Review by Frank Plowright

At the halfway point for Girls things are not looking good for the residents of Pennystown. They’re cut off from the outside world and from communicating with it, and threatened by extraordinarily fast-breeding naked women who develop from eggs and who want to murder the female residents. Civilised behaviour is rapidly deteriorating under threat, and what’s happening is well beyond anything local Sheriff’s Deputy Wes has ever been trained to deal with. The only thing really going in their favour is an understanding that under no circumstances should any man have sex with one of the amazingly attractive naked women. Will that work?

Pacing was a problem during Emergence, and that’s the case again for Survival. There’s a departure into the unknown that has been set up, but it feels played out here just to prolong the tension, as does circulating around the conversations of everyone remaining alive in Pennystown, while conversations about men always being safe are half-hearted. Even when it comes to the decline of civilisation as we know it Jonathan and Joshua Luna direct it gradually, when what Girls really needs is an injection of adrenaline. There is a great scene involving a bear, but several other shocks don’t have the same impact.

Where standards haven’t slipped is with the art, where full figures populate scenes with full backgrounds, and the ordinary conversations have the same thought applied to them as the horror. As with the plot, the art is shared, and while the people can be a little static in places, the emotional resonance is present.

It’s not that Survival would be a damp squib without a strong final chapter moving around the now widely separated cast, but it’s way too slow in too many places. Extinction provides the conclusion, or alternatively Girls: The Complete Collection supplies what the title promises.