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!

Power!

I let out an involuntary groan as the name ‘Ben Steed’ appeared on my screen. After last week’s episode, which rewrote Dayna as Jo Grant, disposed of the only other season regular as if she was a bunch of carnations that had gone past their prime, and featured the new regular, Soolin, as something of a Bond girl, ostensibly deadly but (within those 45 minutes) mostly decorative, we have an adventure from the author of The One Where Servalan Gets Humiliated By A Bloke In A Tracksuit and The One Where A Glove Puppet Disguised As A Computer Orders Men to Molest Woman As Punishment.

I am, perhaps, a little unfair. The interesting thing about Steed is that he is determined to make misogynistic violence a theme. Servalan’s awful boyfriend is, ultimately, just Steed trying to write Travis – he’s a villain and he doesn’t survive the story. Moloch and the Federation baddies are greedy, ineffectual fascists – the one eyed hand puppet symbolises them neatly. In this story, the woman-hating Hommicks are stupid primitives, fighting a bunch of beautiful women so clever they’re telekinetic.

The subtext of these stories is a giveaway, though. Jarvik, in 'Harvest of Kairos', turns out to be a brilliant strategist and fighter precisely because he’s such an unreconstructed MAN. Servalan is led into trusting him because, deep down, she’s all WOMAN. In 'Moloch', the women of the Liberator have little or nothing to do with the plot proper. The only female characters in the story are victims of the Federation’s brutality: that’s the only reason they’re there, and it’s hard to see where they fit into the rest of the history of the planet. And in this story, well, where to begin? The downtrodden wife who self-righteously, heroically, calls herself a woman, rather than a Seska? Avon’s battle of wills with Pella, and the big life lesson that “men will always be stronger”…? Followed by a snog?!

To be honest, though, it saps the will even to write about this story because it’s so incredibly threadbare. They only have 45 minutes an episode, but have to contrive a convoluted plotline involving the riddle of a locked door to which Avon knew the resolution to all along, turning up in the nick of time to sort it out. Steed is so determined to tell his doomy tale about the battle of the sexes that the entire planet is represented by six people by the end (I don’t just mean represented onscreen – the Seska population is just five women, and they’re all dead by the end of the story). Steed can’t think of anything to do with Soolin for the story so just has her hide under a table somewhere.

In addition to which, we seem to have arrived back again with the tribes of the future middle ages that seem so ubiquitous in the universe of Blakes 7. Where are the ludicrous excesses of yesterseason, the lurex and leather and wild eye make-up? Has this show grown so embarrassed about its visual appearance that it’s decided to just play things down – because if so, it’s going to be a very long season. In Doctor Who we’ve just had the Argolins, the Vampires, the Tharils, Trakenites and Logopolians. Blake's 7 could at least have nicked some of their costumes.

Come on, guys, it’s your last season. Stop worrying about what everybody else thinks. Live a little!

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…?