Headhunter!

Avon’s Servalannish tendencies finally abate a little in this story, and as a viewer it’s all for the better. Not that he suddenly becomes a second Gan, or even a Jenna. And it’s not because of anything that his human comrades says to him – it’s an argument with his laptop.

It’s interesting to consider what a major role the machines play in the BBC’s two big SF shows: when this story aired in November 1981, Doctor Who had only very recently (in fact, January of that year) bid farewell to his second-best friend, K-9 the robot dog, and Sarah-Jane Smith was only one month away from receiving her own model of the same machine in her very own Christmas special. The TARDIS herself is “more than just a machine”, and although the show has only very recently given form and voice to the ship’s psyche, the idea that the TARDIS’ computer system ‘thinks’ for itself and is in some ways psychical, self-willed and even moody, has been around since its inception (particularly the telepathic-tastic early 70s).

            Both Avon and Vila are computer experts of differing sorts, depending on whether this is season one or not and what the plot demands. Avon is an expert with big systems and Vila is all about codes, passwords and locks. Avon, like some of the Doctor’s futuristic companions (and the Doctor himself) is somewhat analogously like the computers he operates on: a gunslinger, yes, but one who contemplates and calculates before kicking that chair or letting that engineering scientist get blown up. Cold, unreadable, insufferably clever yet also somehow ineffably desirable, Avon is like the personal computer soon to be appearing in homes across the country. One of the reasons he seems, and always has, to have a strange affinity with the dark side is that the Federation are the ones with the programme for humanity. Like the scary regimes of Orwell and Huxley, the Federation wants to treat the people of the universe like a giant electronic equation. They even use a computer for justice, in the opening episode at least.

            Avon, we feel, like every hard disc ever invented, is entirely corruptible.

            We get an early reminder in this story that Orac, one of the crew, and no less hard and chilly than Avon or Soolin, embodies the personality of his creator, Ensor. Remember him, and his robot canary? Left for dead among the slimy reptiles of the tunnels beneath an acid sea, pursued by still more slimy reptiles (Servalan and Travis) who had decided to triple-cross Ensor and the Federation in their hunt for Orac. It was worth a gamble of everything on Orac, because he was the be-all and end-all of computer thought. Servalan evidently felt she could rule the Universe and squish the Liberator crew with Orac in her talons. Blake, and then Avon, have had Orac for many years now and they’re still racketing aimlessly around the universe with evil on the throne. It does make you wonder if he’s all he’s cracked up to be – though it can’t be denied that he secretly made Avon and Vila millionaires one night, and has solved a couple of riddles in his time (although whether he tells his operators what the answer is, and for what reasons, is a riddle in itself).

This story features another expert in computers and another super-weapon, not so very different from Og the hairy barbarian of ‘Animals’: a soldier that can mess up any electronic equipment it meets, with genius intelligence and a special inhibitor that can control its actions. Like Og, the creation has rebelled against his creator (making Professor Mullen the third Davros-a-like in a row, by my count) and in a fairly grotesque way.

The most dramatic bit of the episode, for me at least, was the android’s takeover of Scorpio’s computer system via the Life Support booth. Roger Parkes signals fairly obviously to the audience that the ever-so-‘umble Slave has gone awry in a significant way, but Vila and Tarrant carry on bimbling around unaware of how vulnerable they suddenly are. The story had the potential for a general recycling of Season 3’s wonderful Tanith Lee Cally-takeover psychofantasy, but things are made more interesting through splitting the crew. There’s a real sense of crisis when the ship shuts down all life support systems. Who understands the situation best? What does Orac know? Dare we break in and find out more or do we stay at a safe distance?

Throughout the story, as the nature of the threat grows clearer, Orac and Avon grow more tactical, more calculating, more personally concerned. Dayna, Soolin, Tarrant and Vila are caught up in the middle, and each of them gets something important to do in the plot (I always award brownie points when a writers achieves this on Blake’s 7 because there are so many bloody lead characters). There’s some especially nice interplay between Vila and Soolin, when the sci-fi story turns into cod-Hammer Horror but Parkes flips the conventional gender roles and has Soolin tough and implacable while Vila hides in a cupboard. (A quick note here that Soolin gets some great lines and Glynis Barber is fab.)

It’s hard nowadays to feel the same paranoia about ‘thinking machines’ that lies at the heart of this story. We are simply too close to them nowadays: we fell in love with the K-9’s, Orac’s and Slave’s of the world. (I asked Cortana about this, and she agreed.) The ending of the story feels rather peculiar now: the threat of the android is such that Dayna and Tarrant blow it up with big relieved smiles. Avon, the calculating bugger, is very cross – but even he is given a bit of side by Orac in the last line of the story. The tension endures, and the show is ever so slightly more on the side of the human. It’s a lovely moment when Avon, of all people, overrides Orac’s instructions and defies the possessed Slave to put on a silly space helmet and ride to the rescue of his pals.

Once again, blurry Radio Times pictures were taken by me, screengrabs are courtesy of http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib.htm

- @lifeinleaves

Ultraworld!

