Animals!

How human is Kerr Avon anyway?

The Blake’s 7 regulars are all a fairly bestial lot. Snarling, snapping, scrabbling about. Vila’s dialogue is more or less analogous to either a mucky grunt or a wheedling yelp. Tarrant and Avon spent series 2 yapping at one another. Servalan would bite your head off, soon as look at you. What’s more, things seem to be getting worse. Avon is getting more savage, his pack seems to be continuously turning on itself, and Servalan – well, I’m not sure what she’s doing and why she hasn’t been recognised yet. Perhaps everybody’s just pretending they don’t know her so they don’t get killed. I’m sure that happens in certain workplaces and even certain bars. But nobody in this show is behaving in a recognisably human way.

            It’s nice, then, to get a reminder of Dayna’s father and to meet one of her old teachers. After space Vikings, space rebels and space punks, this is a story about one of those very specific Blake’s 7 characters: an important human who stands on the borderline between the Federation and its opponents. This time he’s important because he’s a genetic scientist and, a little like Davros, Professor Justin has created a new race of soldiers that thrive in radioactive environments. Unlike Davros, Justin’s creations hate him and have rebelled.

            Dayna, partly the product of his teaching, is also in revolt against her mentor. (It’s not clear exactly what he was teaching her: the important bits of their relationship seem to have been extra-curricular, which I had to keep blotting out throughout the story.) Justin’s eugenic Lego-building doesn’t just involve existential dilemmas but pain, experimentation and conditioning. And that’s before he mentions also experimenting with deserters from the Federation. There’s really not very much to like about Professor Justin: even his tabard’s ugly, and that’s saying something for this show.

            Conveniently, Scorpio needs extensive repairs back at the base, giving Dayna plenty of time with wrestle with her emotions, and Servalan enough time to deduce that something is happening on Justin’s planet, investigate, find the one man who knows about Justin’s experiments, fly him over, interrogate him, kill him, and beam people down to abduct Dayna. How long was Vila mucking about in the Scorpio’s engines? A fortnight?

            Jacqueline Pearce does some great work with Servalan this week. The script’s pretty shonky but the ex-President delivers every line cool enough to administer frostbite. When she realises that Dayna has a personal attachment to Justin, she turns this human strength into a vulnerability: not through blackmail but brainwashing, replacing every loving feeling with animal hatred. After this, Dayna is more Blake’s 7-y than ever: cold, watchful, obsessed with hardware. Servalan has Avonised her, and together they’re unstoppable.

            The test subjects are actually fairly good, costume-wise. Or are they? I can’t tell any more. I’ve passed an event horizon where I have no idea whether something is actually good or just good for this era in British sci-fi television, or even just good for Blake’s 7. After all, we should have met our fair share of alien beasties and strange people in this show and they’ve been relatively few. The denizens of Ultraworld, with their blue leotards and even bluer hair, are not very impressive. The flea-monsters of Kairos are eyebrow-raising for all the wrong reasons. These inventions of Justin, with their presumably radiation-proof golden locks, at least look relatively solid and weird. They are all fairly sensible too, if we go by their complete avoidance of their creator.

            I wasn’t surprised to see Justin go the way of all Blake’s 7 guest characters, and nor was I saddened very much. There was something rather suspicious about his relationship with Dayna. She was terribly upset when he died – and I do mean terribly – but is that down to having Jacqueline Pearce sweetly murmuring: “You love him… You love him… You love him…” while bombarding her with images of the Professor and, presumably, his tabard? Jacqueline could make anybody do anything.

            Especially in a universe like this one, where lives are cheap and victories short-lived. It’s probably hard to stay human in such conditions, particularly when the writers don’t know what they’re doing. We go round and round, getting more bitter, our characters less definite with each trip around the same old plot points. If the series doesn’t end with Avon and Servalan scrapping, eye-to-eye, in a grubby cellar with only a jawbone or a sharp bit of rock to win the day, it’ll only be because the series is so wonkily put together at this point that it doesn’t even follow the rules of its own moral universe.

            PS: Although this episode was truly dreadful, it gets points for a return from Kevin Stoney. Such a pity this stupid programme keeps killing him off!

Rescue!

There’s something strange about seeing these characters back again. Perhaps it’s because the show itself doesn’t go in for character development (e.g. ‘Dayna vows to kill Servalan! ... they go to a random planet… Dayna meets Servalan again – doesn’t kill her … they play Space Monopoly…') so when they have a big season finale narrative shift, it takes you by surprise.

Or maybe it’s just surprising that the series got renewed again.

I must say, having leafed through a copy of the Radio Times looking at listings for season 3, I’m impressed it had the success it did. Radio Times does nothing to promote it, even when they’re bigging up all the other New Year New Season shows. And why on Xenon wasn’t this on at Saturday teatimes? It’s almost literally made for it. The first season even has a Flash Gordon, Saturday-morning serials aesthetic. It should have had the Doctor Who slot. What did they put on instead? Flipping Wonder Woman!

Doctor Who was between seasons (and Doctors) when this went out. I don’t know the background details but for the first time B7 went out in the autumn instead of the spring. That means two things: it could have gone out in the Doctor Who slot – instead of Juliet Bravo, or at least The Paul Daniels Magic Show – and the production team had longer than ever to prepare this season.

Well.

One thing you can say, they’ve taken the jibes about the look of the thing to heart. The series gets off to a bang when the ship given to Avon and friends explodes in an impressive fireworks show, bettered immediately by one at the underground base. In Kevin Jon Davies’ documentary we see Mat Irvine saying the design of the Liberator made it hard to fly (for him, that is, not Jenna) and the new ship looks less interesting but zips along beautifully. Some of the most watchable sequences of this story are model shots, and there is something really beautiful about the craft and dedication that went into them.

