THE DEAD TIMES
DEAD ARE COMING...
COBRA: A Zombie-filled second series
In January 2020, a six-part TV series titled COBRA was aired on Sky One. It was a semi-political drama series following a fictional British government's reaction to a massive solar flare that knocked out all power to the British Isles and pretty much set the UK back to the stone age; electric lights, electric cars, hospital machines, literally anything that required power stopped working. Fortunately, only three zones were badly hit and two of those zones could be restored to basic functional levels with imported transformers. However, one zone, Scotland and the north of England, was left, literally, in the dark. There was looting, rioting and even murders as the people in this "danger zone" struggled over meagre, and ever dwindling, resources; relying on supplies transported from less-effected areas to restock the zone, supplies that would often be stolen by gangs of well-armed thugs before reaching their destination. It was not just the mundane 'everyday essentials' that citizens had to worry about either - with no power, the locks on prison cells failed, releasing hundreds of violent offenders onto the streets. Basically, the North fell into anarchy until the power was restored, and even then, despite not being shown in the series, the operation to clear up the situation and the financial toll of all damages would be immense. But all this is just alarmist media to make quality TV programmes surely? Well, I'm sad to say that, no, it isn't; the Earth has seen massive solar flares before - the last truly massive one hitting Earth in 1859 - and scientific studies predict that another is due anytime in the current century.
So why is all this relevant to The Dead Times I hear you cry, or softly murmur seeing as you've probably already guessed what I'm going to say next; I strongly believe there should be a Zombie version of this show - one that would fictionalise how a government might respond to a sudden outbreak of Zombies.
Why I think this would be a good idea
For a start, it is extremely topical. We are currently in the vice-like grip of a global pandemic where an invisible killer stalks the land and death happens at a microscopic level, a biological level. Indeed, the real-world COBRA team, setup to aid the British government in just such disasters, has convened many times to discuss the situation and draw plans for the future. I thought this, in itself, might be a cracking idea for a sequel series to see how a competent government (ie. not the real-world version) would handle a large-scale outbreak of disease. Would they shut the airports, the seaways, quarantine the island? When would they do this? How would the citizens react? How could Britain produce enough food to sustain its growing population? What if people, fleeing worse hit countries attempted to cross to our green and pleasant land illegally? What if there was an outbreak in a prison and none of the staff turned up, fearing infection - how would this be handled, both morally and physically? What if the fictional disease in this series was much worse than coronavirus; what if it was airborne, had a higher death rate or simply lasted far longer - entire years even? There are so many possibilities and questions.
However, I quickly realised this concept just would not work - a virus, a microscopic, almost invisible threat may be scary in real life but, on TV, it would just come off as boring - who would be terrified by something they cannot see or hear? It is possible, if enough time was invested in characterisation, building up a story to levels where we really cared about multiple individuals and dreaded there loss but, let's face it, this sort of thing takes a long time and some serious writing skill, massively inflating the budget of a TV series while also reducing the available finance for large-scale scenes and quality actors. No, to be truly frightening and give the audience that hit of 'what will happen next' apprehension from the very first episodes evil needs a face, something we can relate to and personify as an enemy, something were we can point at and say "that's the bad man", and that face is the face of your friends, your neighbours, your everyday, that face is the face of a Zombie.
To me, any show involving the living dead is awesome beyond question and is worthy of its time in the light but what I really think is extra special about a Zombie-filled second series of COBRA is that there are just no Zombie shows like it (not that there are many Zombie shows currently on TV, but still). TV series like The Walking Dead or Z Nation, before it was brutally cancelled, and nearly all Zombie movies focus on the individual or a group of individuals - low-level human survival. It would be awesome to see a show about survival on a country-basis; how will it survive; how will it keep going and still provide safety for those within, how will individuals react to being given instructions on how to survive, could they trust those instructions? Of course, this is all fantasy but is it really that much more far-fetched than the solar wave concept of the original COBRA series? I mean, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has a Zombie outbreak survival plan, as do FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the Americas, we know viruses of deadly proportion do happen and that there are huge numbers of doomsday 'preppers' out there that unwaveringly believe that just such a scenario may eventually happen. Also, Britain is the perfect setting for an outbreak, either originating here or travelling to our shores via an infected host. Britain is an island; we have natural sea borders that could be closed, leaving only the airports, which could also be shutdown. The British people can, to a limited degree, isolate themselves from the rest of the world - or be isolated by it.
