Terminal!

If you weren't aware, I write this a little in advance of it being published online. Normally this doesn't mean anything, but: my boyfriend texted me today to tell me that Gareth Thomas has died. By coincidence, I’ve been watching Kevin Jon Davies’ utterly brilliant documentary about the Making of Blake’s 7, which is available in three parts, the first one here. (Today I started on part two, which has a particularly entertaining opening montage of the Liberator crew hilariously responding to snobby contemporary reviews.) Gareth comes across in the documentary as a truly lovely bloke, one of a team of lovely individuals who signed up for something bold and new, gamely ran about in Betchworth Quarry in adverse weather conditions, wore whatever outrageous costumes they were asked to, and endured a lot of negativity from their peers.

They weren’t necessarily playing the most likeable of characters, either. Roj Blake in particular sometimes seems the hardest of the lot to trust – and he isn’t given much in the way of killer lines, either. Gareth played him with great conviction and made him convincing as the serious, impossibly idealistic hero he’d become by the time he dragged all his closest friends (if you can call them that) into a battle between alien invaders and Federation troops. He even did space yoga, and communed with the chicken lady of the living planet.

I wonder what Season 3 would have looked like if Gareth hadn’t decided to leave. The show definitely gains a new lease of life from its new crew, but without a character like Blake at the helm of the ship, it literally hasn’t much direction. They’ve definitely bungled Servalan’s character arc, I’m sad to say – her motivation’s been all over the place since she got back to civilisation, and so quickly. It would have been better to have her the show’s new dangerous loner, or evern plonked her on the Liberator: locked in a strange space tango with Avon (not literally, but here’s hoping for season 4).

The Season 2 cliffhanger is terrific, and for me Terminal just can’t match it: there’s no sense of resolution, no forward momentum, no sense of the crew as an ensemble. The destruction of the Liberator is barely linked to the storyline except as a twist to get rid of Servalan (but something tells me she’ll be back).

The melting of the Liberator is, at least, enjoyably grandiose. It reminds me of Nation’s rather B7-ish Doctor Who story, Death to the Daleks, where everyone’s terribly serious about minerals, power and plague, and everybody gets dragged down from their high technological horse power to squabble desperately in a quarry. At the start of the story, the all-powerful telepathic space-craft belonging to the Doctor is suddenly rendered inoperable and frightening. At the end of the story (spoilers), a giant super-advanced piece of sentient engineering also falls apart. In fact, like the Liberator, it literally decomposes in what feels like a technological equivalent of grand guignol.

One thing that works brilliantly is Avon’s quest to find Blake. Of course everybody compares the show to the adventures of Robin Hood, but I’ve been reading about Arthurian myth recently and something resonates about the hero who sleeps eternally awaiting his acolytes – or perhaps he’s the Fisher King with a dolorous wound and the waste land all around. Well, in fact he’s neither of those things, because he’s been made by Servalan – but why? Because she, and Terry Nation, and we at home all recognise something in Avon that he disguises: a complicated relationship with the only true hero this miserable, nihilist vision of the future is capable of producing.

I was surprised to see Blake again. You have to respect a man like Gareth Thomas, who will actually return to a series he only left a few months ago - in the face of contemporary cynicism and criticism - to make a storyline work. His reappearance here draws together all three years of the show and makes it feel like it’s about something – about the question, whether to follow President Servalan, have lots of sex and crème de menthe and (seemingly) effortless oppression of the mindless hordes, or to follow Roj Blake. To take a chance, believe in heroism, spend most of your working life in Betchworth Quarry freezing your arse off in a leather batwing tunic with silver studs, with only a sense of humour and a ray gun made out of a power-drill to protect you; ever hoping, at the very least, for a truly killer line.

Some of the good guys are prepared to go with the latter option. We should all be thankful for them.