Breakdown!

This morning I find myself asking the question, was rock monolith Patti Smith's seminal 1975 album track 'Redondo Beach' written about a member of the Blake's 7 crew?

Late afternoon, dreaming hotel

We just had a quarrel that sent you away

I went looking for you-ou-ou

Are you gone, Gan?

Desperate I know, but if we never do get anything more about Gan's back-story and why he has that 'inhibitor' than, 'They took my woman', perhaps it will have to do. I've already amended his Wikipedia page but we'll have to see if it stands.

In this story, we saw the inhibitor develop a fault and certain aggressive elements of Gan's personality rose to the surface: it gave the perfect opportunity for the show to return to its more fascinating themes of repression, mind control, the consequences of taking a life and how our actions make us what we are. It was also an opportunity to take a relatively supporting character like Gan and make them the focus of the show.

It gave the perfect opportunity for all of this, but all the programme-makers really wanted was a couple of punch-ups and a stand-off with this week's

DOCTOR WHO GUEST STAR:

Count Scarlioni

 To be a little fairer, there were a few seeds sown for a much bigger storyline, Avon's dissent from the Liberator crew or at least from the captaincy of cuddly Roj Blake. I must admit, they're doing that very nicely – it's a constant presence in the storyline, it's witty, it makes sense, it's nicely played.

But I do feel sorry for Gan, because what seemed like a story that was all about him turned out to be a story in which he was barely present. In the opening episodes we had a new flashbacks in the mix, including one (in hindsight jarringly dissonant) image of Jenna's mother being arrested in a hospital gown. Breakdown should have been Gan's moment.

We should have seen him and 'his woman' walking through a Cadbury's Flake advert. We should have seen 'his woman' zapped by assassins / revealed to be an android / arrested in a hospital gown. Instead, he did a lot of clenching and unclenching of his fists. But I was left confused – was this Gan au naturelle, as he would act with no inhibitor at all? Or just Gan put into psychosis because his brain computer needed a defrag?

Not to get too crazy, but with the hindsight of thirty-odd years, wouldn't it have been fun to see some of this episode through Gan's eyes – and to kid the audience for a while that the Liberator crew were muttering behind his back, reporting him to the Federation, or all perhaps a bunch of aliens in disguise (ones with faces of burnt spaghetti and one big poached egg eye, underneath a rubbery mask – do you see what I did there?).

There are some great stories to tell about a freedom fighter who is physically unable to kill. It would be great if we got one before Gan karks it (gunned down, I hope, by a return appearance from 'his woman' played by Yootha Joyce – with plastic hair). I just don't think Terry Nation cares all that much about him.

Not like Patti Smith does.

Call you on the phone, to another dimension

Well you never returned, oh you know what I mean

I went looking for you-ou-ou

Are you gone, Gan?

The Web!

Being as I'm currently Googling images for this blog, reading reviews  and background (such as the aforementioned Alwyn Turner biography of Terry Nation) and of course the wonderful and hilarious Wife in Space blog,  not to mention having conversations with people who don't know what I don't know, it's hard to avoid spoilers for Blake's 7. Simply through a process of osmosis, I know what happens at the end of the series. I know that Servalan is FINALLY in the next episode. I know about Gan, but not where and when.

But somehow, I sure as hell wasn't expecting whatever this was.

Early expectations were, strange as it may seem, that this might be co-opted somehow into the history of Doctor Who's Second Doctor-bothering Great Intelligence, perhaps the even older Animus, based on their capacity for snatching down spacecraft out of the ether with an unearthly and indestructible cobweb (making The Web a partner with The Web of Fear and The Web Planet respectively) (and there is a precedent in Who fandom for weaving together the respectively gauzy tendrils of the Great Intelligence and the Animus as some sort of Lovecraftian interdimensional evil being).

Then, of course, there was a slow pan through what looked like the New Forest after a Zorbing day out gone horribly wrong. A camera explores a proper sci-fi-looking base, with people wrapped in bacofoil sleeping on very uncomfortable-looking futuristic sun-loungers. A whispering voice – like the Animus!, I thought, like the Great Intelligence! – and then: Saymon.

Cut to Roj Blake, all in his déshabillé, perhaps to arouse the viewer, perhaps to symbolically represent vulnerability. Blake's crew seem peculiarly incurious about the mysterious spaceship they've stolen, more preoccupied with its physical trappings: Jenna's blouse, Avon's jewels, and this time Villa's first words onscreen being a gawky, 'What do you think of the outfit?', to which Cally (whose shimmery green gear is presumably also 'off the peg' in the Liberator's wardrobe room) responds with a heavy object to the head.

The clunky technobabble jeopardy that takes up a great part of the first half of this story – "Standard drive plus auxiliaries can be sustained for ninety hours. Each neutronic discharge reduces that capacity by three hours." Aarrgh! – seems a long way from the sinister meta-psychological stuff we saw in the opening episode, where brainwashing was the most fundamental nightmare of the future dictatorship. But we do see a survival of those themes in Cally: the huge physical prowess of the auto-repairing ship can be invaded and overpowered through the vulnerable and mysterious mind.

There's a first note of something interesting with Cally's alienness, when Avon cites it as a reason not to trust her, and the strange description of her as a 'daughter' of the exiled Auronar scientists. Ham-fisted as the story is, and it's really another issue of wonky pacing, Nation was clearly being strategic about its placing: a new crew member on the ship, but can she be trusted? Does she share the common creed of the crew? Do they have a common creed?

Unfortunately, despite a veritable buffet of interesting characters to play with, Nation makes us starve for interpersonal drama. Instead, he reformulates some of the highlights of Genesis of the Daleks, with arch-villain Davros replaced by what looks like a cheap gimmick from a very outre cabaret act. Hard to describe what the Daleks are replaced by. 'If someone pointed out a child dressed as a woodlouse carrying a spear, and told you that that child dressed as a woodlouse carrying a spear would grow up to be utterly evil...'

 Thank goodness for not knowing: that when I put this in the DVD player last night, I would see this. I still can't quite believe that I saw it. (And I bet Terry Nation couldn't, either. Another potential 'new Dalek' idea, up in smoke.) But how sad to know. To know that Servalan is on her way. To know that Saymon is not coming back. Not the returning villain who becomes the iconic epitome of Blake's 7.

And if he is, and he does, I'm telling you now: keep it to yourself.