Sand!

It’s the singles bar at the end of the universe, and now that Servalan has arrived: it’s ladies’ night…

I’m several stories ahead of the blog. By the time you read this, I’ll have left the dusts of Virn behind. (I’ll have passed beyond Blake’s 7 and a little way into whatever comes next. Edge of Darkness? Emu’s Pink Windmill?) I happened that, just after I watched ‘Sand’ and before I wrote this, I posted my blog about Tanith Lee’s first contribution to the show, ‘Sarcophagus’. (Click here to go back and read it if you like: you are now spiralling in time, try not to trip over that hat-stand). And rereading that was interesting.

It strikes me that I started the review talking about character. Character continuity has always beset this series. It looks like a character-driven show, and perhaps it is, but it’s driven like a go-kart round a track: however fast they go, they circle around to the beginning again. After a while, I got used to this: the same way new viewers get used to the fact that Tom never goes back for Sarah after ‘Deadly Assassin’: it’s a convention, a necessity, a loveable quirk.

In ‘Sarcophagus’, the episode pivots on an understanding of a romantic kind between Cally and Avon that might be there if you dig in the subtext of previous episodes. It’s a small fire generated by the friction of knowing glances, and the most knowing of these is shared between the viewer and the writer. Tanith Lee, like Chris Boucher before her, reveals herself to be viewer-as-writer: she doesn’t know the characters like Terry Nation, but she writes with the implicit authority and insight that all we viewers take for granted.

The Cally-Avon romance basically peters out after the end credits of ‘Sarcophagus’, but for the duration of the episode, along with some of piquant stylistic touches (cosmic folk, especially) Lee convinced me she was sharing a personal insight into the world of these characters.

I used to bemoan the huge number of regulars in the show: now I see them as multiple viewpoints on a world that needs exploring in multiple dimensions (City at the Edge of the World is a great example). And in a show like Blake’s 7, it’s not location work or special effects that create your world, not backdrops and backstory. It’s about how a character sees the world, how they inhabit it, and how they try and shape it. Lots of writers beam the characters down to the ‘planet of the week’ and have them act as disinterested participants, like gamers or tourists. It ought to be more like Chaucer: there’s a reason this story happens to this person.

This charming, brittle, beardless youth of a Federation Captain, who spends a night with the most dangerous woman in the galaxy on a planet of ghosts. This grumpy, battle-weary genius, half-seduced and half-sickened by the President’s power, hanging powerless in her orbit. This planet that engineers a story, divides and destroys and draws together its victims, and heaps up along the windows like a gestalt voyeur, as they gulp their green-ade and blue-ade and get up to who knows what. Obviously, this turns out to be a story about Servalan, and doesn’t Jacqueline Pearce shine, but Tanith Lee’s approach to Serv isn’t through a new world but a man who knows her, in every sense. Two of them, in fact, although one of them is dead as the story begins.

Green dust, black evening gown, dead man in the next room: that’s Blake’s 7.

This is the reason we have Season Four, then, to give Servalan a story in which the mask slips, if only a little. ‘Power became my lover,’ she says. And so Don Keller, the man who dumped Servalan, the warm corpse next door, becomes the reason for the events of the last three seasons. Yes, for the duration of this story, the power games of Blake, Tarrant and the rest all boil down to a lost love and a confrontation with the past in a world – a situation – where such things are briefly in focus. What else does drama do but invent the one world where one unique story can be told?

Next week, it’ll be another world, and maybe another viewpoint will open up. Somehow I doubt it - stories like ‘Sand’ don’t come along very often - but we watch on optimistically. I expect Servalan will be back, and the crew won’t mention Tarrant’s betrayal: he’ll seem to forget, and so will she. As usual, the viewer will fill in what they can remember and what they suspect, and tell their own story. One shaped forever by the particular insights of this richly beautiful, bizarre and chilly alien world…

Death Watch!

First Zelda and now Deeta. How many more siblings are there – and twin brothers and sisters at that – waiting out in space for the Liberator crew to be sort-of-but-not-quite-reunited with. Apart from the fact it’s sort of weird – almost as if they’ve actually forgotten they made 'Children of Auron' and just used the same idea again, and in almost the same way – I think the idea has plenty of potential. I’d like to meet a lot of other members of family. Avon’s Mum, for instance. Vila’s sexy cousins. Servalan’s unassuming twin sister Agnetha. To be really consistent, any of these incoming members of family really ought to be played by their corresponding members of the cast.

