The Last Train

The Last Train is a piece of millennial post-apocalyptic sci-fi that is now largely forgotten by UK viewers but had an impact on those who saw it at an impressionable age. Also known as Cruel Earth ­– its working title and the one it went by for its Canadian broadcast – the six-part ITV series is not the most original vision of the future. The Last Train’s scenario of an asteroid strike devastating the Earth has been seen in many a sci-fi story, and the conceit of someone being held in suspended animation, only to wake up in the ruined future, is none too rare either. Yet these are concepts and images that still have the power to fascinate and terrify in equal measure.

The series was written by Matthew Graham, who would become better known some years later as the co-creator of Life on Mars and its sequel series Ashes to Ashes, with fellow writer Ashley Pharoah. Graham and Pharoah would also create the fantasy series Eternal Law and the unusual archaeological drama Bonekickers. Graham would also contribute scripts to such series as Doctor Who and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, as well as adapting Arthur C. Clarke’s classic novel Childhood’s End for the SYFY channel. The Last Train was the beginning of Graham’s science fiction career; prior to this, he had largely written for soaps and crime dramas.

Graham’s script begins with a fun conceit: a group of strangers are frozen in their train carriage, riding out the asteroid impact in suspended animation. It’s a good way of bringing a ragtag band of survivors together, with people of all different walks of life forced to rely on each other to stay alive.

Nicola Walker (Spooks, Unforgotten, Last Tango in Halifax) plays Harriet Ambrose, an MoD scientist who is desperately trying to reach a survival bunker, when the asteroid approaches. Boarding a train from London to Sheffield, she fails to reach the bunker and is forced to use her failsafe – a canister of an experimental substance that allegedly freezes the area and everyone in it to absolute zero. Yes, that’s impossible, but it doesn’t work as expected anyway, freezing everyone in the carriage for an uncertain amount of time. Harriet thinks it’s been weeks. She’s wrong. Fortunately, being in a tunnel just outside Sheffield means that the train was left largely undisturbed in the years that followed, so the passengers are able to thaw out and make a difficult escape without anything worse having happened to them in the meantime.

Harriet, though mistrusted at first, quickly becomes a de facto leader of the group due to knowing a great deal more about everything than most of them, including the rough location of the Ark, an underground community in Scotland designed to wait out the apocalypse. The mistrust isn’t entirely misplaced, though; Harriet’s determination to reach the Ark leads her to make some questionable, even dangerous decisions, putting the survivors at immediate risk on the basis that it will force them to keep looking for the bunker. From the beginning, it’s clear that her insistence at reaching the Ark is as much due to her desire to see her lover Jonathan (Ralph Brown – Nearly Famous, Legends) who snuck her the canister, got her clearance way above her level and told her about the asteroid in the first place.

The other half of the group’s leadership is contested between Ian Hart, a police detective who initially takes command, and Mick Sizer, a thief who only got on the fated train to escape arrest. Ian (Christopher Fulford – Sorry, I’m a Stranger Here Myself) has a natural authority but rapidly finds himself out of his depth as the horrendous conditions of life after impact become clear. Mick (Treva Etienne – Holding On, Falling Skies) is a smooth-talking, charismatic sort who finds it easy to gain people’s confidence, if not their trust. His initial selfishness gives way to uneasy leadership as he grows more responsible and demonstrates his resourcefulness.

Zoe Telford (Teachers, Absolute Power) had her first major role in this series as Roe, a young pregnant woman who was on her way to get an abortion when the asteroid struck. She begins to form a relationship with Mick but is also the object of obsession for Colin (Steve Huisson – The Full Monty, dinnerladies), a seemingly mild-mannered businessman whose sanity and morals rapidly degrade in the post-impact world. The paternal and good-natured Austin Danforth is played by the prolific James Hazeldine (London's Burning, Chocky), in one of the last roles of his long career, while the late Janet Dale (The Buddha of Suburbia) plays Jean, a middle-aged nurse who’s caring but deceptively hard-edged when she needs to be.

Amita Dhiri, best known as Milly on This Life (another series Graham wrote for) puts in a strong performance as Jandra Nixon, a woman who was on the train as she fled her abusive husband with her two children, Leo and Anita, played respectively by a fifteen-year-old Sacha Dhawan (The Boy With the Topknot, The History Boys, Doctor Who) and a very young Dinita Gohil (Year Million, The Sandman). Anita’s diary entries provide occasional narration to the episodes, helpfully introducing the set-up for those who may not have caught earlier instalments.

Thrown together, these characters have to try to find a way to survive the dangers of a ruined and wild Britain as they search for the Ark and any other survivors. Facing immediate dangers such as wild dogs and even a panther (presumably descended from zoo escapees) and more insidious risks such as poisoned water, the group make their way across uncertain ground with only the protection of Mick’s weapons and van (safely in a lock-up all this time, with the fuel having miraculously not degraded). They do eventually encounter other survivors, notably a teenaged girl named Hild (Caroline Carver – The Royal Today), who is something of a mirror to Roe: pregnant, she and her people are desperate to keep the baby safe, as viable pregnancies have all but ceased. Hild is on the run from her people and falls in with the new group and being the only one who has grown-up in this world, keeps them alive for a lot longer than they would have otherwise. On the other hand, Hild’s pregnancy makes her a valuable resource for the various hostile communities populating the area, making the group a target while she’s with them.

The state of the country immediately hints it’s been longer than Harriet’s projected weeks of suspension, but the length of time the passengers were frozen is only gradually revealed, thanks to scraps of information such as gravestones. It’s eventually revealed that they’ve woken up in the year 2050. (Hey, we’re halfway there!) Due to the nature of the story, we don’t learn anything about how the rest of the world is doing, although Harriet reports the asteroid was due to hit Zambia and that Africa is probably “gone.” Given the low birth-rate among the few survivors in Britain, the outlook for humanity worldwide probably isn’t good.

The Last Train’s ancestry clearly includes productions such as Survivors, The Changes and Threads, with an emphasis on how our comfortable modern lifestyle could come crashing down in moments following a catastrophe. There’s a grim atmosphere throughout and plenty of violence (the final episode in particular features some real brutality, although none of it graphic), with the characters motivated largely by survival even as they mourn everyone they’ve lost. There are glimpses of hope for the future, with the characters beginning to build relationships, but death is always around the corner and the group doesn’t get through the series intact. There are some light-hearted moments to break it up, although any actual laughs are at the expense of some shockingly awful dialogue (Mick being a particular culprit). Yet the cast are all excellent, giving real depth to their characters that overcomes some of the clichéd nature of their interactions. While it’s an ensemble show, it’s Harriet who’s the central focus, with Walker doing well to keep her as a compelling character in spite of how thoroughly unlikeable she is.

Grim but gripping, The Last Train had a brief afterlife in repeats on ITV2 and several on SYFY as late as 2007, plus the aforementioned showings in Canada. However, the series has never enjoyed an official home video release and has not been shown in the US, although it’s rumoured that an American remake was in the works for a time. As with all science fiction, it’s a snapshot of the time it was made (there’s an adorable line where the Ark is described as “ten times the size of the Millennium Dome), but its themes are timeless. A rebroadcast of The Last Train is well overdue.

Daniel Tessier