Episodes 4 & 5, 2008
Written by Charlie Brooker
Directed by Yann Demange
My rating (both episodes): 
IMDB • Official Site
A surprisingly strong finish.
* * *
Premise
Riq, having discovered that Kelly is alive in the Big Brother house, is determined to make his way up the country to join her (much to Alex’s chagrin); while Patrick and Pippa escape from the Green Room and make contact with the housemates. All the survivors eventually join together, but personality conflicts (chiefly caused by Patrick) almost immediately begin to threaten the house’s security.
Review
The middle act of Dead Set had a tendency to coast on the awesomeness of its setup (as I said in my previous review, writing phrases like “zombified Davina McColl” never gets old), a couple of strong performances (chiefly Liz May-Brice’s quiet strength as Alex and Patrick Nyman cranking Patrick well past eleven) and some agreeable references to pretty much every major cultural zombie touchstone from Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later. I’ll admit that I expected Dead Set to go downhill from episode three, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised–and impressed–by the final two episodes.
Charlie Brooker’s scripts, as always, rely heavily on standard zombie tropes. (I’ve actually considered not bothering to speak vaguely about character deaths, on the grounds that, if you’re even vaguely familiar with the formula, by the time episode two is over you should be able to predict who lives and dies with about 90% accuracy.) But Brooker deploys them with skill, never cheating dramatically (coughZombielandcough) and wring pathos out of situations that could have come off as obligatory.
While Kelly remains a frustratingly one-note take-charge horror heroine, and Patrick’s histrionics occasionally drive the character into cartoon territory (Nyman spends most of the fifth episode channeling Josef Pilato), the supporting characters are given a chance to shine, and the players step up their game accordingly. This turns Joplin (voted “most likely to die first in a zombie apocalypse” by his graduating class) into the lynchpin of the final act, and Kevin Eldon (best known as a comedic actor; he’s the creepy hired cleaner in the second episode of Black Books) becomes the unlikely MVP of the show.
While nobody will ever accuse Dead Set of being strikingly original, it’s proof that you can still be a bit (okay, heavily) derivative and still be effective, and it helps remind us exactly why we fell in love with the zombie tropes to begin with.