I remember, during the Eleventh Doctor’s memorably final, unforgettably naff adventures with Amy and Rory Pond, that some fan commentators postulated the theory that the Doctor was experiencing these adventures in a different order to his companions. That the stories were, in fact, being seen out of order by the audience for some very interesting purpose. This, obviously, came to nothing. But I would be tempted to resurrect the theory and apply it to the adventures of the Liberator in season 3.

Character development seems to go backwards and forwards. Sometimes Tarrant is the Captain, sometimes Avon. Sometimes Avon is having a relationship with Cally and sometimes with Dayna, and most of the time, with Servalan, but that’s all done via WhatsApp so nobody knows. Is Cally exiled from Auron? Does anyone ever remember that her twin has died? Does Dayna remember that Servalan killer her father? Does anyone remember the aliens who were invading at the end of last season – or that guy called Blake?

At the start of this story, the Liberator is once again flying randomly through space. It encounters a mysterious object that looks a bit like a Sontaran scout ship and a lot like a mirror ball. In fact, when Cally is telepathically possessed by it – for the umpteenth bloody time – it actually manifests as a mirror ball. We get some bright lights flashing. We really ought to cross fade to Tina Charles surrounded by dry ice, but sadly that never happens.

The Liberator crew decide to teleport down and rescue her, after a bit of argy-bargy between Avon and Tarrant that makes no reference to any of their other rescue missions for Cally. Perhaps, the ship being psychic, it requires its crew to have an argument before it can power up its teleport circuits. Perhaps the entire Liberator is powered by its occupants’ internal discord. Maybe it’s inducing these arguments.

Anyway, they all head off except for Vila, who has become a complete imbecile who wants to tell Orac stupid jokes. Stupid, stupid jokes about ‘parking meteors’. The fact that this then comes to be an important factor in the plot makes me even more suspicious of the psychic ship and oracular Orac. I think Orac could see what was going to happen and got Zen to control Vila and make him behave like a numpty, in order to rescue the crew at the eleventh hour.

Why wouldn’t Orac just tell them what they need to do? Well, this is the same computer who deviously flew the entire ship into a black hole a couple of episodes prior to this. Once you accept that Orac and Zen are in control of the ship, the mass of ridiculous coincidences that power Blake’s 7 begin to make sense, as do the crew’s unstable character motivations. They’re basically action figures in the metaphorical grip of two electronic giant children.

But I digress.

My big shock this week was that as soon as the blue men arrived – yes, you remember the blue men: they’ve strapped Cally down and they’re feeding her mental powers into ‘the Core’ – I realised I had seen this story before. Cue a wibbly wobbly flashback to the young teenage Nick, drunk on The Avengers and Doctor Who and excited to find a Blake’s 7 VHS or two in his local library.

‘Ultraworld’ was on one of those videos. (The other had ‘Gold’ and ‘Orbit’ on – it’ll be interesting to see those again.) I’d completely forgotten seeing this, it all came flooding back: the disgustingly baggy giant pus-coloured brain that is the core, and the inevitable soggy explosion of the same. On the available evidence, I can see why I didn’t immediately succumb to this series. (Interestingly, and I’m stretching that definition, this story was preceded on that VHS by ‘Sarcophagus’, which I had absolutely no memory of seeing. Which means I was even more bored by that story than I was by this load of old rubbish.)

I’m happy to have a giant brain, three balding blue men and a plan to steal everyone’s minds and put them in a giant mirror ball. I’m happy for the day to be saved by telling the supercomputer stupid jokes. But Trevor Hoyle obviously sent this through to the wrong production team. This is a Doctor Who story through and through.

Of course, in Doctor Who it would make a bit more sense. Cally wouldn’t be possessed – she would teleport down to Ultraworld out of curiosity, despite Tom Baker’s boggle-eyed warnings. Then the Doctor would travel down to the ship with the crew, who would be picked off one by one – but only after he had got the chance to explain the plot to at least one of them.

We’d have a nice slow build-up to all of this, and the blue men wouldn’t be after the Liberator – I mean, what’s that all about? – but the TARDIS. Lalla Ward and K-9 would be dodging blue men – who would probably be a bit scarier, maybe they would have weird blue contact lenses in or something? And they fire blue lasers out of their eyes and turn other people blue…

You get the picture.

But instead, for no good reason, Tarrant knows everything. Exactly like the Doctor, exactly unlike Tarrant or anybody else in the show, except perhaps Orac (again, suspicious). And not only that, but Dayna knows nothing. Every time the camera cuts to her, Dayna is saying, “What’s that?” and “What do you mean?” She manages to blow something up precisely once. Apart from that, she might as well be Dodo Chaplet. She even gasps in horror at the sight of – some men. With their eyes closed.

Well, I did say it. 'Rumours of Death'. 'Sarcophagus'. There had to be a bad story on its way. But I must say, watching a story like this is dispiriting. It’s tempting to give up on the whole show. But I must not think like myself at thirteen.

I must venture forward, with an open heart…