“Beneath that cold exterior beats a heart of pure stone.”
Well, it had to happen eventually; a bad script from Chris Boucher. He’s usually so full of ideas, but not here. I preferred Oscar Wilde’s version as if it needed saying. What’s the point of “homaging” something if you’ve got nothing to say about it? Also, the early 1980s BBC conception of the future being dull, functional corridors is hardly something to satisfy an aesthete.
Still… a brand shiny new season, then, with some genuinely fantastic new titles which remind me very much of an old Acorn Electron game called Starship Command. We’re following directly on from the end of last season, as Dayna and Avon watch Gerald the Gorilla head into the ship Servalan has so kindly left for them. The ship immediately blows up; it was a booby trap.
Avon immediately realises that, if Servalan booby-trapped the ship, she will have booby-trapped her headquarters to go off simultaneously, too. No wonder her terms seemed so suspiciously reasonable last episode.
We see Vila dragging an unconscious Tarrant outside just before there’s a second, huge, explosion. Cally is killed by this explosion. Jan Chappell doesn’t even appear in this episode, and we only hear her voice for two last, telepathic, lines. Her last word is “Blake”.
It’s a shame that the focus then moves elsewhere and Cally’s death is pretty much downplayed for the rest of the episode. Even Gan got more of a send-off.
Having found what’s left of Orac, our team rather foolishly split up, inevitably getting into trouble. Dayna and Vila are rescued from their Sarlacc-like predicament by some bloke called Dorian, who seems to have a bizarre S&M relationship with his ship’s computer. Our heroes are less than grateful, though; as soon as Avon arrives he pulls a gun on him and the lot of them hijack his ship, just in the nick of time as we get played loads of stock footage of earthquakes, volcanoes and stuff.
For all we know at this point, Dorian is what he appears to be; an innocent salvage chap. And this makes it seem very clear that Avon and co are committing a particularly nasty and very serious crime here: stealing someone’s spaceship by means of armed hijacking. Yes, our heroes have always been criminals, but there’s always been something of a romanticised Robin Hood quality to their crime, and this diminishes them as protagonists. Yes, I know Dorian turns out to be a baddie (he bloody well had to after this), but that doesn’t justify the hijacking.
There’s an interesting Dayna moment as she passes a connoisseur’s judgement on the adjustable weapons they find aboard. And this scene immediately tells us that this ship is going to replace the Liberator (it even has a partly-formed teleport bay), or otherwise it wouldn’t be here.
The ship, we learn, is called
Scorpio, and they’re headed to a planet called Xenon. As soon as they arrive, though, they discover that the only person around, aside from Dorian, is a rather gorgeous lady called Soolin, who remains enigmatic for pretty much the whole episode. It seems, initially, that she and Dorian are a couple. It also seems that they were expected, and they receive an oddly hospitable reception for a bunch of hijackers. They even get a glass of wine each (one glass too many; that’s for Cally), which is apparently supposed to be quite good, which is odd as it appears to be rosé. Still, we learned in
Moloch that “real” wine is supposed to be rare, so perhaps beggars can’t be choosers.
There follows an odd, underground scene between an inexplicably aged Dorian and some horrible creature in the underground darkness, which immediately tells us something isn’t right. I’m sure that there are plenty of viewers far more eagle-eyed from myself who immediately guessed which novel was being ripped off at this point.
The party splits up again, with unpleasant circumstances all round, especially for Dayna. Only Vila, sensibly deciding to get sloshed, is not in trouble. Avon gets the exposition; Dorian has been on the planet for two centuries (has the wine really lasted that long without being drunk?) but hasn’t aged a day, and is able to indulge all sort of unspecified vices, which would no doubt, if we could see them, be both shockingly depraved and far too expensive for the Blake’s 7 budget. Oh, and his first victim was a male “partner”. That figures; it’s inevitable that he would turn out to be gay because, like, so was Oscar Wilde and stuff (actually, both Dorian and Wilde seem to have been bisexual, but let’s not get sidetracked).
Anyway, Vila saves the day (hooray for getting sloshed!), and Soolin quickly nips upstairs…