The new computer, Slave, also looks good, and the new flight deck… I could get used to it. Let’s just say it’s a very 1981 approach to the concept. Perhaps they’ll redesign Orac while they’re at it. Pop him in an android, maybe?

Dorian and Soolin’s house looks fairly solid but it’s awfully boring. The spiral staircase into the monster’s cave, however, I did like – simple, nicely shot, fantastic sound. It makes perfect sense for the dull suburban grind to be going on upstairs, and the man to have a monstrous secret down in his dungeon, particularly a man who wears as much hair gel and foundation as Dorian does.

Sense is made a little less perfectly in the episode as a whole. To be frank, I’m not sure what happened. Dorian’s two hundred, lives with a gunslinger, pretends to be a galactic rag and bone man, wants the B7 crew because they care about each other – and that’s an odd reputation they’ve got, considering – because there’s a vampiric force in his cellar which purifies him…

On top of this, the Sea Devils are involved somewhere along the line. I suppose it makes sense if they live underground. Perhaps seconds after Vila’s quip about staying off the drink, three pterodactyls and a stegosaurus come lurching out of the dark too.

And what has happened to Dayna? Within five minutes, she’s twisted her ankle and has to be rescued by Avon. She falls down a cliff and has to be rescued by Dorian. Later, she throws her gun ineffectually at a Sea Devil and has to be rescued (and cuddled) by Avon. Is Ben Steed the new script editor? Dayna’s a warrior and technician. She’s the coolest cucumber in B7 – or was.

Much as the sentence may look odd in the context of B7, this episode is a case of style over substance. Boucher’s written some amazing episodes based on a series of reversals, and the mirror-monster-vampire-thing is reminiscent of his Face of Evil. But this story goes out of its way to trip up the viewer so many times it pulls a hamstring and stumbles about for the second half looking ridiculous.

And how could they kill off Cally so perfunctorily? If that’s all we’re supposed to care about one of the main crew dying, how are we supposed to root for the remaining bunch…?

 

Moloch!

Well, where to begin…?

I have a new game I play when I watch Blake’s 7. It’s not a drinking game, although I’m pretty sure the drunker you are, the better the show is. No, it’s very simple: just as the title card comes up (bwwwaaaaa…) I close my eyes (bwwwaaa…) and then I have to see how quickly I can guess who has written the episode.

Now, I was vaguely aware that Ben Steed had written more than one episode because of something muttered in the opening episode of fan podcast Down and Safe (if you get the chance, I urge you to download it and listen yourself). And I knew it couldn’t be Trevor Hoyle, because he’s just had a turn. I didn’t for a second think it was Terry Nation, but I might have guessed him before I guessed Chris Boucher or Robert Holmes. Their work, as I said in relation to 'Rumours of Death', is happening in two different eras of television. Terry Nation’s still essentially writing for the 60s. Chris Boucher’s story structures can be seen on BBC 1 today.

Ben Steed, on the other hand, writes for the era that time and taste and all right thinking people forgot. I pegged this one as his, as soon as the mysterious overseer (later revealed as Moloch, later revealed as a malignant computer, later revealed as a small felt glove puppet with one eye) told the Federation troopers what to do with the woman who has betrayed their whereabouts to the Liberator.

“Give her to your men.”

Now, it’s all very well for me to big up Chris Boucher as the better writer – but it should also be highlighted that he was the script editor for this season. I like to believe that Boucher saw strong female characters as an important element of the show – as character outlines, Dayna, Cally and Servalan are all stronger figures than virtually any other character but Avon. ‘Rumours of Death’ pivots on a strong, complex, dangerous female character – and even when Servalan is tied to a wall, she has maximum power.

So how could he let through a script where women are implicitly raped offscreen; where, in fact, there are only two female characters in the story so that this particular form of violence can be employed? Steed is, perhaps, trying to demonstrate the depravity of the planet’s rulers, an echo of the child abuse storyline in the series’ pilot episode: except that the tone of those stories was 1984, and this one feels more like a surreal episode of Allo Allo. Vila happens to befriend a misogynistic murderer, and when he’s told he’s going to be given a woman for serving the Federation, he trots along looking really quite cheerful about it.

Stinky old Carol on Vila-world wouldn’t be very pleased to hear about this.

I mean, you don’t need to hear it all again, I don’t need to say it all again, but Servalan gets humiliated by one of her officers, again. Cally spends the whole episode working the teleport, and manages to get that wrong, twice. Dayna does nothing in the episode but ask Avon questions (not very different from last episode). I’m expecting at least one of the female regulars to leave next season. And I bet there’ll be another bloody awful Ben Steed story then too.

The story is a mess, with a magic computer on an invisible planet and too many people making overly complicated plans with it. The design is lazy, the effects work is dreadful (is that really supposed to look like a human being floating in that tank?) and in the conclusion, the plot just self destructs: Moloch, the hyper advanced alien, can’t survive without his life support machine and Avon runs away from Servalan (who has a teleport bracelet, and didn’t manage to kill Vila or Tarrant when she was face to shoulder-pad with them).

What’s really sad is that I see we are nearing the end of this season. This time last season, everything was gearing up toward the destruction of Star One – this time around, there’s absolutely no continuity at all and no sense of direction. Where is Servalan going? Where is Avon going?

Come on, Chris. Prove me wrong. Two more stories to go. Surely this Ben Steed story was penance enough. Let’s get back to the good stuff.