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.

Death Watch!

First Zelda and now Deeta. How many more siblings are there – and twin brothers and sisters at that – waiting out in space for the Liberator crew to be sort-of-but-not-quite-reunited with. Apart from the fact it’s sort of weird – almost as if they’ve actually forgotten they made 'Children of Auron' and just used the same idea again, and in almost the same way – I think the idea has plenty of potential. I’d like to meet a lot of other members of family. Avon’s Mum, for instance. Vila’s sexy cousins. Servalan’s unassuming twin sister Agnetha. To be really consistent, any of these incoming members of family really ought to be played by their corresponding members of the cast.

I suppose they should also experience the other’s death telepathically – again, a weirdly repeated motif. I thought it was actually handled really nicely here. The telepathic link managed to serve multiple purposes without being stretched. It was strangely logical for opposing forces to vicariously experience their champion’s terror or victory, and gave an interesting role for Dayna, with her unique affinity for warfare. It came as a surprise for it to be the context and medium for Deeta’s only contact with his brother, his goodbye witnessed by millions, and the scene was beautifully, unsettlingly shot by Gerald Blake.

It was a surprising and inventive episode in more than this. It recalls one of the more memorable stories from Season 1, 'Duel', but in that story the focus was on the participants. Here, much more was made of the Liberator crew as a viewers, knocking back the space booze, debating the ethics of the contest, the strategy, even the commentary (delivered by 

 Doctor Who Guest Star #1

Praxis from 'The Pirate Planet'). The story's never quite as meta and clever or even as fun as it really has the potential to be, but it does call on a different sort of energy between the lead actors, and that’s difficult in a show like this.

Typically of Chris Boucher, it was also a story where the action – in the denouement, especially – was fairly evenly divided between lead characters. Avon plotted, Dayna analysed – and caused a diversion, Orac behaved like he was originally designed to, and Cally relayed information to Tarrant like nobody else. Vila wasn’t much use, but then he so rarely is – and I did enjoy his complete inability to recognise Steven Pacey in a wig. ‘I’m sure I know that man…!’ (There’s less for 

Doctor Who Guest Star #2, 

Professor Jones, to do.)

The only problem is, this really didn’t deserve to be such an ensemble piece. Quite reasonably, every member of the crew has had their own special episode centred on them – bar Dayna, and here’s hoping the talk about her father’s death in this story is set up for the finale – and now it’s the turn of Dev Tarrant. Isn’t it? But this feels like the least we’ve ever heard from that particular member of the crew. Normally he’s bleating on about how unappreciated he is, how stupid Vila is, where to blow up next.

This episode, he watches his brother walk into almost certain death – and then to actual, certain death – and then even avenges him, with not much more emotion than if he was watching Deeta fail a driving test. It’s not the fault of Steven Pacey, really – there’s absolutely nothing in the script for him. Not even a single tear down his extremely smooth cheek, or a variety of emotions chasing one another over his choirboy features. The story even ends on a bit of a gag – just as Children of Auron did, bizarrely. At least this one’s amusing.

It’s an odd story for Servalan too. I suppose I was spoiled by the build-up to 'Star One', but here we are in the penultimate episode, here’s Servalan, here’s a promising scene with her nemesis (‘I don’t see you as an enemy, Avon, but a potential friend…’ ‘I’m ready to come up now’) and then – it turns out she just has another Evil Plan of the Week, which is foiled with no repercussions.

I’m looking forward to the finale, though. I accidentally found out that Terry’s back, and I think he’s got lots of material to work with. If he hasn’t paid much attention to the show lately, at least he’s got a reminder of the Dayna/Servalan blood feud in this very episode. The whole of this episode is almost like a man who’s been house-sitting for a friend, reminding him where all the important stuff is. Let’s hope the electricity’s on…

 

I took the wobbly pictures of the Radio Times listing, but any other pictures are from: http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib

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.