1. Aftermath
by Terry Nation
All change!
We join the battle of Star One already in progress and, oh dear. Say hello to some familiar model shots (that don’t even match the alien ships we saw last time), all desperately cut together to look a bit more exciting but not, alas, any more expensive. All is not well on the Liberator: destruction seems possible so Vila, Avon and Cally head for the escape pods. Blake and Jenna don’t want to abandon ship but eventually they do the same - entirely off-screen.
Amazingly this is Jenna’s exit from the show. (We’ll see Blake again. Rather infamously.) And can I just say - ouch? I never really liked Jenna, but that’s largely down to her having nothing to do. Sally Knyvette was mostly required to moon at Blake. Wikipedia says she “often maintains her opinions stubbornly” which, whoa, unforgettable stuff, huh. She at least deserved a heroic death.
Anyway, Avon quickly fills the heroic gap at the centre of the episode, as he crashes on a planet with a nice seaside (ooh!), populated, need you ask, by Viking knock-offs. He is saved from execution by Dayna, a forthright young woman with a bow and arrow who obviously will improve the female representation on the Liberator. Strangely Servalan is also here - explained as showing up to claim victory then oops, getting shot down - but it’s worth it for the power play through the rest of the episode as she tries to make inroads with Avon. Darrow and Pearce sparkle in a way you just wouldn’t get with Blake or (hahaha) Travis. They are just as likely to snog as shoot each other. Interesting. With the Federation apparently in tatters thanks to Star One blowing up, most bets are off, so who knows. (It’s almost a pity Blake has unceremoniously sodded off now, but then again this is what he wanted and his character’s not really built to navigate the weirdness of no-more-Federation.)
The bulk of the episode is a waiting game while the Liberator repairs itself (I forgot it did that) and Servalan bides her time to either dupe Avon or steal Orac / the Liberator. By the end of it, Dayna has good reason to want Servalan dead, Vila and Cally are still AWOL, and some random bloke who I know joins the cast shows up at the end to point a gun at Avon. But hey, the Liberator’s fine now.
Technically not a lot happens apart from taking a breather after the big fight. But the character interplay is great, and the whole thing feels like opening the windows in a stuffy room. I’m here for it. Jenna was robbed though.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! A nice young woman gets killed offscreen and strung out on planks.
WHO’S WHO: Mike Yates is in this briefly, then he gets murdered. I hope he got a nice hotel stay out of it. His mate Michael Melia once played a Tereleptil. Alan Lake, head of the who-cares Vikings, was in Underworld.
BLAKE’S... 5, now that Blake and Jenna have gone.
2. Powerplay
By Terry Nation
Now that we’ve dropped the No More Blake bomb it’s time to get the rest of the band back together. Powerplay does this as busily as possible, but it’s a still a bit of a nothing episode when you stand back from it. Albeit a fun one.
Much to Avon’s chagrin, the Liberator is held by Federation Death Troopers, apparently led by a man named Tarrant. Avon and Dayna must get back control, but someone is murdering the troopers so they might as well just wait? Vila is wounded on a lush but primitive planet and is soon picked up by 1) primitives, then 2) apparently friendly women who feed him and take him to a nice hospital. The local primitives have nothing good to say about these ladies, but maybe they just don’t know better?
Cally has been picked up by a hospital ship which also picks up (wouldn’t you know it) Servalan. Pointed awkwardness ensues. Cally then ends up at the same place as (wouldn’t you know it) Vila, and it soon transpires they need to get away fast or lose their organs. Avon finds out the murderer on his ship is Tarrant, who’s secretly one of the... er... good guys, I guess? And before long the Troopers are gone, Vila and Cally are back, and Dayna and Tarrant get Liberator friendship bracelets. Servalan is technically powerless but she still has big plans. Servalan gonna Servalan.
We’re still settling into the scrappy post-big-space-fight world, what with displaced Federation heavies, Servalan sharing a room with Cally and no unified enemy. (The series has already included so many “neutral” worlds that the planet of the organ-pinchers is neither here nor there. EDIT: And we get another neutral one next week!) That messy sense of “now what?” adds something exciting to what is otherwise just a bunch of bits. However, Tarrant is an interesting addition, in that he’s more bloodthirsty than Blake. When you add Dayna, whose first impulse is always to knock people off, there seems a definite movement towards the anti and away from the hero.
As for the regulars, Avon’s long-held plan to win the Liberator isn’t going away just because of some lousy Death Troopers, and his determination here is pretty cool. He shares some fabulously grim lines with Dayna when they find a Trooper knifed to death: “That’s a difficult way to commit suicide.” “Maybe he was cleaning it and it went off.” Otherwise Vila lives it up very briefly and adds his usual comic flavour - in some ways his character is as limited as Jenna, but it’s a fun limit. Cally tries to use her telepathy with predictably pointless results. (What good is sending Vila a message if he can’t reply? Then again she seems to “hear” Vila’s discomfort, so maybe they’ve just decided she’s proper psychic now. They might as well. EDIT: No, next week it’s one-way again. Who knows.)
