Blake's 7: Cygnus Alpha

“Wisdom must be gathered. It cannot be given.”

A bloke is a cloak, a sunset which is clearly a painted backdrop, a night sky which is even less convincing… hardly an auspicious start. And yet this episode is quite as brilliant as the first two. The Captain is subdued as the London is about to land; he’s not exactly shrouded himself in glory of late, as we’re reminded by a quick flashback.

Blake, whose recent achievements have been rather more impressive, is still with Jenna and Avon in their cool and mysterious new ship. The ship has some powerful weapons. There’s a nice scene where Avon points one at Blake, only for Blake to turn around and ignore him. This is a nice little scene, mainly about who’s the alpha male, of course, but also showing us that Blake has decided that much of Avon’s amoral cynicism is just a front.

The ship goes through “negative hyperspace”, meaning it’s “crossed the anti-matter interface”. Well, quite. What’s interesting here is that this is technology far in advance of the Federation, and presumably humanity. It’s alien, then. And yet so far we’ve had no explicit mention of aliens. Presumably, then, they’re known to exist (this isn’t Isaac Asimov’s human-only Galactic Empire), but few spacefaring civilisations are known to exist within explored space, although the concept is considered plausible? Certainly, it seems as though this new ship, the Liberator as Jenna christens it in a revealingly Blake-sympathetic moment, must be alien. And yet we know little of its origin is that it was involved in some sort of altercation last episode. Perhaps.

Oh, and we’re introduced to Zen. And he says “confirmed” for the first time, while remaining effortlessly, enigmatically cool. He really gets on Avon’s tits, which helps. Oh, and “spatials” are apparently a unit of measurement.

Before long we come across what appears to be a matter transmission room, and triggers another contest between Blake and Avon over who is the alpha male. Blake wins this quite easily by being the only one of the two of them who’s man enough to risk using this untried technology to teleport down to Cygnus Alpha. Jenna’s impressed, I can tell. She certainly gives him a big hug when he teleports back.

Meanwhile, Cygnus Alpha is not what we were expecting. There are no guards and it can only loosely be termed a prison; convicts are simply dumped there and forced to fend for themselves, a bit like people who’d finished their sentences on Devil’s Island. We also get a bit of a closer look at Gan, who has really only been a supporting character thus far. And I’d like to get a look at him, having read the rather splendid Liberation by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore. This excellent fan guide to Blake’s 7 posits, rather fascinatingly and convincingly, that Gan is some sort of sex offender, and it’s going to be interesting to watch what he does with this in mind. Certainly his threats to the bloke being nasty to Vila hint at some possible psychopathic tendencies, but generally he comes across as a nice chap.

Vila, Gan and their redshirt friends encounter a rather grisly corpse, and Pamela Salem in a cloak, looking particularly lovely. She orders them to kneel, which they do. Fair enough. I probably would have done the same. I mean, she kisses Gan.

Interesting religion they have here; monotheistic, practised in what looks very much like a church, with an altar and candles and everything. It looks as though it’s been largely ripped off from Christianity which, to give the designers their due, seems to fit in rather nicely with what we’re later told.

Oh, and let’s talk about Brian Blessed, shall we? Apparently in Z-Cars, which I haven’t seen, he was a talented actor. Certainly in I Clavdivs, which I have seen and enjoyed very much, he’s outstanding. But at some unspecified point (arguably The Black Adder is the point of no return), he seems to lose the ability to play anything other than loud, shouty, bearded barbarian kings. Is this where the rot begins to set in? Beard? Check. Shoutiness? Check. And yet there are still several scenes here where he still has that Augustus-like ability to be quietly menacing. I miss that side of Brian Blessed.

Back to some rough kind of chronology, the prisoners are apparently suffering from the “Curse of Cygnus” to which, conveniently, only the priests have the cure. It’s not long before Brian is telling Blake that the priests are all descended from convicts, making him some kind of Great Space Australian. Interestingly, he admits that society used religion to bind together a society which had become conflicted, over fifty generations, between newly arrived convicts and those born on the planet. So, is he a true believer, someone consciously using religion as a tool or, as I suspect, both?

“Fifty generations” is interesting, too, as it gives us a clue as to how far into the future we are. It seems humans broke “the light barrier” at least, say, 650 years ago if a “generation”= 25 years.

Meanwhile, there’s conflict between Avon and Jenna; they’ve discovered untold wealth on the ship. Avon persuading Jenna to give Blake just an hour before abandoning Blake generates a lot of dramatic tension, of course. But it’s much more interesting than that. Jenna is being torn between two ideologies here. And Avon is persuasive. Blake is a “crusader”. He can’t win. Does she want to be rich or dead? He has a point.

