So, The Colony happened! I pulled up a barstool and told my woes to Tor.com.

My major beef with the show is that it really skewed the casting. Every single one of those participants is one of the MOST USEFUL PEOPLE ON THE PLANET. It gets worse if you look at the bios. Let’s take the theoretically-least-immediately-useful one, the marine biologist.

Well, that got longer than I thought.

“Amy is certified in CPR, rescue diving and emergency response…she then entered the Peace Corps and served in Gabon, Africa for two and a half years, and then moved to New Zealand, working initially on organic farms. She completed…a deep-sea research internship, which led to stints in Alaska, Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.”

So you have a marine biologist who can farm the shit out of extreme climate situations, and then give you CPR when you have a heart attack about how the hell one person can be so qualified? Seriously?

I mean, don’t get me wrong: Amy West is the shit. I would certainly like her on my team when the Big One strikes and we are left to cobble together a semblance of humanity. That is not the problem.

The problem is that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the participants has a bio like that! There are no loads! There are ALWAYS loads! This is an apocalypse, for crying out loud! Useless civilians such as myself would be cleaving unto her like you cannot imagine. She would take one look at my survival skills and label me “To Be Thrown In Front of Attackers While I Escape.” She knows it and I know it, and that would be amazing TV.

Sure, there’s some interpersonal drama amongst the participants in future episodes, but there’s never going to be the king of decision where everybody locks Grandma outside because she can’t contribute to the colony any more, which is the sort of heart-rending, dehumanizing struggle I like in my apocalypses.

P.S. In my column, I say:

I’m going to guess that generally, in an apocalypse situation, you won’t get a cross-section quite like that. Instead, you will be trying to rebuild the world with three executive assistants, a waiter, an accountant, a construction worker, a small business owner, a 13-year-old who skipped school, a wailing toddler, and an 85-year-old who was running errands and left her insulin at home. Your life will be short and filled with power struggle over who should be eaten first based on their relative usefulness.

So, who should be eaten first?