Being an island, there are far fewer people than in, say, the US, which is absolutely massive in comparison. A series could show the devastating effects of a full-blown Zombie apocalypse fairly quickly while still keeping the number of Zombies low enough for some form of human counter-attack and eventual resurgence. Britain also has the advantage of large amounts of the population being separated in different areas with huge numbers in London and England compared to the less densely populated Scotland. A quality idea would be to have a reimagining of 'Hadrian's Wall' from roman times where a large, defended stone wall was built to divide the civilised English from the barbaric North. In a Zombie-infected Britain, you could have a reversal of that idea with a heavy wall keeping the less-badly infected Scotland from the rotted remnants of England.
The pitch
The series would be divided into four parts:
- Origins and the initial rise of the dead
- Transmission of the virus to the UK
- Stabilisation and the struggle to keep Britain afloat
- Understanding the virus and combat, seeing the eventual eradication of the undead plague (a small amount of undead would remain at the close of the series but humanity would definitely be on the road to victory)
The main idea is that government incompetence, lack of information and a general refusal to comprehend the existence of Zombies by any 'serious' person leads to all the problems initially. There is however a chance that humanity will prevail; the onslaught of the Zombies will be brutal and the spread of the virus behind them will appear impossible to stop but there will always be that glimmer of hope, stopping the series sinking into complete despair; the situation is bleak and the world will likely never return to normality but things will get better as the right choices are made, both the British government and the British people becoming more experienced at dealing with the Zombie horror.
The Zombies in the series wouldn't be the fast, screaming Zombies we see in most modern Zombie films - they would be slow, lurching horrors like those seen in World of the Dead: Zombie Diaries 2 or The Dead; giving a sense of the patient, relentless, almost unstoppable march of the undead plague. The plague would be a virus, originating in some third-world country, a remote village in Africa for example; nothing man-made, not some superdrug escaped from a lab or anything, just some disease that has sprung up naturally - maybe it's a random mutation in an existing virus or something altogether new, at this stage, it is unclear. It spreads gradually outward, the remote village at ground zero is not visited often, even by other Africans but eventually it reaches more villages, bigger towns and the pace of spread escalates dynamically. Soon reports of random violent outbursts come in from all around Africa - the lifeless dead travelling to the bigger cities by chance, not design. Of course, these outbursts are assumed to be the work of angry peasants, commoners, disgruntled farmers and so on. However, as the attacks continue the African government realises that 'the dead are coming back to life an attacking the living'. They send word to all other countries to cease tourism flights immediately, stop all other travel, freeze exports and set up road blocks, checkpoints along African boundaries - this plague of walking death cannot be allowed to leave. No action is taken by any country; it is deemed a joke, either by a meddlesome 'hacker' or someone who is asking to be fired, or a simple garbled message - in any case, the memo is not even shown to people in power in most countries, including Britain. In the eyes of the outside world, who can see something is going on in Africa, the event can be dismissed as some coup that will be brought under control in a few days - nothing to bother themselves with.
With no border controls in place, the virus inevitably heads to Britain; a tourist, who was scratched by a Zombie while on holiday in Egypt, boards a flight home and inadvertently takes the virus with him. The infection time of the virus is roughly 24-hours to 36-hours; crucially not immediate like in nearly all modern Zombie movies to allow the virus to take hold in Britain before the true Zombie threat is realised and also to create worrying uncertainty about just how many infected people there are in the country. The wounded tourist, of course, travels home to his wife upon arrival in London though soon becomes unconscious and is transferred to hospital. The doctors attempt treatment but nothing works. Other unconscious patients come in and the WHO (World Health Organization) is alerted of a possible new disease. The British government are informed at this point and start investigating; currently unaware of the link with foreign travel or the spreading Zombie virus because they did not read the memo from Africa. By the time the government has discovered the foreign travel link between most of the sick patients (one patient who had not been travelling abroad got scratched by someone already infected in an accident and thus contracted the disease that way), the first infected has risen and is slowly making his way through the hospital, spreading the infection to other patients and medical staff; the viewer does not directly see this - they just get non-sensical and conflicting reports from government officials; one report says it is a single crazed man terrorizing hospital staff, another report says it is a host of armed gunmen and another states that it is just a blown power circuit. Similar reports start coming in from other hospitals around the country and more infected patients from the first hospital start to rise, again, off-screen.
