Orbit!

FROM: dirtydozen@hotmale.co.space

TO: pres.sleer.valan@gmail.co.smic

SUBJECT: Room on top?

Dear Servalan,

Hope you are quite well. Or, to be absolutely consistent, quite mad, bad and dangerous to know as ever you were. Sorry to have missed you on down there on the planet Malodar, a world that lived up to its name by stinking to high heaven. And yes, I got your scent, right enough, amidst the stench of deceit, regret, frustrated eroticism and Deep Heat. That evil genius Egrorian had certainly pressed against somebody who wears ‘Suspiria’ perfume, and in these circumstances at least, it wasn’t his ex-boyfriend Pinder (it was him with the Deep Heat). I wouldn’t have thought Professor E. was your type, but I can hardly talk, having taken myself and my colleagues to Malodar and the brink of destruction on nothing more than the promise of his giant weapon.

So yes, I got away, and more than that, I know it was you who tried to kill me, and more than that, I know that you know that I know, in fact: you know that I know that you knew that I know that you knew that I know that you knew, and so ad infinitum. I don’t think there’s anything we don’t know about each other. Never was the chance of a mate allowed to grow so stale.

For a long time we’ve been in the same orbit, you and I, going around and around. To an observer, it might look as if you were in pursuit; to a political theorist, it might seem that I’ve been deliberately giving you the runaround. Only an astrophysicist would know the truth: we’re both swinging in circles because that’s how the universe holds together. But whose orbit is holding us, Servalan, and if he’s not around anymore – are we free to go our own way?

To be frank, I’m writing to see if you’ve got any jobs going free at the Federation, or wherever it is you work at the moment. If you can get away with an assumed name, not even growing your hair out, I’m pretty sure I could slip into some secret niche. No, it’s not a trap. What would be the point?

Once upon a time, I’d have scorned to ask such a question. You were the enemy, pure and simple – well, not at first. Servalan, you were a target. You made yourself our opposition, pursuing and antagonising us and generally looming large. You and Travis put a face on the forces that Blake and Jenna were set against. We all came to obsess over that face, one way or another.

Nowadays, I’ve no idea what you stand for or what you want. You’re hardly in power any more, and all your schemes generally come to naught since my leather-trousered arse is still sitting safe and sound on board the Scorpio as I write this. You’re no opposition and certainly no target. If you want to get anywhere, you’re going to need better allies than Pinder and Egrorian.

More to the point, and speaking off the record, I’m not entirely sure what my place in the universe is any more. I don’t need money or glory. The woman I loved, as you know, is dead. My old friends sell me out, my new friends make me sick. Somewhere in the middle is Vila. I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind about Vila, but last Monday evening in the heat of the moment, everything to play for… to my surprise, I found my mind was made up. Oh, we laughed about it afterward, but since then, it’s given me pause. I’ve caught myself staring into space with even more gravity and melodrama than usual.

I can’t keep flying around in circles, Serv. Something has to give. You know what I’m talking about: you nearly made it out, left for dead twice, and you clambered back onto the horse and where did it get you? Pressing yourself against Egrorian, hatching another pointless scheme. I know you know what I’m talking about. You know I know, and I know that you know that I know.

Sooner or later there has to be a decisive move on someone’s part. I could send along my CV but I suspect you have all the salient details.

See you next Monday,

K.A.

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!

Stardrive!

Avon has definitely gone a bit strange.

Risking the lives of all your crew, despite their objections, just to gain a tactical advantage. Imperiously ordering them to sit and complete demeaning tasks in the dark, to satisfy your whim. Chasing after the latest missing Federation scientist and their mysterious super-charged gizmo, again just to gain a tactical advantage, even though tactically speaking you seem to have no actual long-term plan. Tricking close allies into risking their lives, just to create a distraction while you steal the gizmo. Letting other allies know about your bastardly behaviour to scare them into obedience.

You are Servalan.

Perhaps it’s because he thought she was dead, or at least, on the run? It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going with the Federation nowadays. It can’t be the same organisation that was led despotically by Jacqueline Pearce, or the one that was in shreds after the civil war, or the original one that Blake took charge of. Servalan once told Avon that the universe would be in disarray and needed someone strong – with fabulous hair – to put it back together. She had a go. Perhaps Avon thinks it’s his turn now.

He certainly seems as crackers as she was now.

Unfortunately for him, it’s not just because he’s madder, badder and more dangerous to share a spaceship with than he ever was before that he resembles our favourite villain. He also looks like her because he does all these despotic things with the desperate air of someone continually failing. The ship needs power, then it’s damaged, then (during the mystery of the exploding Federation ships) Orac refuses to give Avon the information he wants. After that, it’s all about the Space Rats and how much more dangerous and better organised they are than Avon and his crew.

It’s interesting to see James Follett tell his story this way. We’ve seen this narrative before, but normally with the magic gizmo in the hands of primitive cave dwellers or Space Vikings. The Space Rats are tribal, testosterone-tastic troglodytes, but Follett doesn’t equate that with primitive culture so much as Hell’s Angels and punks – oh, and queers too. There don’t appear to be any girl Space Rats, and the language of ‘bending’ people is rather suspect. If this is a depiction of power-play, status anxiety and (in some strange form) cold war, it is telling that this particular author seems slightly scared of a culture that is avowedly opposed to the mainstream. In short, the Space Rats are almost a parody of the ‘Dirty Dozen’ concept at the heart of the show, and they seem more dangerous, albeit more stupid. It’s like the show really doesn’t know what it’s about any more.

I was waiting throughout this story for a big confrontation between Avon and Vila. The moment when Avon’s plan went to pieces and Vila had to rescue him. To see their positions overturned, Dayna with the power to sacrifice him. Instead, Avon’s plan works out brilliantly in the nick of time and nothing is said between the crew. Follett contrives some jeopardy so that there’s no time to talk, and then the super genius Dr Plaxton is pressed into fitting her super gizmo to the Scorpio engines.

I haven’t really said anything about Plaxton so far, but I think I’ve said at least as much about her as the story does. She’s a harassed enigma with a screwdriver.

All this seems to endorse Avon as the hero of the piece. He’s not a bastard: he’s tough, he has vision, he’s a leader.

And then he allows poor old Dr Plaxton to die, seemingly without showing any remorse. He’s off at the deep end now – it’s not the way any of his crew react to the news, it’s just him in his lonely despot world, looking down from such a height that he can’t make out individual faces.

‘What about Dr Plaxton?’ they ask him.

‘Who?’ And he almost smiles.

In some ways this feels inevitable. The world of Blake’s 7 is a harsh, peculiar, decentred one. After all this time, the crew still don’t like one another, and they have no friends or family. Every gain they make against the Federation just melts away: like Servalan, Avon is a survivor who never wins, always loses. It’s no real surprise that he’s gone as crazy as she.

The question is, where does he go from here? And could he be brought back somehow?