Summary
Earth Abides gets off to a very bleak start in Episode 1, but it’s a refreshingly human-focused take on post-apocalyptic storytelling and has some clear potential.
I hope you haven’t forgotten about the COVID-19 pandemic, because contemporary entertainment isn’t about to any time soon. And what better to help us collectively process an unprecedentedly devastating public health calamity than a show about… an unprecedentedly devastating public health calamity, albeit one that leaves just enough people alive that they can be really sad about it. This is Episode 1 of Earth Abides in a nutshell.
To be fair, Earth Abides isn’t based on Covid; it’s adapted from George R. Stewart’s same-titled 1949 novel, which was itself a big influence on Stephen King’s The Stand. But this MGM+ version does pay lip service to how our handling of the previous pandemic left us more susceptible to this one. It’s a bit of needless contemporary flourish that is supposed to make the premise more believable but ends up feeling a little hectoring. No matter.
Let’s be clear: “Alone” is a very grim hour of television, though it mostly lives up to its title, which refers to our protagonist, Ish, a geologist in unreasonably good shape whom we meet living alone in an isolated cabin studying nearby rock deposits. In the opening scenes of Episode 1, he’s suddenly bitten by a rattlesnake, and despite him having sucked out enough of the venom to survive, he nonetheless collapses once he drags himself back to his cabin. When he wakes up three weeks later, everyone – almost everyone, anyway – is dead.
As it turns out, Ish slept through the eradication of mankind; he’s like my girlfriend trying to wake up for work. This sounds funny written down but it isn’t intended as a joke; there are no jokes in Earth Abides. Instead, Ish tries to reckon with his new sudden solitude, and this is quickly revealed to be the point of the story. There are no zombies like in The Walking Dead or fungal monstrosities like in The Last of Us. There is, crucially, nothing – and no one.
When Ish gets in his car and drives into the nearest city, he finds it deserted except for rotting corpses in parking lots and military vehicles left eerily abandoned. A billboard informs him that humanity is kaput. But because he left his phone where he got bitten by the snake, he never saw the text from his mother telling him he was loved. So he rushes home to reunite with his parents and finds them both dead and rotting in an unceremonious one-two punch of reality. I told you this premiere was grim, didn’t I?
Alexander Ludwig in Earth Abides | Image via MGM+
Quite often in Earth Abides, Ish frantically screams to himself. The implication isn’t that he’s losing it and might be imagining things, though I can see how some might see it that way. This is also part of the point. Ish is resigning himself to society’s collapse, to the loss of everything, and the potential of having to rebuild it from scratch. His screams are of terror, not loss. He’s having an existential moment.
At this point Ish does what anyone would when confronted with the implosion of their existence – he goes to Vegas. Unfortunately, Sin City is also curiously barren, except for two survivors who’re hiding out in a hotel (this is an MGM+ show; you can guess which.) But these two don’t represent a glimmer of sunshine. They’ve both resigned themselves to sitting around getting drunk, working their way through the casino’s food reserves until they expire or the power fizzles out, at which point they’ve both agreed to commit suicide. Fun!
Ish’s attempts to convince the survivors to leave the hotel and look for life elsewhere fall on deaf ears. They’ve already given up. So he leaves, and as he does so, a gunshot rings out – a few seconds later, another follows it.
Cue more screaming from Ish. Things aren’t looking good. At some point, it must have occurred to him that he’s immune from whatever world-ending disease ravaged the population, or at least that’s what I’m theorizing. I guess he contracted it while he was delirious from the rattlesnake bite and some combination of the venom and the virus canceled each other out. I’m not a doctor, but that seems likely enough by fiction standards.
Either way, Ish is alive while almost everyone else is not, which is what matters. Luckily, he runs into the only thing that could possibly improve such a situation – a dog. He finds it in the middle of the road and almost flattens it, so he names it Lucky. Inspired by the land shark, he visits a local library and checks out a bunch of books for survivalist homework. The point is clear – he’s determined to stick around.
Ish and Lucky find a place to hole up and an indeterminate amount of time passes. Ish grows a beard and gradually begins to lose his sense of purpose in his long solitude, which I suppose is understandable. He keeps himself busy and more or less sane with learning, routine, and basic survival. I’m glad the show skipped over this since it can’t have been very interesting.
But Earth Abides Episode 1 ends with Lucky barking at something on the balcony. He can see smoke rising from a nearby home. Someone else is alive. It’s a curiously hopeful note for this premiere to end on given how thoroughly bleak it has been throughout its runtime, but I suppose we don’t know who’s out there just yet. Could be a serial killer or a vegan or something, which would only make things worse. We’ll have to wait and see.
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