Blake's 7: Sarcophagus

“I think I will accept your ship as your gift to me.”       

This is an interesting one, nicely structured and with lots of very interesting and thoughtful characterisation for all of our regular characters. But it leaves me with the impression that there are subtexts I’m not getting, and although I can recognise a lot of quality here I can’t quite say I particularly enjoyed it more than other episodes, less laden with meaning and subtext, at least on first viewing. Still, I’d like to see more from Tanith Lee, and Boucher’s policy of getting established sci-fi authors to write episodes is certainly a great idea.

The extended opening sequence is extraordinarily weird. Female-only cultists carrying torches on bleak alien landscapes is already a Blake’s 7 cliché, but this- several minutes of no dialogue in which a series of masked, colour-codes female figures are summoned into being, seemingly by magic, to perform rituals- is baffling, very odd indeed and must surely have alienated the viewing audience. After one viewing, and deliberately not reading up on the episode until after my review, I have no idea what any of this symbolises. I’m guessing it’s something pagan and on the theme of the feminine, but I have no idea.

We then switch to the safe and familiar territory of the Liberator, although admittedly by means of a very unusual camera zoom outwards from Cally’s eye in close-up. We have dialogue at last, and Tanith Lee proves herself to be rather expert at it, as well as depicting all the regulars as fully-rounded characters and saying interesting things about all of them before the episode ends.         

The chat between Avon and Cally is extremely interesting; both of these characters are somewhat broken after their sufferings during the last two episodes, and its clear there’s a bond between them. For all Avon’s aloof manner, he’s genuinely kind and comforting to Cally here, because he cares about her. And it’s obvious that she knows this. And it’s interesting in this light to later see this episode’s obligatory fight between Avon and Tarrant for the spot of alpha male of the pack; it starts with Tarrant accusing Cally of hiding something and Avon defending her.  

In fact, this particular Avon / Tarrant scrap is very interesting indeed. Tarrant is the one who lets rip, saying some very hurtful things about Avon while Avon keeps his cool. But Avon is the clear winner here; no one has thicker skin than he does, and he’s the one who ends up looking like an adult. Even his deferral to the majority vote on exploring the mysterious alien ship nearby makes him look strong, and indisputably the leader; he can afford to be magnanimous. As we shall see, Tarrant ends this episode considerably diminished, and quite low down on the Liberator’s pecking order.     

Avon quietly asserts his superiority over Tarrant by leading the search party himself. He, Cally and Vila find what appears to be a tomb, complete with grave goods, adrift in space like an Anglo-Saxon ship burial. It’s a trap, of course, which gives us something of an exciting sequence, but ultimately the team end up bringing two artifacts aboard the Liberator; one large, obvious and immediately studied, and the other a ring hoarder by Cally, who is clearly beginning to come under some influence.    

Night falls, everyone goes to sleep, and things become very creepy for most of the rest of the episode. “Night” may well be an arbitrary concept for a spacecraft (and how come the Liberator only ever gets chased by Federation pursuit ships when everyone is awake?) but we’re certainly made to be afraid of the dark. Firstly Orac describes the artifact as “irrational”, then asks to be disconnected. Then Zen, whilst being drained of power, warns that there’s a malign power on board the ship. We get some very eerie poltergeistiness before the artifact seems to age rapidly and collapse. Cally, meanwhile, is clearly under its baleful influence.         

Then things really get weird. Vila’s magic trick (a nice nod back to The Keeper) actually works, and that weird space lute thingy starts playing itself. Both Vila and Dayna simultaneously exist in two realities, one of which has them hooded and robed in strange surroundings.    

Dayna and Tarrant find Cally, and Dayna reveals she was knocked unconscious by a being which looked exactly like Cally. Tarrant responds with an excitable babble of theories. Then Avon turns up- calm, collected and organised, having been rather sensibly observing everything that’s happened. He cautions Tarrant against a “cavalry charge”. Tarrant, being Tarrant, doesn’t listen. And gets utterly humiliated and diminished as a result.

The being is gradually absorbing Cally’s life force to fashion a body based on hers. It may be ancient, but it is also childlike, simply demanding anything it wants, including the ship’s crew as its “pets”: Dayna as musician, Vila as fool (ha!) and Tarrant (no doubt sarcastically meant…) as “protector”. It is perceptive, though, saying of Vila that “This one interests me. He has a very high IQ and yet he behaves like an imbecile.”

Avon, who’s been conspicuous by his absence, now returns to do the heroic thing and reaffirm his place in the pecking order. He goads the being into killing him, knowing that Cally won’t let her; interestingly, we get confirmation here that Cally has feelings for him. He then declares that “You’re beautiful when you’re angry”, and suddenly kisses her- a surprisingly misogynistic moment for a script by a female writer. He then uses the distraction to grab the ring, my precious, which is the source of her psychic power. The being then ages, horribly, and fades away to her awful fate of fully conscious nothingness. It’s all very bleak, but elegantly put.

The episode ends with Avon most definitely as top dog, with Cally and Dayna both seeming to be well above Tarrant in the pecking order. Will this last…?