Blake gets to be cool, too, though. Placed in a cell with the other prisoners, who know perfectly well that if he doesn’t agree to give Brian their ship then one of them will be sacrificed, Blake manages to get them on his side through sheer force of will. He’s definitely the alpha male here. But also, perhaps, again showing signs of being a charismatic and dangerous fanatic.

We get a final showdown with Brian who reveals, perhaps too easily, that the “disease” is a mild and artificial poison, and dies, most certainly too easily, before he can get started on all that space evangelism. Still, nice episode.

Blake's 7: Space Fall

“They murdered my past, and gave me tranquillised dreams.”

The story follows directly on, but this episode is spent entirely on board ship, and our cast of characters shifts accordingly. We’re on the “Civil Administration Ship” London, staffed by a captain, the competent and ambitious Artix, and the rather unpleasant Raiker, played by Leslie Schofield, who seems to have been in everything in the late ‘70s. It’s amusing to hear some of the series technobabble we’ll presumably be hearing on a regular basis, with all this “hyperdrive speed” and “time distort seven”. Interestingly, even with faster-than-light travel, the journey is to take eight months.

Raiker delivers a nasty speech to the prisoners, in which he warns them of all sorts of arbitrary nastiness which will be coming their way. This, of course, informs the viewer that he’s a right baddie, and is almost certainly get his comeuppance. This becomes all the more certain after his initial attempts to sexually abuse Jenna. As the only woman on board, she’s in a very dangerous and vulnerable position, but shows herself to be extremely dignified and strong. She’s lucky that all of her male fellow prisoners are by some strange coincidence such solidly middle-class RADA-trained types, though.

Blake, of course, is already plotting escape. And there’s a rather interesting new character: a computer expert and fraudster called Kerr Avon. Already he’s by far the most interesting character, and Paul Darrow is just incredible.

Some kind of mysterious space battle nearby somehow causes “turbulence”. Meanwhile, Blake gets a film sequence as he crawls around the ship, looking for the main computer. Meanwhile, in the studio, Vila and some bloke called Gan are distracting a guard in a scene which reminds me of bits of The Great Escape.

Dialogue tells us that four months have suddenly elapsed, long enough for Blake to gather his information and make his plans. All that remains is to persuade Avon, a highly intelligent and fascinating character, do help them. It’s quite gripping to watch the two of them verbally sparring, something we’ll be seeing rather a lot of.

Avon agrees, and is rewarded with a film sequence of his very own as he crawls towards the computer room. A redshirt prisoner follows to see what he’s up to, and rather impudently demands a film sequence hardly befitting to such a minor character. Quite rightly, he soon gets killed. From this point, only Avon (and that bloke he fights) is deemed cool enough to be on film.

Not everything goes well, and we soon have a stalemate. Blake, Jenna, and Avon control the computer, but all the others, including Vila and Gan, are recaptured. At this point we get an intense debate over what to do next, and thus is crucial, establishing the relations between the three of them. Blake admits the true intensity of his desire to overthrow the Federation. Heroic, perhaps. Idealistic, certainly. But Gareth Thomas plays it in such a way that we’re already a little troubled. Has Blake crossed the border into fanaticism? Are his goals at all realistic? Is he, if you’ll excuse the cliché, a freedom fighter or a terrorist?

Avon is quite different, concerned only with his own material welfare. This is amoral and cynical, yes. Self-centred, certainly. But between Avon’s rational self-interest, and criminal activities which could be seen as victimless if one were feeling generous, and Blake’s possible fanaticism, which is likely to do more harm to the innocent bystander? These are very interesting questions.

Jenna’s reaction is interesting, too, and perhaps mirrors ours. She admires Blake, wants to believe him, but isn’t quite convinced.

The impasse is broken by a trick which Nation will re-use the following year for Doctor Who in Destiny of the Daleks. Raiker simply threatens to shoot one prisoner every thirty seconds until Blake gives in. It works, of course, and leads to a lot of whingeing from Avon, but makes the viewer even more convinced that Raiker isn’t going to survive the episode. This is a Terry Nation script, after all.

It looks as though our heroes have lost. But then the London comes across a whopping great ship, apparently something to do with this space battle they came across earlier. Everyone is keen to claim it as a prize (I’m getting echoes of the great Patrick O’Brian here), and so an hilariously flimsy-looking “transfer tube” is sent across. Two redshirts seem to go mad and die. What else to do than to send our three erstwhile mutineers after them? Blake, Jenna and Avon are duly introduced to this ship, and we, the viewers, can see from this shiny and expensive new set that it’s obviously going to be re-used a lot. It’s all a trap, of course, but Blake is able to resist it. I’m sure there’s some sort of Biblical or literary allusion there but I’m buggered if I know what it is.