By the end we have a full complement on the Liberator again. Getting there was a lot of fun, but the real proof is seeing the new stuff in action. For that, next week.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Some literal back-stabbing but it’s Pat Gorman, it’s an occupational hazard. We just miss some organ removals.
WHO’S WHO: How long have you got? Michael Sheard, here uncharacteristically violent as a Death Trooper, guest starred pretty much through Who’s entire run. (Mainly Remembrance Of The Daleks and Pyramids Of Mars.) Fellow Trooper Max Faulkner was a UNIT troop / android in The Android Invasion. Bald alien John Hollis was in a Pertwee story (The Mutants), better known as Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back. His large mate Michael Crane played a large chap in The Monster Of Peladon. Primi Townsend (one of the lovely organ-gatherers) was in The Pirate Planet. Helen Blatch, the receptionist at the organ place, was in The Deadly Assassin and The Twin Dilemma. Pat Gorman shows up again!
BLAKE’S... 7! With the newbies joining (and remember the computers are included) it’s Avon, Tarrant, Dayna, Cally, Vila, Zen and Orac.
3. Volcano
By Allan Prior
It looks like the show has settled into its new normal. And, well, it’s quite a bit like the old one.
Tarrant and Dayna have only been here five minutes and they’re already going on missions! Dayna has some friends on the planet Obsidian who might join the cause. (Also Blake may have been spotted here. Don’t get excited, Gareth Thomas left. Why tease the audience?) However it turns out the people are total pacifists, so they’re of no help to a violent rebellion. I’m not sure why Dayna didn’t know this, as it’s not a new thing.
The Federation and, need you ask, Servalan are also buzzing around the planet, hoping to snatch the Liberator. They nearly do it as well, which is an unfortunate piece of repetition as well as being embarrassing for them. Can we go at least one episode without someone battering Avon’s crew and taking their stuff? It’s also getting a bit dull going back to “everybody wants the Liberator” as a plot device. And as for Servalan’s now weekly contributions, let’s just say she works better as an occasional treat. Like going out for dessert, if the dessert immediately tried to murder you.
While we’re discussing Servalan then: if you’re going to fragment the Federation, why act like you haven’t done that? She’s still got her servants and space fleets, and she seems to be auditioning replacements for Travis. (Ben Howard plays Mori, a much more subdued sort of heavy. But he ends up falling in a volcano. Back to the drawing board!) She does eventually figure out that with Blake out of the picture she can focus on other things for a bit - which is probably giving Blake too much credit - but at this point I doubt that’ll amount to anything new. Give me grey areas! Test existing loyalties! If you insist on making her a regular, at least stop doing the same stuff.
Anyway, the people on Obsidian have an uncanny habit of repelling the Federation and everyone else. Why is that? It turns out this is because they’re all living above a nuclear bomb which they’ll detonate, killing themselves, if people won’t leave them alone. (I’ll let you guess what happens at the end.) That and an active volcano makes Obsidian a pretty strange thing to fight over. You just wouldn’t go there. Keep it, lads. To make it even less appetising, the inhabitants are all dying of radiation poisoning, presumably because of the bomb. (They are weirdly reluctant to clarify this.) To make it even strangerthe people, led by Michael Gough, are so obsessed with pacifism that they electro shock their citizens to enforce it. Yikes.
Unfortunately for all the effort Allan Prior makes here, the episode isn’t really about these guys or examining said practises. At one point Mega Pacifist Gough gets sick of his son opting for rebellion and kills him. So, pacifism shmacifism? Don’t bother thinking about it as it’s nearly time for the inevitable bomb. Ideas are just sitting here in a heap. (Remember when they thought Blake was here? Anyone?) What’s the point of any of this, if Obsidian doesn’t also have some amazing advantage that you’d want to possess? This crummy planet, the dying people with their problematic ways, the big red suicide button all amounts to zilch.
So, they go to a place, it’s pointless. Servalan tries to steal the Liberator, nearly does it, then doesn’t. Oh, and Cally uses her telepathy again - hilariously no one warned Dayna and Tarrant about it. But no one else does anything noteworthy. The newbies more or less fill the roles Blake and Jenna would have had.
It’s all very disappointing. How are we in a rut already? Dear oh dear oh dear.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Some bloodless shooty deaths, and a not-great CSO fall into a volcano. You’ll cope.
WHO’S WHO: Michael Gough was Anneke Wills’s (less than stellar) husband, and also played The Celestial Toymaker and a dodgy Time Lord in Arc Of Infinity. Ben Howard played another heavy in The Green Death.
4. Dawn Of The Gods
By James Follett
Hey, a new writer! I wonder what bountiful rewards this will - ah no, it’s shit.
For about 15 minutes it looks like Dawn Of The Gods is going to be entirely set on the Liberator. By the end, it might as well have been. The ship is... going off course, or something? Cue lots of talking until they figure out 1) they’re heading into a black hole and 2) it’s Orac’s fault for wanting to study some interesting space phenomena and didn’t tell anyone. Someone must go outside for some reason and Vila draws the short straw; lucky for him (moments away from falling to his doom) they’re actually in some kind of cave which looks uncannily like a black, featureless sound stage. He still manages to get attacked and almost killed by an angry bumper car. Sure, why not.
