This story made me feel for Terry Nation.
After two and a half seasons, the best episode of your show airs, one that
fulfils all the promise of the characters, setting and format, and you didn’t
write it! I can imagine him feeling something similar when ‘Evil of the Daleks’
went out. From the very opening of the episode, where Avon at his weakest
suddenly reveals himself to be Avon at his strongest, and questions are
answered while asking a hundred new ones, this feels not only accomplished but
modern. Plenty of Nation’s B7 scripts play with their audience at the eleventh
hour, but to do it in the opening minutes – to fill the entire episode with that
tense, unpredictable energy – is all too clearly the hallmark of a different
generation of TV scriptwriting.
Then there are the flashbacks: cleverly
interspersed so that we are wrongfooted from the start about Anna. Like Avon’s
struggle with her identity, but we piece things together from the other end –
and with the absolute certainty that things are going to turn out badly for
him, for her, for everybody. We see Anna from Avon’s perspective, the edges
rippling with the eddies of memory and fantasy, and possibly with some of the
futuristic fizzy wine they’re enjoying.
We see his image of her in a cell, waiting
for the return of the Federation agent who will torture her for information –
an agent who, we later learn, was never coming for her, if she was ever in that
cell at all.
The whole story is about pictures that
mislead. Here’s an 18th century country house: it’s actually the
newest thing on this future Earth, a cheap location but an insane act of lavish grandeur from
everyone’s favourite ‘tasteless megalomaniac’. Having blasted her way out of
the image of speechifying (male) dignitaries that appears in so many Blakes 7 openers,
Anna and her men (disguised as Federation troops) disrupt the surveillance
cameras, and then present a misleading image back to the security team, who are
busily telling Servalan that everything’s fine, it’s absolutely fine…
What about the crew of the Liberator? It’s
the worst cliché to say that actors are always asking about their motivation,
but here’s a story where we know what everybody’s after, what their agenda is,
their vendetta or their friend’s vendetta or the vendetta of the man they hope
to replace as captain (of sorts) of the ship, and the performances are
accordingly sharper and more satisfying. I’m thinking particularly of Jan
Chappell, who has suffered in the past from being half-protagonist, half-plot
device. In this story, you can believe that these are veterans of a conflict
and not sure which way is up any more.
This is a good episode all round for female
characters, actually. They still don’t outnumber the men, but they have some of
the most powerful roles, without being reduced to beautiful superheroes who are
punching above their weight, or space vampires. There’s one shot in particular,
where Anna leaves the debating chamber, having argued for the life of Servalan,
heads off up the corridor for some unknown purpose, and Cally and Dayna steal
after her. Blakes 7 is not a horribly sexist show, but it does tend that way
sometimes, and when it’s going the other way it sometimes feels a bit pleased
with itself. In this story, it’s unremarkable that all the women are strong,
dangerous and well differentiated.
Servalan, meanwhile, is chained to a wall
in the cellar, in her evening gown, naturally. Once again, I can only imagine Harvest of Kairos was made accidentally.
How could the production team treat so casually what they give such potency
here: the humiliation of Servalan, her tenacity, her strange relationship with
Avon and Tarrant. Boucher handles this so minimally, keeping her dialogue brief
and bitterly significant.
At the end of this episode, Avon kills the
woman he loves and liberates his enemy. What exactly does this struggle
represent? What are they all fighting for? Is it possible to avoid your fate,
when you spend your life chasing after it with plasma bolts and crazy schemes?
It’s a perfectly composed, shot, performed little Greek tragedy in space. I
think Terry Nation must have felt somewhat jealous – but perhaps proud,
overall, of what the show could be.
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