“Natural leaders are rarely encumbered with intelligence.”
At last a writer I know, and it’s the great Robert Homes again, at last! This episode is great. These two statements may well be connected…!
Yet again we get a notoriously clever scientist whom Avon wants to contact in case his cleverness might be useful- the standard Season Four plot, basically. But, this being Robert Holmes, we get a much more entertaining scientist. In fact, Egrogian must be the campest scientist ever, in all senses of the word. John Savident chews the scenery magnificently, and is the best thing in this.
His interaction with Pinder is great, too; in fact, it’s pretty much a textbook example of what we Doctor Who fans call a “Holmesian double act”; the “smart” one, with a rich fruity vocabulary and great quotable dialogue, and the put-upon underling. But it’s very, very dark here. For a start, there are hints of past sexual abuse. And the revelation that Pinder is only twenty-eight, but was aged fifty years in a freak accident, which was entirely Egrogian’s fault, is a wonderfully dark, twisted, Holmesian touch. Even the wart and hairstyle work perfectly for this gloriously grotesque villain.
It’s a dramatic moment when Avon and Vila are offered the tachyon nuke, capable of blowing up stars. Obviously, no one can have this much power. We know from the start that this uber-weapon cannot possibly be allowed to survive the episode. Especially as Egrogian proceeds to go on a bit of a rant about revenge and destroying stuff.
Avon is more or less his old self here; clever, level-headed and showing no sign of his self-destructive streak which has been showing itself occasionally of late. He sensibly agrees Egrogian’s proposed swap of the uber-weapon for Orac but, as we’ll see, has a rather cunning little contingency plan, double-crossing the double-crossing. I would have said how clever it was of him to infer the involvement of Servalan, but I won’t; Servalan is in every bloody episode these days. She’s very, very Thatcher here, so far more evil than usual.
Probably the creepiest moment is where our ultra-camp mad scientist expresses a bit of a thing for Vila (“One could become very fond of that young man…”), who would no doubt be abused in the same way as Pinder.
That’s not the only indignity Vila is made to suffer, of course. Both Holmes’ script and Darrow’s performance make it clear that, faced with death as the alternative, Avon is quite willing to throw Vila off the ship so he can achieve escape velocity. I’m still unsure whether this is a regression on the character’s part (the Avon we see in this episode is not quite the reckless Avon of Season Four), but the circumstances give him little choice, perhaps.
The twist ending is great, though; a little dwarf star, foreshadowed earlier, being the thing that’s pulling the shuttle down. I suspect that it’s not entirely realistic for Avon to push it around, but never mind! This episode is such enormous fun I can forgive anything. Top stuff.
