The UK is on the verge of a pandemic which could killed 100s of thousands of people.  Government pandemic preparedness is abysmal, and the citizen’s compliance with necessary health directives is a joke.  Can Government Scientist Ian Hood save the day single-handedly?  Also, zombies?

Simon and Eugene discuss Containment.

Episode Synopsis

Workers in a church are just busting things up and hauling old bodies around, as you do when you’re making Yuppie Flats, when one of the workers, a particularly curious chap named Ned who looks to stick his in everything he sees, finds a body.  That might not seem so weird, considering what they’re doing, but this emaciated, almost mummified body is wearing workman’s clothes and… he’s ALIVE!  But not long enough to make it though the opening credits.

Ian Hood is being taken to carpet for his budget excesses.  He argues that, since the work he must do is unknown until it happens, his budget cannot be predetermined, therefore he cannot overrun something that cannot be adequately estimated.  Also, Quantum physics!  QED!

He gets called out of that meeting because there’s a potentially disastrous pandemic event shaping up at that church.  Hood meets with Martin Callan, voluntary head of Britain’s ad hoc pandemic response team.  Voluntary because Britain doesn’t see the value of funding such a thing.   But he’s not bitter, just because the Americans spend a billion dollars on pandemic preparedness and will never have to worry a nightmare scenario like this.  Rachel expresses her doubts to Hood about Callan’s qualification to handle this crisis, but Hood assures her, he’s the best.

The worker was a mortician, who was working late on Friday at the church.  He was found Monday and must have collapsed and been unable to call for help.  It looks like some sort of a pox, possibly smallpox.

All the workers are voluntarily detained in quarantine, by force.  They’ll all be quarantined in a warehouse, together.  Hood is aghast.  If anyone is sick, they’ll all get sick in quarantine.  “The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few,” says Callan.  Actually, what he says is considerable more brusk: “Yep, some will die to save the larger public.  Too bad, so sad.”

Curious Ned is also Ned the Dad, who’s got an important gift for his five-year old’s birthday party today.  He breaks quarantine, hacking, sneezing, and retching all over the place as he walks shoulder to shoulder with the people on the streets.  He’s not a complete idiot.  He’s realized that there is a serious outbreak, so it’s not about getting home for the birthday, it’s about getting home to his family so he can take them somewhere safe.

OK, maybe he is a complete idiot, just a different type of complete idiot.  A special kind of complete idiot.

Hood gets there first and convinces him to go quietly to hospital to die.  Which he does.

The pox has been identified, it’s some form of hybrid between smallpox and tanapox.  Which gives Callan pause.  Clearly an engineered variant that probably escaped from a lab overseas that doesn’t observe proper protocols.

Hood’s team also does contact tracing on the dead mortician, and discover that he did under-the-table embalming on the side.  From that, they identify all the bodies that he’s worked on recently and start investigating those deaths.

Callan is too busy pursuing his own plans to bother thinking this is a concern.  He’s insisting this came in from overseas, but in the interest of ticking all the boxes, Hood and Rachel follow up on the bodies.

Rachel discovers that one, Jack, worked in a cold-storage facility and died in an industrial accident, but when she realizes the facility utilizes illegal Asian immigrants, she calls in the hazmat team.  

That leads them to a recent arrival from China who lives in a flop house who has been exhibiting pox-like symptoms.  Rachel chases that lead, running through the streets until the suspect is hit and spattered by a car, getting blood all over Rachel.  Off to the quarantine death camp for her!

Callan is relieved, but his assistant Luke isn’t so sure and approaches Hood with his concerns.  The timing is wrong.  If the Chinese immigrant was patient zero, which didn’t he die before the mortician?  Callan dismisses this concern because “he’s an epidemiologist and Hood is not” also, “Asians are different from us, they probably just die slower.”

Hood does some not-by-the-books bloodwork and determines that the Chinese man had Chickenpox and that Rachel and the others can be freed from quarantine.

All roads lead back to the cold storage facility.  Callan first goes to investigate something and meets Ellis Gibson, assistant manager.  Ellis is blackmailing Callan.  He knows the smallpox was stored at his facility and wants money to return it.

Hood also concludes that somehow smallpox was stored at the facility, but when he gets there, there is nothing but an empty box.  Ellis has taken it, hacking, sneezing, retching his way around his family and busses and trains as he moves around waiting for Callan’s call.

Hood confronts Callan, who admits that, all those government cutbacks meant that someone must have stored the smallpox instead of destroying it like what was supposed to happen.  No crime though, so, Callan is free to go.  Hood goes to meet Ellis.

A confrontation ensues and Rachel is taken hostage.  The smallpox containers are shattered all over the Central Bus station, but eventually, Hood saves the day.  While he does, Callan swoops in, collects the package of smallpox, returns it to quarantine, where he overly-dramatically injects himself with it as penance to ease his conscience and lies down on the bed to die.

…or more likely to wait for his inoculated body to kill off the virus that he infected himself with.