The government cannot get a straight answer of what is going on so, fearing a terrorist attack on one of London's major hospitals, they send in a Specialist Firearms Command or SCO19 team (basically, the British version of a SWAT team). The SCO19 team arrives at the hospital in the usual dramatic fashion of armed police in the media and strategically 'breach' the hospital fully expecting a battle with well-organized, 'dug in', armed terrorists; completely the opposite to what they find. The building is seemingly normal-looking; the lights are on, there is no blood on the walls, no bullet-holes and some staff are still just working away as normal (these are slow Zombies and the infection time of the virus is also fairly slow, large parts of the hospital are going to be unaffected initially). The SCO19 team order an immediate evacuation of the building - they are angry, and a bit confused about why this has not already been done. There are no distant gunshots or hostiles walking around so the entry team begin to question their orders, through the radio, to their commander outside. He is frustrated as well and is getting conflicting reports and half-truths from the government; he relays what info he has as he gets it and sends the entry team further into the hospital. By this time, multiple Zombies are 'waking up' all over the hospital - there is not a horde, only about four or five individuals, but the virus spreads as each resurrected bites one of the living. Eventually, among more conflicting reports from the government - now saying there is only one attacker, not a group -, the entry team finally see two of the Zombies shuffling towards them. However, the entry team do not know they are Zombies or hostiles of any sort; there are dead patients on beds and blood splatters on the walls making the two Zombies, both in hospital gowns, to appear as nothing more than civilians, wounded in a gun battle with the supposed gunman and mindlessly walking forward in a state of confused shock. Some of the entry team naturally rush forward to grab the 'civilians' and take them to safety - getting bit in the process. Another Zombie rises from a hospital bed behind the entry team, taking a chunk out of the officer at the back. None of the team were prepared for this and panic sets in, stray bullets hitting walls, impacting lights, slamming into each other and puncturing the Zombies (a few lucky strays hitting the advancing dead people the head, putting them out-of-action permanently). The commander, safely outside the hospital barks orders to his men through the radio and orders them to withdraw. Once the team are safely outside the hospital, the injured SCO19 officers are whisked off to other hospitals while the commander requests a situation report from the panic-stricken remainder - a report he later passes to the prime minister. It's bad yes, but it is considered a simple act of terrorism, coupled with a tragic police accident and is reported to the British people as such - there is no need for immediate concern among the populace. Many MPs and other officials disagree with this - especially those police officers on the entry team who know this is a complete lie - but the prime minister's word is final and he has got enough MPs to back him on this way forward. The prime minister sees, with very little collaboration, no evidence of a virus or link with what is going on in Africa (of which he has little interest at the moment). He is about to discover the consequences of his actions…
It's at this point where I'm going to go conveniently hazy on the details, largely to stop this article ballooning into some form of horrible demon-spawn of irritable length but, primarily because I never intended to give a whole script scenario here. This is just my idea of how a series dealing with how a modern government would deal with an outbreak of a fictional Zombie virus, just one possible direction for the narrative to take.
Before signing off, I would however, like to add another element to the story outlined above. It would take place after the prime minister's fateful decision to announce that the Zombie virus is, in fact, not a virus with ominous portent for the country but merely an isolated incident of violence carried out by a terrorist. After reports of similar incidents of violent outbreaks by individuals and increased reports of people becoming ill start to emerge, the British government as a whole is forced to accept that there is a virus, one that brings the recently deceased back to life to attack the living, even taking the bold step of using the word "Zombies". However, before they can host a press conference to warn the British people (they may actually deliberately hold off on telling the public so as not to create a panic or spark looting waves etc.), an incident occurs where the government learns, without a doubt that the infection is 'in' a particular apartment building; one person in the building carries the virus but whether they have become a Zombie yet is unknown, whether there are more infected people in the building is unknown and whether there are still uninfected in the building is also unknown; the virus is there, that's all they know. It's an almost identical situation to that in the epic Spanish Zombie movie Rec. And, just like in Rec, the building is quarantined; plastic sheeting stuck to the walls, armed men surrounding the area, no one leaves. So, say the government decide to destroy the building with whoever is inside, still inside. It's the only right answer (even if it is morally wrong); you kill the host, you kill the virus, you stop the spread. But the public don't yet know about the Zombie threat due, primarily, to government tardiness. To the people of Britain, the very people they elected to protect them have just slain several innocent people. The government will try to defend their position, try to explain the truth (leaving out any bits where they were slow to respond), try to convince people that a Zombie virus is currently ravaging Europe and is spreading into the UK but, come on, aside from a few diehard Zombie-lovers, who is going to believe that the dead walk? And that's the beauty of this concept, unlike most Zombie shows it is set in a fictional version of the modern world where Zombie media exists; there are people out there that believe Zombies can exist and quite rightly so.
With people becoming increasingly angry, it's the perfect opportunity for some of the backstabbing that is so prominent in the political world, and in season 1 of the show for that matter. The opposition party just has to come along and say how mad this all is, that Zombies don't exist and that the elected government must be overthrown before they cause more damage. Ok, none of those things are true but we apparently live in an age where truth doesn't matter anymore; if people buy it, who cares, right?
DESCRIPTION:
COBRA is a TV series about politics and how a fictional British government deal with a very serious crisis. It has been renewed for a second season and I think the new season should be about Zombies - this article explains why.
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DATE UPLOADED:
27/09/2020