Could You Survive Channel 4’s Apocalypse? First Episode Sees 14 Strangers Turn on Each Other
Could you survive Channel 4’s Apocalypse? The first episode drops 14 strangers into an abandoned town, and the fight for food begins almost immediately.
Imagine being dropped into a scene from The Walking Dead, only without the zombies. The streets are deserted, buildings have been abandoned, food is scarce and there is no electricity or running water, leaving you to work out very quickly whether you could actually survive when everything you normally rely on has disappeared.
Channel 4 has dropped 14 ordinary people into an abandoned town just like this with only one brutal question: could they actually survive if normal life disappeared overnight?
That is the premise behind Apocalypse, the new seven-part survival experiment bringing together contestants from the UK and Australia. After the first episode, however, surviving the environment might only be half the problem. The bigger challenge could be surviving each other.
The contestants are secretly divided between two camps, Eastside and Westside, with neither initially knowing the other exists.
Across a sprawling abandoned site, they have to search buildings, find usable supplies and work out how to secure enough food and water to keep going.
It does not take long for the experiment to become competitive.
One of the biggest discoveries is the town’s abandoned supermarket. With resources scarce, getting inside could completely change one group’s chances of surviving.
Eastside manage to break in first and take supplies, immediately creating an advantage over Westside.
That advantage soon brings another problem. Once members of Westside discover what has happened, food becomes something worth taking back, setting up an increasingly tense battle over who actually owns anything found inside the town.
The personalities are already proving just as important as practical survival skills.
Australian cattle farmer Scott McMinn arrives with experience of hunting and life in the countryside, while Welsh farmer Ioan Humphreys is more accustomed than most to isolation and being far from everyday conveniences.
Elsewhere, Steven McKell enters with a very different background. The content creator has millions of followers online, but likes, followers and social media experience are not necessarily particularly useful when a group needs food, shelter and someone prepared to search an abandoned town.
There are also contestants with potentially valuable real-world skills, including mechanic Louise Baker, paramedic Laura Powell, student nurse Kyra Muzvaba, chef Dean Sganga and former soldier Matthew Wilson.
Yet the opening episode quickly demonstrates that having useful people in the group means little if nobody can agree on what to do.
With food already being stolen, contestants arguing over decisions and two rival camps beginning to realise they are not alone, Apocalypse has barely started and the social experiment is already becoming as important as the survival challenge.
The real question now is not simply who is strongest, who can hunt or who knows how to repair something. It is whether 14 strangers can cooperate for long enough to make any of those skills matter.
Watch the official trailer:
Apocalypse continues on Channel 4 and is available to stream on Channel 4.
