Years and Years / Nightmare Fuel

All spoilers on Nightmare Fuel subpages are unmarked as per site policy. You Have Been Warned.

Russell T Davies once again refuses to pull his punches.

Episode One

The scenes of the Chinese island being nuked, the frighteningly realistic emergency broadcast, and mass panic are creepy.

The drone footage of the rubble that once was Hong Sha Dao, including vaguely humanoid scorch marks on walls that once were people.
The world's climate has started to go out of control by this point. For reference, Viktor just casually mentions to Edith that the North Pole has completely melted.
The overnight collapse of Stephen's and Celeste's bank. They're insured up to £85000 which is not much use seeing as they just sold their house for over a million pounds.
The sheer panic outside their bank branch and the police trying to hold everyone into an orderly queue. Then the bank stops letting anyone else in and everyone, including the policeman, is banging on the glass doors demanding their money. But there's nothing they can do except suffer the pain of coming to terms with what happened - all their money is now lost forever.

The result of Bethany and Lizzie's trip to Liverpool. Bethany calls Celeste sobbing and a concerned Celeste immediately drives to Liverpool to find out what's happened. Bethany mentions something about a procedure. Lizzie is on the bed wearing an eye-patch. Celeste gently removes it and says she looks okay, just a little bit of swelling. Then the eye starts moving wildly, out of Lizzie's control. It's a camera that Lizzie can't even see out of because the output of her eye is on a tablet, not in her brain.
- And the fact that it's too expensive to fix and the culprits will get away scot-free, as they're on a boat and practically impossible to prosecute.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria is now a widespread threat. In other words, something as simple as a scratch or a small cut can kill someone in no time flat due to the bacteria causing internal sepsis (a Cruel and Unusual Death).

The general collapse of Europe - Spain has a communist revolution, Greece is leaving the EU via Grexit, Hungary is bankrupt and Italy has declared martial law. Things aren't looking much better in old blighty.
- Across the pond, the USA has suspended same sex marriage, overturned abortion rights and banned the speaking of Spanish in public spaces. The United Nations were beyond horrified at these developments, and threaten to remove their headquarters from American soil; likewise, America's response to this is to pull out of the United Nations completely and see it as what happened to the League of Nations in the build-up to World War II.
The news footage of deep fakes of politicians saying extreme things like "arrest all immigrants" and the politicians freaking out and panicking. It's clear that democracy is going down the drain. And of course, Viv Rook manages to both condemn the deep fakes but plant the seed of doubt that they really believe those things.
The brief (around a second long for each one) shots of Daniel and Victor on the dangerously crowded, unstable refugee boat are truly horrifying.
Daniel dead on the beach, eyes open, with Victor so traumatised that all he can do is repeat "не знаю" (meaning "I don't know") over and over.

Dirty bombs are planted in the centre of both Leeds and Bristol. In the aftermath, a terrified woman covered in dust is shown panicking on the news, saying "I've breathed it in - what do I do?!"
Many parts of Britain have become uninhabitable for one of two reasons:
- Radiation. Mentioned above.
- Flooding. Not just regular flooding; the water is poisoned with toxic material such as sewage and chemicals, making any home flooded a bio-hazard. For Real Life reference, this is somewhat similar to the Love Canal disaster - except that was just in one area; here, floods like these are all over Britain.
The entirety of Vivienne Rook's pitch on the Erstwhile Sites. Specifically her pointing out the widely true fact that no one really remembers or cares about the fact that the British literally invented concentration camps during the Boer War, killing 26,000 people and therefore, no one will remember or care about what she's doing. Until the entire scheme fails, that is.

The populist movements that have swept countless countries in the Western world have now shown their true face; totalitarian, xenophobic governments that glorify things such as evil, violence and hate. Oh, and they're also anarcho-capitalist.
Hate, poverty, genocide and disease have become commonplace.
The presence of a deadly pandemic called Monkey Flu and the fact that eligible victims are being deliberately shipped to the Erstwhile Camps in order to spread the disease amongst the captive population.
The Erstwhile Camps themselves are basically Nazi-style death camps where those 'undesirable' to the Four Star government put through a slow and painful death. Also, anyone sent there is not just killed, but erased from existence Nineteen Eighty-Four style.
Speaking of something right out of 1984, Rook and her cronies appear to be pushing for Mind Rape and information control on levels that would make Ingsoc proud - for example, making people believe an obviously false fact as the truth (e.g. 2 + 2 = 5) and vice versa, and also making people believe that something never happened, or that someone never existed. For example, Woody dismisses many historical world events up to that point, such as 'Hong Sha Hell', as fictional conspiracy.