I suppose they should also experience the other’s death telepathically – again, a weirdly repeated motif. I thought it was actually handled really nicely here. The telepathic link managed to serve multiple purposes without being stretched. It was strangely logical for opposing forces to vicariously experience their champion’s terror or victory, and gave an interesting role for Dayna, with her unique affinity for warfare. It came as a surprise for it to be the context and medium for Deeta’s only contact with his brother, his goodbye witnessed by millions, and the scene was beautifully, unsettlingly shot by Gerald Blake.

It was a surprising and inventive episode in more than this. It recalls one of the more memorable stories from Season 1, 'Duel', but in that story the focus was on the participants. Here, much more was made of the Liberator crew as a viewers, knocking back the space booze, debating the ethics of the contest, the strategy, even the commentary (delivered by 

 Doctor Who Guest Star #1

Praxis from 'The Pirate Planet'). The story's never quite as meta and clever or even as fun as it really has the potential to be, but it does call on a different sort of energy between the lead actors, and that’s difficult in a show like this.

Typically of Chris Boucher, it was also a story where the action – in the denouement, especially – was fairly evenly divided between lead characters. Avon plotted, Dayna analysed – and caused a diversion, Orac behaved like he was originally designed to, and Cally relayed information to Tarrant like nobody else. Vila wasn’t much use, but then he so rarely is – and I did enjoy his complete inability to recognise Steven Pacey in a wig. ‘I’m sure I know that man…!’ (There’s less for 

Doctor Who Guest Star #2, 

Professor Jones, to do.)

The only problem is, this really didn’t deserve to be such an ensemble piece. Quite reasonably, every member of the crew has had their own special episode centred on them – bar Dayna, and here’s hoping the talk about her father’s death in this story is set up for the finale – and now it’s the turn of Dev Tarrant. Isn’t it? But this feels like the least we’ve ever heard from that particular member of the crew. Normally he’s bleating on about how unappreciated he is, how stupid Vila is, where to blow up next.

This episode, he watches his brother walk into almost certain death – and then to actual, certain death – and then even avenges him, with not much more emotion than if he was watching Deeta fail a driving test. It’s not the fault of Steven Pacey, really – there’s absolutely nothing in the script for him. Not even a single tear down his extremely smooth cheek, or a variety of emotions chasing one another over his choirboy features. The story even ends on a bit of a gag – just as Children of Auron did, bizarrely. At least this one’s amusing.

It’s an odd story for Servalan too. I suppose I was spoiled by the build-up to 'Star One', but here we are in the penultimate episode, here’s Servalan, here’s a promising scene with her nemesis (‘I don’t see you as an enemy, Avon, but a potential friend…’ ‘I’m ready to come up now’) and then – it turns out she just has another Evil Plan of the Week, which is foiled with no repercussions.

I’m looking forward to the finale, though. I accidentally found out that Terry’s back, and I think he’s got lots of material to work with. If he hasn’t paid much attention to the show lately, at least he’s got a reminder of the Dayna/Servalan blood feud in this very episode. The whole of this episode is almost like a man who’s been house-sitting for a friend, reminding him where all the important stuff is. Let’s hope the electricity’s on…

 

I took the wobbly pictures of the Radio Times listing, but any other pictures are from: http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib

Ultraworld!

I remember, during the Eleventh Doctor’s memorably final, unforgettably naff adventures with Amy and Rory Pond, that some fan commentators postulated the theory that the Doctor was experiencing these adventures in a different order to his companions. That the stories were, in fact, being seen out of order by the audience for some very interesting purpose. This, obviously, came to nothing. But I would be tempted to resurrect the theory and apply it to the adventures of the Liberator in season 3.

Character development seems to go backwards and forwards. Sometimes Tarrant is the Captain, sometimes Avon. Sometimes Avon is having a relationship with Cally and sometimes with Dayna, and most of the time, with Servalan, but that’s all done via WhatsApp so nobody knows. Is Cally exiled from Auron? Does anyone ever remember that her twin has died? Does Dayna remember that Servalan killer her father? Does anyone remember the aliens who were invading at the end of last season – or that guy called Blake?

