Season Two!

Oops. I seem to have missed, oh, thirteen weeks of the blog. Did you miss me? No, don’t answer that: I’m more sensitive than I appear…

How did it happen? Well, I lost faith in the show, and I didn’t want to write about it: nothing’s going to corroborate negativity more than writing a blog about it. And who’d want to read it? I couldn’t stand a blog on any season of Who where every entry began: “Oh Christ, let me tell you about this one…”

Get a bloody life!, I would say. I quite often shout this at the mirror, in fact.

The sad thing being that, like Season 8 of Who, I have no record of what I thought of Blake’s 7 Season 2. No chronicle of my growing respect for the production team, as they drew together the threads of Blake and Servalan’s stories, tangled them in knots round the innocent Liberator crew and accursed Travis, dragging them up and down the universe, through all the Skaro’s and even to the space cabaret that Doctor Who extras go to after death.

I’m not saying this season’s perfect. I couldn’t love anything that was. The first six episodes made me consider faking my own death and forging a new persona as a sports fan denying all previous association with the world of British sci-fi telly and its fruity lead actors. Those stories are full of great characters (like Carnell the psycho-strategist) drumming their fingers while events revolve around them like a doddery baggage carousel.

And you have to say it: Scott Fredericks, Peter Miles, Kevin Stoney. One story each. Their only/last appearances in the whole series. What?!

But I must say, once Gan’s dead and Blake’s come back from his weird sojourn on the living planet with the English-speaking chicken-lizard-lady and Servalan’s double-crossed (or is it triple-crossed?) New Travis, and the Liberator has ram-raided the Federation, things begin to steadily improve.

To start with, there’s Robert Holmes’ first contribution to the show, Killer. It’s got a fabulous Saturday night vibe: you know where you are, then you’re surprised, then there’s a race against time and a twist and even a surprising, tragic ending that no amount of silly flappy PVC tabards can undermine. After Hostage, about which we will not speak, comes a story which is almost a reversal of Killer: there’s an old ally of Avon’s, and certain death in the offing. The Liberator crew could fly away to safety, but instead they battle on to the last second to demonstrate what ideals they hide beneath their chilly exteriors. It’s got pace, it’s got backstory, it’s got mad staring eyes: excellent.

The remainder of the series takes us from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, at least once a week. We have the production team writing to the show’s strengths and just a little beyond the budget: best of all, Servalan and Travis going seriously off-message. By this point, we know who everybody is and what they want, but we don’t know what they’re going to do about it.

Voice from the Past, hardly the best story, is still full of surprises. Blake’s gone mad, baddies have gone good, there’s a sort of Bonfire Night guy speaking with a weird unpredictable accent: who can you trust? Nobody, it seems. Servalan becomes a cinematic image, which feels very 1984. The watcher was Travis all along. The pace is fast and the style is totally unpredictable.

And if you’ve been wondering how to peg me as Blake’s 7 fan, it may help to know that I don’t think anything will ever match up to Gambit. 

By this point, the crew are actually going somewhere again. Sometimes unwillingly, yes, but they’re on the move, making plans, even making plans for after. It’s not drowning in continuity – to be frank, I couldn’t tell you what Servalan’s agenda was from one week to the next – but we have a destination.

We also have The Keeper, which is appalling but at least in an interesting way. If you can’t enjoy a ranting Bruce Purchase as a yellow Visigoth in a mauve leather miniskirt (you should have heard me gasp) then really you must shun this era in television history. Go and read Tolstoy instead.

But ultimately there is a season finale, in an era when I didn’t think they did season finales, and the big secret everyone’s been going on about, and just when you think you know what you’re getting and you’re prepared to be disappointed, they only go and turn the tables on you. At least once before you even know you’ve done it, and then again.

It’s a brilliant cliffhanger. The Federation a ruin, Travis dead, Servalan abruptly the empress of chaos, and the freedom fighters standing by to defend everybody against goodness knows what. Should it have ended here?

Let’s find out.

Breakdown!

This morning I find myself asking the question, was rock monolith Patti Smith's seminal 1975 album track 'Redondo Beach' written about a member of the Blake's 7 crew?

Late afternoon, dreaming hotel

We just had a quarrel that sent you away

I went looking for you-ou-ou

Are you gone, Gan?

Desperate I know, but if we never do get anything more about Gan's back-story and why he has that 'inhibitor' than, 'They took my woman', perhaps it will have to do. I've already amended his Wikipedia page but we'll have to see if it stands.

In this story, we saw the inhibitor develop a fault and certain aggressive elements of Gan's personality rose to the surface: it gave the perfect opportunity for the show to return to its more fascinating themes of repression, mind control, the consequences of taking a life and how our actions make us what we are. It was also an opportunity to take a relatively supporting character like Gan and make them the focus of the show.

It gave the perfect opportunity for all of this, but all the programme-makers really wanted was a couple of punch-ups and a stand-off with this week's

DOCTOR WHO GUEST STAR:

Count Scarlioni

 To be a little fairer, there were a few seeds sown for a much bigger storyline, Avon's dissent from the Liberator crew or at least from the captaincy of cuddly Roj Blake. I must admit, they're doing that very nicely – it's a constant presence in the storyline, it's witty, it makes sense, it's nicely played.

But I do feel sorry for Gan, because what seemed like a story that was all about him turned out to be a story in which he was barely present. In the opening episodes we had a new flashbacks in the mix, including one (in hindsight jarringly dissonant) image of Jenna's mother being arrested in a hospital gown. Breakdown should have been Gan's moment.

We should have seen him and 'his woman' walking through a Cadbury's Flake advert. We should have seen 'his woman' zapped by assassins / revealed to be an android / arrested in a hospital gown. Instead, he did a lot of clenching and unclenching of his fists. But I was left confused – was this Gan au naturelle, as he would act with no inhibitor at all? Or just Gan put into psychosis because his brain computer needed a defrag?

Not to get too crazy, but with the hindsight of thirty-odd years, wouldn't it have been fun to see some of this episode through Gan's eyes – and to kid the audience for a while that the Liberator crew were muttering behind his back, reporting him to the Federation, or all perhaps a bunch of aliens in disguise (ones with faces of burnt spaghetti and one big poached egg eye, underneath a rubbery mask – do you see what I did there?).

There are some great stories to tell about a freedom fighter who is physically unable to kill. It would be great if we got one before Gan karks it (gunned down, I hope, by a return appearance from 'his woman' played by Yootha Joyce – with plastic hair). I just don't think Terry Nation cares all that much about him.

Not like Patti Smith does.

Call you on the phone, to another dimension

Well you never returned, oh you know what I mean

I went looking for you-ou-ou

Are you gone, Gan?