In case anyone other than Tansy and Terri care, I’ve decided to give the rest of Blake’s 7 a miss. The new Travis really doesn’t do it for me, and I was finding it all a bit slow going. I have read the Wikipedia entry for the series overview (sorry Tansy), and I’m impressed by some of the later ideas the writers introduced and how ambiguous they appear to have kept the tone of the show. It’s not quite enough to get me to watch it, though.

The Discovery of Blake’s 7 (complete with spoilers)

1.11: Bounty

I didn’t get to see all of this episode because the disc was a bit broked and kept skipping. I saw most of Blake and Cally going to convince an ex-president of a non-Federatation planet that he ought to return to his planet and stop it being subsumed by the Feds, and I saw that the Liberator was under possible attack… but I had no idea by whom until quite near the end. I had thought Zen the computer was acting very strangely and that we were about to find out more about the shifty AI! But no. Sigh. It was just ordinary run of the mill space pirates.

I am enjoying Blake and Cally working together. Her telepathy is of course an enormous boon, and presumably is one of the reasons she is so often used on missions requiring scouting etc – not that she can ‘hear’ guards or anything, but she can warn Blake when they are near. As well as that, though, she is resourceful and good at fighting. Of the other characters, Vila is a coward and Gan has the limiter chip and Avon is still not entirely trustworthy and Jenna has to fly the ship, so she’s a good choice for all of those reasons too. And there’s no flirtation. In this episode, I enjoyed their interaction with the ex-president, too, especially his infatuation with mid-20th-century Earth stuff. It’s a neat little device used to show how weird things we take for granted today might seem in the future; Blake’s reaction to an automobile was priceless.

Overall this is a fairly by-the-numbers episode I think. It shows how tricksy and sly the Federation can be in getting other planets under its sway, it shows how resourceful the crew is… but that’s about it.

1.12: Deliverance 

It had to happen at some stage, I suppose. Avon being mistaken for a god, that is.

I think I’m beginning to figure out the general format for this show, and it often involves two parallel plots. With a crew of seven – even if one of them is constrained to the ship (I presume!) by virtue of being its computer, there are a limited number of plots that genuinely utilises every single one of them in a one-track story. So, two plots. In this case, after watching a spaceship ditch on a planet, the crew rescues one survivor and transports him back to the Liberator… while losing Jenna at the same time. So Blake and Cally stay on the ship, looking after the survivor and then being held hostage by him as he forces them to redirect the Liberator onto the course he had previously been following.

Meanwhile, on the planet, Vila, Gan and Avon are searching for Jenna, who has been kidnapped by a bunch of savages; the boys are saved by a mysterious woman in a cave who, naturally enough, greets Avon as a god. They manage to rescue Jenna and help out the mysterious woman, who is somehow part of a group of people who had been waiting for someone with just Avon’s talents to help them launch their own spaceship, packed with frozen embryos and seeds, towards a planet some 500-odd years away. Totally makes sense in context.

Once again it’s Avon who gets to be the most complex and interesting in this episode. For a start, his determination to save Jenna is a bit surprising – he has seemed mostly callous towards all of them previously – and is an indication that perhaps finally he is starting to feel some companionship towards the others. Mostly, though, it’s in how he treats his apparently divinity. Of course he makes light of it at times, and of course at other times there’s a glint in his eye that suggests he could get used to that sort of thing. But he does not, actually, take advantage of it at all. Instead he does exactly what the woman asks, fulfilling the prophecy and her dreams. It shows him to be a remarkably… moral, I guess, and peculiarly honest man. And there’s a wonderful exchange with Blake towards the end, where Blake asks him in an amused tone what he thought of being regarded as a god, and Avon asks back – somewhat archly, somewhat sarcastically – “Don’t you know?” or words to that effect. Blake looks at him, and acknowledges his point, and admits that he doesn’t much like it either.

So there’s one episode left in this series, and of course it’s on the next disc, so I hope Bigpond hurries up and sends it to me. I’m wildly excited to find out whether this is the sort of series that goes in for cliffhangers.

Yes yes, more Blake’s 7. I’m really enjoying it, okay?? Spoilers ahoy!

1.9 Project Avalon

The gender equity continues to impress me. Servelan appears again, observing Travis in his latest attempt at trapping Blake – more on that in a moment – and we’re reminded that she is Supreme Commander of the area. A key part of Travis’ plan involves an anti-Federation organiser named Avalon: also a woman. And is there any comment on these women being involved in the military or politics? Hell no. And Jenna and Cally, on the Liberator, continue to take a variety of roles – Jenna in particular playing a key part as pilot. And there has yet to be any suggestion of flirtation or sexual innuendo towards those women from the four men. I keep expecting to see Blake and Jenna ‘naturally’ pair off, but so far – nadda.

That said, Servelan and Travis are so an item. She is just so arch around him, even (perhaps especially) when bossing him around and wearing crazy outfits. I bet there’s just reams of fanfic on that. (Also on Blake and Travis I bet, but I don’t want to go there.)

Anyway. The plot here revolves around Blake wanting to make contact with Avalon. Travis of course gets there first – thanks to a traitor – where ‘there’ is a planet that makes Hoth look like a tropical getaway. He captures Avalon, scans a brain, tests a nasty plague… and then Blake breaks in and gets away with Avalon really quite easily. Bizarre? And just a little sus, yes. Turns out this Avalon is a kill-bot. Happily our heroes figure it out before any of them are killed and they turn the tables quite neatly on Travis, making him look quite the fool and getting away with Avalon in the end.

