[1][2][3] The Bulletin called it "a classical allegory about two squatting families who play out their own version of the Trojan War.
The head of the families, Pryor Lovett and Simeon Quigg, do not want violence but the younger members are harder to contain.
The whole 50 minutes were so soporific and inconclusively brooding that I stayed the distance only because a cast of gifted Australians wrought small miracles with the script... Serpent in the Rainbow is like a radio play with pictures.
The pictures are superb... episode 1 was so slow-moving and uninformative as almost to be incomprehensible... the most earnestly solemn play I can remember the ABC ever producing... awkward, unreal and unnaturally sombre.
"[8] A sequence in the final episode where Adam Quigg broke the neck of Paul Lovett in a fist fight prompted complaints about violence.