Blake's 7: Games

“Your survival is becoming more miraculous by the moment…”

Well, here’s another episode, and here’s another writer who’s unknown to me. Bill Lyons gives us a good, witty script though.

We get some exposition to start with; Avon and his crew are planning to rob an Unobtainium mine run by the Federation; simple enough. Except that this particular Unobtainium is magic, and produces huge amounts of energy at very little cost. It’s notable that, although this story ends with a load of it destroyed, the Federation are still mining another eight planets of the stuff. The subtext continues to be that the Federation are increasingly becoming quite worryingly powerful.

Isn’t Stratford Johns great? Belkov (naturally, the chess player has a Russian-sounding name) is such a fun character- a bit like Vila, but cooler and with more style. I love the booby traps / obstacle course protecting his ship, but the coolness of the character basically comes from Johns’ performance. I love his calm, scheming acceptance of the situation when he’s arrested by Servalan; his refusal to accept the situation and his insistence on bargaining with “Sleer” even seems to gain her grudging admiration. Also, the sheer bare-faced cheek he shows in playing our heroes and Servalan against each other is a joy to behold.

It’s interesting, incidentally, that chess has survived unaltered so far into the future as, although chess computers are apparently some way behind Deep Thought. It’s amusing that this world of interstellar travel and all sorts of marvels should be so far behind our own in this respect, but never mind! At least Gambit seems to have feelings, something beyond our ken, as we see at the end.

This is an episode which seems to return us to traditional Blake’s 7 values in many ways: Avon seems to be motivated essentially by greed, which seems a little inconsistent with his behaviour of late; the landing party is out of teleport range for much of the episode; and Avon even gets to practice his thieving skills, not once but three times. None of these things really seem to belong in this season, but it’s nice to see them all the same.

This is a nice, light-hearted episode, and rather leads me to expect much grimness in the near future. There is one horrific moment, though; we last see Gerren (always doomed to be a redshirt) quivering with fear as Servalan puts her gun in his mouth. It’s hard not to see this as symbolising another kind of violation, although the literal meaning is dark enough. The actor does a great job of portraying real, paralysing terror.

Back to lighter matters, though… isn’t the ‘80s amusement arcade near the end of the episode a fantastic piece of nostalgia? Soolin even acquires a rare couple of personality traits; she’s a crack shot and confident at taking risks to prove it. And Tarrant, of course, is a flight sim fan.

The twists at the end- no unobtainium on the ship, and the ultimate goal being death by black hole- is interesting, I suppose, but it loses something for not paying off anything established earlier. It fails to match the last episode in that respect. And the characterisations of the regulars don’t quite seem to fit in with their more recent development, however vague this development admittedly is. This is very much a standalone episode, then; light, fluffy and entertaining without really advancing the arcs or the characters. But there’s nothing wrong with that every now and then; this is our third good episode of the season. It may not end up such a bad season after all...