Blake's 7: Trial

“Resist the host, or your oneness will be absorbed.”

An excellent episode, this. I’m relieved that the events of last episode have been dealt with. On reflection I’ve become even more strongly convinced of Blake’s culpability for Gan’s death; we had foreshadowing in Horizon as Blake continued to push his tired crew, and the title “Pressure Point” is an obvious follow-on from that, as well as probably referring to Blake’s state of mind.

Chris Boucher is handling the scripting here; probably the wise course for such a character-based episode, with two contrasting “trials” which reach opposite conclusions but then meet at the end. Certainly, Travis’ fate is fascinatingly Machiavellian; being hung out to dry by Servalan for atrocities he committed three years previously on Zircaster. ( Incidentally, these episodes remind me of Magic Bullet’s Kaldor City audios a lot, and not just for the presence of Peter Miles, here reprising his role as Rontane from last series. Kaston Iago, played by Paul Darrow, is said to have killed “the butcher of Zircaster. This may, or not, imply who he is.)

Travis’s court martial is narrated, interestingly, through two pairs of characters; the two guards (one played by Kevin Lloyd, later to play Tosh on The Bill) give us the perspective of the poor bloody infantry (they even have regional accents), while Rontane and Bercol comment for us on the significance of this trial in the context of Servalan’s machinations; if Travis can be quickly executed, he will be unable to testify as to her recent incompetence in the pursuit of Blake. Naturally, she’s watching the trial through a secret camera and, naturally, Travis’ defence counsel, Thania, is an underling of hers.

Blake’s trial, though, is self-imposed. He needs time to think, and Gan’s death has hit him hard. He is beginning to question the wisdom of his continuous tilting at windmills and to realise the liability he has become to others. And yet, the signs are there that this will not last. He is notably reckless in his failure to gather much information about the world on which he is to plan his brief (or not) exile, and in pig-headedly refusing to carry a gun. His message to his crew is quite extraordinary; on the one hand he is risking abandonment and possible death, and on the other hand the whole situation is so staggeringly passive-aggressive. Avon is right to scorn him for self-pity. And while Avon (who earlier refers to Blake’s “three remaining followers”, a figure which seems to exclude himself) may vocally suggest abandoning him, his behaviour suggests otherwise. The detector shield he is building, to protect the Liberator from the long-range scanners of Federation ships, is not only a markedly more constructive achievement than anything Blake has had as leader, but also a sign of his continuing long-term commitment.

Blake is not alone, though. Apparently there’s a woman in a rubber suit somewhere nearby, and she seems to be taunting him with a water pistol. Eventually this ridiculous figure reveals herself to be Zil, and somewhat cryptically explains to Blake what is more usefully summarised by Orac on the Liberator: this world is a single, Gaia-style, living organism, which immediately makes me think of that recent Adam Curtis documentary, which seemed to assert that the late 1970s was when such ideas started to permeate the general consciousness. The planet is having one of its regular “purges” of parasite. Tragically, Zil, who is rather nice, dies shortly after Blake realises she was protecting him because she thought he was a newborn child.

It is Avon’s cleverness, significantly, that leads to Blake’s rescue. But Travis is already in trouble. His trial is conducted in the same way as Blake’s in The Way Back, with evidence being analysed, apparently objectively, within seconds by a computer after the evidence is submitted. But Travis manages to seize a chance to possibly change things by delivering his own closing speech, insisting that his actions are only the result of his training. This is to no avail, though; he is still sentenced to death.

Blake, predictably, is full of renewed purpose; it seems he will never see the error of his ways. This cannot end well. He proposes a quick attack on Servalan’s HQ using Avon’s detector shield to slip away again, although what value beyond a gesture that this has is, to say the least, unclear.

The predictable result is, of course, that Travis escapes in the confusion, with a pursuit ship and three “blanked” Mutoids. Travis is pursuing Blake, and Servalan is pursuing Travis…