Containment: Pilot Review

“Peace be with those inside.”

The camera focuses on those discordant words as chaos reigns behind the hand-lettered sign separating the quarantined from the masses.

Showrunner Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) makes a departure from the supernatural to deliver this intense drama based on the Belgian series Cordon. While a zombie certainly wouldn’t seem out of place within this bloody world the focus is all too-human. The pilot opens with a glimpse of Day 13 and the hell they’re soon to face….

Back on Day 1, police Major Lex Carnahan (David Gyasi) has been tasked with sending his officers to find Patient Zero, a Syrian refugee whose been unknowingly (or knowingly?) spreading a deadly ailment since his arrival to Atlanta, Georgia by cargo plane. Unlike the cold or flu, this virus is spread through any bodily fluid and will make you bleed-out through every orifice. It’s enough to make you reach for a surgical mask and industrial-sized hand sanitizer.

Trying to get a reign on the scope and severity of the contagion is Dr. Victor Cannerts (George Young) of the CDC. Behind the closed doors of the Infectious Disease Unit at Atlanta Midtown Hospital he watches the tainted violently succumb and confirms the virus as an avian flu that’s been altered with bioterrorism properties. From there, things truly get scary.

“I’m not going to shake your hand, nothing personal.”

Dr. Sabine Lommers (Claudia Black) of Health and Public Services calls for a 48-hour cordon sanitaire, a forced urban quarantine of the hot zone. Locked inside the hospital with Cannerts is Lex’s best friend, Jake Riley (Chris Wood), whom he sent for patient zero, grade school teacher Katie Frank (Kristen Gutoskie), her son Quentin (Zachary Unger), and thirteen students under her charge. Also trapped within the fence’s confines are teen mom, Teresa Keaton (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), and Lex’s commitment-phobe girlfriend, Jana Mayfield (Christina Marie Moses).

Containment  follows their interwoven stories, their will to survive and the need to reconnect with their loved ones. It starts with 48-hours. A short inconvenience while a cure is found. 48-hours. Don’t touch. Stay four-to-six feet away. 48-hours.The epidemic could run its course…take everyone with it. 48-hours. Who is responsible and why?

Only there’s that glimpse at the beginning. Day 13. What was supposed to be mere hours is weeks. The exposed are living in an infected bubble, a microcosm that’s disintegrating as they become further cut off. People grow increasingly fearful. Desperate. Stupid. Some will emerge heroes. Others will crumble within the walls.

And you—as you watch, as you cringe—will ask yourself what you would do in the same situation, while thinking twice about the next sneeze you encounter or hand you shake.

Watch the CW’s Containment  on Tuesdays at 9/8 C.