Joely Richardson was quite good, although she spent a lot of time talking absolute bullshit on the radio or making gasping noises as she escaped from somewhere yet again. Dougray Scott is a charisma-free zone, and I couldn't warm to him in the slightest - in his narration he just sounded bored. Vanessa Redgrave was wasted in a superflous sub-plot that served to pad out a second part that needed more space for its conclusion, and Brian Cox wasn't much better served in his extended cameo. And just what was Jason Priestly's Coker supposed to be doing? He got whipped in the eye by a Triffid at one point, poision clearly clouded his eye, but no more mention was made of it. The latter is just one of the dangling plot points: What happened to Coker? What happened to Vanessa Redgrave's naughty nun? How did everyone keep escaping? How did Eddie Izzard survive a plane crash? And most importantly of all - how exactly did squirting Triffid poision in the eyes of the leads help them to just waltz straight passed the massed throngs of killer plants to safety? This last question was key, but no attempt at an explanation was even attempted - I think we were supposed to take Dougray Scott's irritating, repetitive flashbacks as an excuse for the resolution - it didn't help in the slightest. I found myself looking at the clock, seeing they had only 10 minutes left to save the world from Triffid attacks and thinking 'they'd better come up with something quick!' It turns out the best the write could do was an unexplained squirt in the eye followed by a bit of preposterous flim-flam narration about everyone moving to the Isle of Wight, with no suggestion that they could or did kill off the Triffids! How's that for an ending to the conundrum of the Triffids? The characters did absolutely nothing to save the world, they just lived on an island and ignored the problem. This sort of bleak ending may have worked in 28 Days Later, but I actually gave a crap then.
On the plus side, the Triffids themselves were well designed and creepy. I'm ready to accept that they could move, were different sexes and ate meat, but how did they see where they were going? And how exactly did Vanessa Redgrave's community survive being attacked? Through offering sacrifices to the Triffids? That doesn't seem likely given that understanding the nature of sacrifice would require just that - understanding - the Triffids didn't seem to be blessed with anything other than the urge to kill.
Given a few more episodes to play with, to allow dangling plotlines to resolve, questions to go answered and characterisation to take place, this would have been good, as it was, it passed the time. And Eddie Izzard was great.
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