Another episode with Travis and Blake pitting their wits against one another, with Travis getting to be snarky at his capsicum-headed mutoids and wear his black leather pants and Blake getting all angsty at his crew having to break orbit and not beam them out right now. This seems to be getting towards a standard format.

1.10 Breakdown

Aaand as soon as I talk about a standard format, the show breaks from it. This episode reminded me a lot of the Firefly episode “Ariel,” because the crew has to risk themselves to get to a hospital. There, it was River, and the need to read her brain to figure out what was going on; here, it’s Gan, whose limiter is going on the blink and causing him to spin into uncontrollable, violent rages. Blake et al decide to head for an allegedly neutral space station in order to find a surgeon, although it turns out to be harder to get there than it ought to be: Zen flat out refuses to take them there directly, and refuses to actually explain why. Turns out there’s a gravity-something that means the crew have to be heroic, together, because Zen turns himself off for the duration. All very sweet. And that’s just half the episode…

This episode tripped a lot of my suspicions about Zen as a computer, and I’m wild to find out where the writers are actually going to go with it. The fact that it still hasn’t really been discussed just who developed the Liberator, and therefore who Zen originally interacted with, makes me very suspicious indeed. I really, really hope that this gets explained, because I have all sorts of suspicions about Zen being genuinely intelligent, either artificially or as an alien or… something else.

So the second half of the episode is the crew getting to the space station, taking the surgeon over to their ship, and waiting for him to deal with Gan – except that he’s a Federation stooge, so said surgeon notifies the pursuit ships of their location. Oh noes! The surgeon is played by Julian Glover, who I know I’ve seen in other British things.* Anyway, perhaps more interestingly than that  – at least for this Avon-phile – is the fact that Avon declares during the gravity emergency that he is outta there ASAP. He heads over to the station… and it’s at that point that my rented DVD started skipping. I never did manage to see all of this episode, and have no idea what the station captain said to Avon to make him go back to the Liberator. Which is just slightly annoying. But the upshot is Avon is still on the ship, Gan’s limiter is fixed, and the seven thumb their noses at the Federation yet again. Hooray!

*Turns out he’s Triopas in Troy, the voice of Aragog in HP & the Chamber of Secrets, and OH! Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!! and General Veers in The Empire Strikes Back!!

Continuing my dive into Blake’s 7… spoilers aplenty!

1.7

The team breaks the not-quite-format-yet by going to the rescue of a ship that appears to have been stuck in the same orbit for a long time. Turns out they’ve stumbled onto a classic locked-door murder mystery: the crew all asleep thanks to some gas through the filters, and one dead. They’re a group of non-Fed humans trying to take a crystal back to their planet which will save the colonists from starvation. Of course, said crystal is worth a very large amount of money, and one of the crew has made a deal to sell it and pocket the proceeds, to everyone’s loss. There are a number of red herrings, as you would expect from this sort of story, and I’ll admit that I didn’t expect it to be the innocuous-seeming blonde woman. It was quite a nice twist, actually.

Still loving Avon. I remember being impressed by Battlestar Galactica and its depiction of genuine fights between men and women, where the men were fighting another person, not a woman. Here, Avon totally decks Sara because she is a genuine danger to him and his. I really do appreciate that egalitarian spirit.

1.8

Mystical blue women (who turn out not to be blue) start this episode off, which immediately put me in mind of Farscape, although these women seem even weirder than Zhaan. And their place of worship is particularly bizarre, with what looks like people stuck in the ground reaching up. Creepy. (Also, Zhaan would have done something about getting a tshirt bra under that outfit.)

helLO Travis! There’s something peculiarly attractive about that eye-patch. (Maybe it’s the leather pants….) But your pilots look like they have black capsicums on their heads, which is a bit weird. They’re also mutoids, requiring blood serum for some reason, which is neither here nor there at the moment but I’ll bet it has some impact on the story arc (yup. Stranded on the planet with no serum). Mutoids were mentioned, I think, in the earlier Travis episode, but we finally get some explanation here: they’re people who have been modified in such a way that their memories are completely removed, as well as whatever else happens to them. Travis appears to get a perverse pleasure from telling his pilot who she had been, although she doesn’t respond at all.

Travis and Blake face off in their first full-on space battle in this episode, and it gets manipulated by the creepy mystic women for their own purposes; time distortion and stasis and everything (with oh such awesome 70s colour freakiness to demonstrate what’s happening). Their  calm in the face of the “primitive violence” of Travis is magnificent – especially given the history they reveal, of their long-lasting violent global upheaval. Ah pacifism. And yet they propose a duel apparently to resolve their differences! How quaint… and how nasty, involving Jenna and the mutoid from Travis’ ship, making it all the nastier! Travis enjoys this fight way too much… as does Giroc, the old creepy woman. She’s a bit too sadistic for my tastes. The effect of having the ships’ crews watching everything that’s happening is quite clever, too, although I don’t think they got enough airtime to make it worthwhile.

Avon once again gets the best lines. Travis and Blake up trees for the night: “unless they’re planning on throwing nuts at one another I don’t see much of a fight developing before it gets light.” Also, he admits that he does care about Blake, cutting Villa and Gan down with devastating po-faced wit, pointing that it shouldn’t be necessary to go irrational to prove you care – nor, in fact, why it should be necessary to prove it at all. Oh Avon, I really look forward to more of your story.