This kind of near-total destruction of human society leaves those who are strong enough genetically to pull through like Isherwood aka Ish in a massive quandary – do they simply give up like two drunken survivors in Las Vegas choose to do or do they try to forge some sort of new life in the disease-stricken ruins of the old?
No prizes for guessing, since there’s six episodes of storytelling in the beguilingly languid offing, what Ish chooses, even as he struggles to deal with the fact that his parents and everyone he knew is dead and that life, as he experienced it in San Lupo, in the Bay Area of California, has been thrown into the dustbin of history by a plague that moved so quickly that, bodies, aside, everything has an air of a catastrophic Marie Celeste to it.
It’s at this point, when Ish is all alone that he has a choice – does he try to create something entirely new or work hard to resuscitate civilisation as it was?
This central tension runs right through Earth Abides which takes us on a journey over twenty years, during which Ish meets and falls in love with Emma (Jessica Frances Dukes), has three kids, and the family is joined by a community of likeminded souls including Jorge (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll) and his partner Maurine (Elyse Levesque), and a polyamorous throuple consisting of Ezra (Birkett Turton), Jean (Hilary McCormack) and Molly (Luisa d’Oliveira).
By and large, their struggles aren’t the violent warlike kind that ended up marring shows like The Walking Dead, which became obsessed with death and fighting over actual humanity and the urge to live on, but rather the stuff of rats invading the community or disease striking when medical supplies are near to non-existent.
If you’re not the sort of person who likes their storytelling slow and meditative, then you may not enjoy the quiet thoughtfulness of Earth Abides which does, for the most part, go for big, bang, boom storytelling, preferring instead to let the story unspool in time with the way in which Ish and his new community quietly and tenaciously rebuild their lives.
While the show does have a tendency to overplay its narrative insightfulness – by and large, the narration works but sometimes it simply pretentiously overbaked – it mostly nails what it would be like to face a world largely free of people and societal touches and having to choose over and over again, day by day, what kind of world you want.
Earth Abides works, despite its flaws, because it chooses to go deep into how post-apocalyptic life would, under the right conditions, slowly begin to fashion a new normal.
Where some of these stories go wrong is assuming that every single day would be epic tension and blockbuster developments; that simply wouldn’t be the case because at some point, things, by their own momentum would have to ease off crisis mode and into something more ordinary and everyday.
The show recognises that and so pretty much all of the storytelling centres on domestic dramas and the challenges of survival and how even when things are looking on the up-and-up that dives back into existential danger can happen with little to no warning.
This ruminative approach punctuated by moments of high drama works because Earth Abides takes its time getting us to meet and know its characters; while yes, there are a few cardboard cutout characters, by and large, everyone feels like a real person, and thus, their sense of community and found family feels compellingly authentic too.
By far its greatest strength though is that Earth Abides doesn’t throw in the towel and say humanity is dead and buried.
Are we well and truly back at square one? Yep. Are on the mat, to use a wrestling down, pinned by evolution stabbing us royally in the back? Also yep. But can we rise again?
Earth Abides believes so, and it doesn’t make its case in ways that feel too trite and easy; sure some things are a little too simple and there are moments where credibility is strained – Ish wanders into his parents’ place at one point and finds their bodies but does he don a mask or protect himself? Laughably, no – but overall, this is a show that focuses hard on humanity and its strengths (mostly) and weaknesses and how, even in the very worst of times, this will carry us through, maybe not to a recreation of what we’ve lost but quite possibly to something new and good and a world where we can start again.
Earth Abides streams on MGM+ and in Australia, on Stan.