The Colony..My First Impressions...

The new show on one of The Discovery Channel networks debuted this past week. It is called The Colony.

The basic premise appears to be whether a "diverse" group of survivors after some sort of apocolyptic collapse can band together and survive for a 10 week period.

As expected, it appears to be more of a loosely based "Survivor" type reality show, rather than a true expirement in preparedness or survival. Essentially the group of people are made up of scholars,engineers, and actual medical personnel, rather than a diverse group of the type that might actually band together after a world altering event.

I will watch again, just to see if my initial perceptions actually change....but I suspect they will not. I am quite sure that there were many glaring mistakes made by this group on the outset, which will be very obvious to anyone with even a loose grasp on survival.

The greatest of which for me, was the utter lack of awareness about securing the safety of the group from outside forces. Yes...shelter and water are two immediate needs, but this is also true for all the other dregs of society out there as well.

I did not expect the producers of the show to in any form, include any actual means of self defense such as firearms or tactical training, but they really lowered the bar on the protection issue. Only one of the group members has any type of self defense training. She is supposedly a martial arts instructor, but seems much more likely to be a fitness trainer who uses some self defense moves as exercise.

The group resembles much more the typical herd found after a catastrophic event, who figure if they can try to be comfortable for a few days, the Gov will show up and slap the big band-aid on it.

In reality, if things had gone bad, these people would not make it through the first week. Let alone a full ten weeks. In the real non-television world, "marauders" do not come beat on your unsecured compound, and run away if you yell at them.

Remember, in our current state of civilization, their are predators out there who will take what they want and gladly kill you in the process. So, in this scenario, where there is little to none of police protection, you can imagine what these predators would be like!

So, The Colony might be neato entertainment for the uninformed. Yet it is in no way a realistic experiment as it has been portrayed by the promoters.

I will give it a bit more time to develop. But I am not to confident it will improve.