Earth Abides – Season 1 Episode 1 “Alone” Recap & Review

Alone

Episode 1 of Earth Abides begins over at a quiet cabin in the middle of the woods. A man named Ish writes in his journal about excavating for pyrite and how he’s feeling lucky. His mum rings but he ignores the call, instead heading out to the cliffside. Unfortunately, he ends up bitten by a snake and is forced to spit the venom out. In the chaos, he drops his phone on the ground.

Ish makes it back to his cabin but this survivalist eventually passes out on his bed, and is forced to try and work through the poison. He does, thankfully, but his hand is swollen like a balloon. Time passes and strange, delirious visions include a bunch of people sniffing around the cabin commenting how he’s sick, and a helicopter flying overhead.

It’s unclear right now exactly how long Ish has been out of it, but we do catch a glimpse of his phone out in the woods. The last message from his mum reads “We love you”. When Ish finally awakens, he heads out in his car and over to town. Only… the place is deserted, save for the bodies. A whole bunch of people are dead, and it’s here where Ish notices a sign reading that there’s been a global pandemic and the government suspended.

Ish is shocked, and races over to his mum’s place. There’s still food here, although it is starting to rot, and there are also coffee cups still on their saucers. Whatever happened, it happened fast. Unfortunately, he ends up finding his family dead. After burying his folks, Ish heads to the local church where he finds a whole bunch of people dead.

Determined to find other survivors, Ish picks up some supplies from the store and heads out. How do we know he’s doing this? Well, he says it out loud to no one in particular. As you do. The roadblocks out of town are abandoned, and with no one else on the road he puts his foot down and just floors it along the desert roads, all the way to Las Vegas.

Given the hydro-electric power from Hoover Dam, all the lights are still on but there’s nobody around. At least not to begin with. After indulging himself in a late-night dip and some alcohol, a couple of survivors suddenly show. Apparently Ann and Milton are immune, and the pair have recorded the news too.

The pair are cynical and defeatist, pointing out that there’s nothing left and despite there only being 3 weeks passed, they’re ready to just drink their worries away. Ish meanwhile, clings to hope.

In the morning, he finds Ann trying on clothes and she points out that even though her heart is beating, it doesn’t mean she feels alive. For her, the world has ended – and so has her existence. Ann doesn’t believe humanity has much to talk about when there’s nothing else going on and she’s very much ready to end it all.

Ann explains that she met Milton at the hotel, after watching her daughter die on a zoom-call no less. Milton’s wife died there at the hotel, and the pair have stuck together since, given they’re the only survivors. That was, until Ish has shown up of course.

Ish is not sticking around though, as he intends to try and find more survivors and make sense of what’s happening. Milton though wants him to reconsider. They have everything they need to “get to the end” in a few weeks. Once they’ve run out of food in the hotel, they intend to commit suicide. I mean, there’s still tinned food though right? And tons of water? Ish brings this up to Milton, pointing out they could be kept alive on the strip for nearly a decade. “But would you want to?” He says.

When he leaves, Milton and Ann both shoot themselves, seemingly not waiting around for a few weeks after all. Ish hears it all, haunted by the sounds, as he leaves Las Vegas and continues to drive. He picks up a dog along the way, naming it Lucky, and heads back to his hometown again. The library is his first spot, where he intends to find ways of sustaining a new eco-friendly future and living off the land.

We then cut to “Year 1”. Ish is keeping fit and just surviving as best he can. However, the cracks are starting to show in his mental resolve… until he finds hope, stemming from a survivor in the distance with smoke coming from their chimney.

The Episode Review

There’s something really gripping about an end of the world story, and it’s probably why there’s so many of them on the market. Whether it be genre-defining zombie flicks like Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later, or a straight virus that wipes out the world like The Stand, there’s undoubtedly a lot of mileage to gain from retelling the same story repeatedly. And to be fair, it leads back to that primal urge of living off the land and stripping away all the noise and needless technology humanity don’t really need to survive.

Ish is a decent protagonist to follow too; a survivalist living off the land and understanding how to use nature to his advantage. However, given it has only been 3 weeks, the speed at which survivors like Milton and Ann have lost hope and revel in their cynicism does seem a bit sudden. I mean, given they’re in Las Vegas, surrounded by abundance and not really feeling the full effect of everything (ignorance is bliss and all that), not to mention how clean everything looks, it does feel a bit unbelievable that they’d just kill themselves like that.

I understand the show is trying to pedal the message that they’ve given up hope and without anything to live for it’s all hopeless… but 3 weeks?

There’s also the situation Ish finds himself in that’s a similar point of contention, He was out of commission for nearly a month but like The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later, seeing someone wake up from a medical injury and then finding the world destroyed in that manner, just feels a bit cliched and treading familiar ground. And that’s before mentioning Ish showing at the church, just like Jim did in 28 Days Later.

But similarities aside, there’s a decent story at the heart of this one, and hopefully this show can lean into that in the episodes ahead.