Raiker gets his long-anticipated come-uppance and our three heroes (well, two heroes and Avon) have a rather splendid ship with which to liberate their mates on Cygnus Alpha…

That was really rather brilliant.

Doctor Who: The Power of Kroll

Part One

“Will there be strawberry jam for tea?”

Our first scene introduces us to our group of miners, among whom are John Leeson taking a break from K9 to play Dugeen, the ever-splendid Philip Madoc as Fenner and the extremely impressive Neil McCarthy as Thawn. He’s superb as our villain of the piece, a cold-hearted personification of corporate evil. All of which is to say that already this is shaping up to be our finest cast of the season, and John Abineri hasn’t even appeared yet.

It’s a familiar set up- an anti-colonialist morality tale at heart, although perhaps with a more up-to-date flavour of corporate activity in the Third World rather than evocations of pith helmets and mem-sahibs. It’s all quite strikingly political though. The humans want to mine this world’s mineral resources, they refer to the natives dismissingly as “Swampies”, they work for a “company”, and there are apparently activists known as the Sons of Earth who oppose this kind of thing. All of which is quite efficiently exposited by Robert Holmes’ script in a scene which gives us a basic impression of what these characters are like.

The TARDIS lands in what is, it must be said, an excellent location, and we’re told this is the third moon of Delta Magna. The mercenary Rohm-Dutt, meanwhile, is busy gun-running with the Swampies. Both TARDISeers are soon captured, the Doctor by the human miners and Romana by the Swampies and Rohm-Dutt. How very traditional. As is the obvious model oil rig which brings back nostalgic memories of Terror of the Zygons. This is all very hard-boiled, especially for this season, but the setting is extremely well thought out. I love the Swampies’ use of the term “Dryfoot”.

We eventually learn that the humans intend to create ten mines here, which will lead to the inevitable destruction of the Swampies’ habitat. Something tells me it might not work out that way…

Part Two

“Well, he probably looked more convincing from the front.”

The perfect cliffhanger resolution- it really is just a man in an unconvincing rubber costume. Brilliant!

The Doctor and Romana disappear into an underground passage- of which there have been quite a few this season- to do some reading up on Swampie mythology and the mysterious Kroll, who apparently just pops up every couple of centuries; “A sort of Holy Writ” says the Doctor of the book they find. “I think it’s atrociously writ.” says Romana. Groan. It seems the proteins the human colonists are after are part of Kroll’s enormous bulk, and that in mining right into his tentacles they’re not being entirely wise.

The cliffhanger’s odd- the Doctor, Romana and Rohm-Dutt are to be executed by one of the Swampies’ seven deadly rituals, yet we end with one of the baddies in danger.

Part Three

“I’m not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages!”

What a very long reprise. And what a very nasty means of execution- being slowly stretched until your spine snaps as the sun dries out the vines. Our heroes are extremely fortunate that the storm turns up when it does so the Doctor can save them all in a rather nifty fashion.

Kroll’s getting rather more active now, and he’s fulfilling a useful role in getting rid of characters, like Rohm-Dutt. Who have served their plot purpose.

Part Four

“”I’m reporting you for murder!”

We now have dissension in the refinery ranks, as Dugeen and Fenner object to Thrawn’s plan to fire depth charges at Kroll- Dugeen because he’s an apparent sympathiser with the Sons of Earth, Fenner because he’s cynical but realistic. This is paralleled with the Swampies as Varlik and the others come to question more and more Ranquin’s insistence that Kroll is a god and not just a mindless predator. It’s not surprising to see that Ranquin’s fate is to be Death By Kroll.

It ends nicely, with the Doctor in Kroll’s clutches but just managing to reach for the tracer to turn Kroll back into the fifth segment. The humans now have no protein to mine and the Swampies are presumably safe. Hooray! There’s a note of unpleasantness after this though- a lot of people mentioned in their reviews to The Sun Makers that the fate of Gatherer Hade was a little too nasty and undermined the moral rightness of the Doctor’s friends, something I entirely failed to spot at the time. Something similar seems to happen here- just as the Doctor and Romana leave, the remaining Swampies start to advance on Fenner. No doubt some vines will be drying out shortly.

This is probably the biggest pleasant surprise of the marathon so far- I wasn’t expecting to like this much and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it, but actually I find myself giving it 4/5. It was well-written, admittedly hard-boiled but with enough humour to leaven things, well characterised, very well performed and on the whole well made. It just loses a point for Holmes allowing the political subtext, fine in itself, to overwhelm the story at times.