At the start of this story, the Liberator is once again flying randomly through space. It encounters a mysterious object that looks a bit like a Sontaran scout ship and a lot like a mirror ball. In fact, when Cally is telepathically possessed by it – for the umpteenth bloody time – it actually manifests as a mirror ball. We get some bright lights flashing. We really ought to cross fade to Tina Charles surrounded by dry ice, but sadly that never happens.

The Liberator crew decide to teleport down and rescue her, after a bit of argy-bargy between Avon and Tarrant that makes no reference to any of their other rescue missions for Cally. Perhaps, the ship being psychic, it requires its crew to have an argument before it can power up its teleport circuits. Perhaps the entire Liberator is powered by its occupants’ internal discord. Maybe it’s inducing these arguments.

Anyway, they all head off except for Vila, who has become a complete imbecile who wants to tell Orac stupid jokes. Stupid, stupid jokes about ‘parking meteors’. The fact that this then comes to be an important factor in the plot makes me even more suspicious of the psychic ship and oracular Orac. I think Orac could see what was going to happen and got Zen to control Vila and make him behave like a numpty, in order to rescue the crew at the eleventh hour.

Why wouldn’t Orac just tell them what they need to do? Well, this is the same computer who deviously flew the entire ship into a black hole a couple of episodes prior to this. Once you accept that Orac and Zen are in control of the ship, the mass of ridiculous coincidences that power Blake’s 7 begin to make sense, as do the crew’s unstable character motivations. They’re basically action figures in the metaphorical grip of two electronic giant children.

But I digress.

My big shock this week was that as soon as the blue men arrived – yes, you remember the blue men: they’ve strapped Cally down and they’re feeding her mental powers into ‘the Core’ – I realised I had seen this story before. Cue a wibbly wobbly flashback to the young teenage Nick, drunk on The Avengers and Doctor Who and excited to find a Blake’s 7 VHS or two in his local library.

‘Ultraworld’ was on one of those videos. (The other had ‘Gold’ and ‘Orbit’ on – it’ll be interesting to see those again.) I’d completely forgotten seeing this, it all came flooding back: the disgustingly baggy giant pus-coloured brain that is the core, and the inevitable soggy explosion of the same. On the available evidence, I can see why I didn’t immediately succumb to this series. (Interestingly, and I’m stretching that definition, this story was preceded on that VHS by ‘Sarcophagus’, which I had absolutely no memory of seeing. Which means I was even more bored by that story than I was by this load of old rubbish.)

I’m happy to have a giant brain, three balding blue men and a plan to steal everyone’s minds and put them in a giant mirror ball. I’m happy for the day to be saved by telling the supercomputer stupid jokes. But Trevor Hoyle obviously sent this through to the wrong production team. This is a Doctor Who story through and through.

Of course, in Doctor Who it would make a bit more sense. Cally wouldn’t be possessed – she would teleport down to Ultraworld out of curiosity, despite Tom Baker’s boggle-eyed warnings. Then the Doctor would travel down to the ship with the crew, who would be picked off one by one – but only after he had got the chance to explain the plot to at least one of them.

We’d have a nice slow build-up to all of this, and the blue men wouldn’t be after the Liberator – I mean, what’s that all about? – but the TARDIS. Lalla Ward and K-9 would be dodging blue men – who would probably be a bit scarier, maybe they would have weird blue contact lenses in or something? And they fire blue lasers out of their eyes and turn other people blue…

You get the picture.

But instead, for no good reason, Tarrant knows everything. Exactly like the Doctor, exactly unlike Tarrant or anybody else in the show, except perhaps Orac (again, suspicious). And not only that, but Dayna knows nothing. Every time the camera cuts to her, Dayna is saying, “What’s that?” and “What do you mean?” She manages to blow something up precisely once. Apart from that, she might as well be Dodo Chaplet. She even gasps in horror at the sight of – some men. With their eyes closed.

Well, I did say it. 'Rumours of Death'. 'Sarcophagus'. There had to be a bad story on its way. But I must say, watching a story like this is dispiriting. It’s tempting to give up on the whole show. But I must not think like myself at thirteen.

I must venture forward, with an open heart…