BUNKER·ETIQUETTE

Series One · Black comedy · Season 1, ten episodes

Sixty-One
Rules

In a world where sound draws death, a handful of people live under a town and have spent eleven years writing down how to live together. There is no government in the Kettle, no leader and no law. There is a wall.

Years since — 11 Rules on the wall — 62 Ever removed — 0

The wall

Kettle · main entrance

◤ LAW ONE — NEW RULES GO UP

◤ LAW TWO — OLD RULES NEVER COME DOWN

Sixty-two lines, added one disaster at a time. Thirteen are legible below — tap any of them. The rest are on the wall too: scratched, weathered, and never written into the record. They still count.

  1. 01 Nothing runs longer than a slow count of thirty. YEAR 1 The basic law of the world. It holds in every episode. Sound draws them — not a noise, a sustained noise. A scream is survivable. A running generator is not.
  2. 02
  3. 03 Doors open slowly or not at all. YEAR 1 A visual grammar as much as a rule: every door scene in this series is tension.
  4. 04
  5. 05
  6. 06
  7. 07 Arguments are held in installments. YEAR 2 The engine of the dry humour. On the worst day of your life you still have to stop the fight every twenty seconds and listen.
  8. 08
  9. 09 If someone stops talking mid-sentence, you stop too. YEAR 2 The shared alarm protocol. Silence is the signal.
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14 Never thank the dog. It knows. YEAR 4 Beans' canon moment, and the signature of the tone.
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19 You may keep one loud thing. You may never use it. YEAR 4 Every member of the cast has a loud thing. What they chose defines them.
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23 If you cry, cry into something. YEAR 5 Grief is a logistics problem in this world. The cruellest rule on the wall.
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28 Nobody sings. Not even quietly. Especially not quietly. YEAR 5 The loss of music. The core of Bo's episode.
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31 The generator runs only when the river is loud. YEAR 6 Spring melt covers the sound of machinery. The dam's tension, written into law.
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40 Nobody asks what anyone did in the first year. YEAR 7 The cast's history. It may stay closed for years.
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52 Count out loud only in your head. YEAR 9 The narrator's favourite, because it is absurd and everyone obeys it anyway.
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61 New rules go up. Old rules do not come down. YEAR 11 The wall's rule about itself. The title rule of episode 8.
  62. 62 Finish the last sentence out loud. Once. YEAR 11 Written by the narrator's own hand after Mira died in the locked room. It answers rule 9 — 9 orders you silent, 62 permits you one sentence — and it deliberately contradicts rule 52. Both stay up. That is what the wall is.

The Hums

The threat · six fixed laws

Survivors call them Hums, after the low continuous drone they make. Nobody on this channel calls them anything else. These six laws are fixed — no episode may break them.

01

They follow sustained sound

Not a noise — a continuing noise. Roughly anything unbroken past thirty seconds pulls them in. A scream is survivable. A running generator is not.

02

They hum themselves

Which means a crowd feeds itself: the drone draws more, and each arrival drones louder. The bigger the crowd, the faster it grows.

03

They do not run

A fixed pace, and they never stop. The danger is not speed. The danger is that they do not tire.

04

They see poorly

Light does not draw them and darkness does not hide you. Sight is not a defence in this world.

05

Only bites infect, and slowly

It takes days. The drama is never the bite — it is the week that follows it.

06

They avoid running water

The river is the safe corridor. It is the whole reason anyone settled this valley.

The Shelf

Four recurring places

The Kettle

The shelter. An old municipal water reservoir under a town. Home, and the wall is at its entrance.

The Dam

An old hydroelectric dam up the valley. The only power. Electricity means machinery, machinery means continuous sound — the thing keeping them alive is the thing that kills.

Uptown

The ruined town on the surface. Scavenging ground, and the series' daylight.

The Quiet Mile

A bend in the river where the Hums have gathered and nobody goes. Shown at most once an episode, so it never stops meaning something.

Why nobody leaves the valley is deliberately unanswered. So is how the outbreak began, whether other shelters exist, who the narrator is, and who wrote the first rule. Those are episodes, not trivia.

Episodes

Season 1 — playlist

Sixty-One Rules episode 1

Episode 01 · Rule 1

We Survived 4,000 Days Of The Zombie Apocalypse. Then Our Pump Wouldn't Stop.

Live · Nothing runs longer than a slow count of thirty

 Sixty-One Rules episode 2

Episode 02 · Rule 23

4,000 Days Into The Zombie Apocalypse, Three Of Us Died Because Someone Cried.

Live · If you cry, cry into something
◼ EIGHT MORE
IN THE SEASON

Episodes 03 — 10

Rule 14 · Rule 28 · Rule 40 · The Choir · Rule 19 · Rule 61 · The Tallymen · Rule 9

Not every episode is a rule — that is the point

WATCH ON YOUTUBE ▸

The narrator

Unnamed · unseen

The voice belongs to the world. They are the one who writes the rules on the wall. They are never named, never shown, and never appear in the cast. Dry, tired, sardonic without being cruel — the voice of someone who has watched people make the same mistake for eleven years. Never panicked. In this world panic is already fatal.