Mercifully it turns out there are people here, one of whom is communicating with Cally telepathically. He is the Tharn, a figure from her childhood legends whose backstory she relates at questionable length and who sounds suspiciously like Omega from Doctor Who. (Angry big shot who taught powerful aliens everything they know is stuck in an antimatter universe, you haven’t heard the last of me etc etc.) When we meet him he looks suspiciously like one of the aliens from Colony In Space, also Doctor Who. (Big whoop alien turns out to be tiny but is massive of noggin.) At the end of the episode when the Liberator escapes the Tharn gets out as well, which um... can’t imagine anyone watching was desperate to see him again, but okay?
Forgive me for skipping to the end of the plot, but there’s not much else going on. Tarrant and Avon are kidnapped by the Tharn’s lackeys, who want to slice up the Liberator for scrap and make use of Orac. (The snag with the latter is that they don’t know who or what Orac is, and even with a magic truth stick they somehow fail to determine that he is a computer.) The lackeys offer the main point of interest here, not least because one of them is dressed like a magician in a top hat, the other like a croupier/accountant. Black set, random costumes, lengthy bits on the Liberator... seriously, who blew this week’s budget? One of them is at least interesting, in that he’s trapped here and longs to get back to his family. At the end when he has the opportunity to do just that, he stays. Why? Is blowing it up really more important than getting out? (Blake and co head off to give his regards to his family, which will take some doing without a name or address.)
Tarrant and Avon don’t exactly bond. To the extent that we know him, Tarrant is a man of action; take him away from people he can kill and he’s just a skinnier, posher Blake. Avon just looks bored. Dayna has the same fish-out-of-water problem as Tarrant. It should be a good one for Cally, what with her telepathic stalker, but she spends most of their conversations lying on a big rug. (Oh, there’s the budget. That rug guy saw you coming.) She eventually gets the better of the Tharn (and frees the Liberator) by asking him nicely to switch off his defences, which he then does. See why I’m not excited for a rematch?
Vila gets the best line when he wakes up after a crash and has double vision: “I’m in hell, and it’s full of Avons.” But otherwise this is a total dud. At best, it’s a meta experiment in what it would be like to get stuck in a black hole: no passage of time and nothing happening. Bravo.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Your kids will not sit through this.
WHO’S WHO: Terry Scully, the inexplicable accountant, was in The Seeds Of Death. Marcus Powell - the Tharn - was a slave in Destiny Of The Daleks.
5. The Harvest Of Kairos
By Ben Steed
Wow, we’re on quite the streak at the moment. This is terrible.
I just don’t get it. Remember the end of Series Two, with Avon in charge and the Federation crumbling against an alien threat and the old conflicts no longer seeming important - everything at stake? What the hell happened to all of that?
Five episodes into the next series and there’s no Federation (except for the bits of the Federation we still see almost every week), Servalan’s still the bad guy (except all she ever bloody wants is the Liberator) and despite banging on for two years about wanting the Liberator when Blake was done with it, Avon seems to have quietly passed control of it over to Tarrant. As for what the crew of the Liberator are up to nowadays, answers on a postcard. Last week it was board games and a trip to a black hole. This week they take up piracy. Can a quiet night in be far off?
The Harvest Of Kairos is by another new writer, and after last week’s debacle and now this shit-astrophe I’m wondering if those are really a good idea. Ben Steed for some reason goes all in on Tarrant: Tarrant is the famed leader of the Liberator, oh yes, it’s Tarrant Servalan must contend with. And this is based on what, exactly? She has no on screen history with him. He didn’t noticeably exist half a dozen episodes ago, and has done cock all since. My only thought here is that they (or Ben Steed) felt they had to literally replace Gareth Thomas, but seeing as they’d been inadvertently building up Avon to do exactly that, and you only need to watch the end of Series 2 to see it in action... well, they’re off their heads. Tarrant is going nowhere as a character so far, whereas Paul Darrow has consistently been the most watchable thing in the show. A dim chicken could tell you which one is the lead. Avon, though, spends this episode either standing on the sidelines or nattering on about intelligent rocks. They can’t even make a thing about how he’s playing second fiddle since there’s no working relationship or even antagonism between him and Tarrant, besides one line suggesting the other guy is getting a little full of himself. The two characters just boringly co-exist.
Impressively though, the Has The Writer Even Seen This Show Award for bad characterisation doesn’tgo to either of the Liberator’s would-be captains: it’s Servalan. Her now tedious obsession with the Liberator would be bad enough, especially since the last time we saw her she said she had time to go off and do something else since Blake was no longer around. On hearing that an underling talked smack about her behind her back, she calls him up to have a look at him, and he forces a snog on her... and she likes it, spending the rest of the episode either in googly-eyed thrall of him or terrified of his swaggering machismo. What the remote fuck? This is Servalan, yes? Famously the biggest and baddest and-yes-okay-sexiest force in the Federation? I’m amazed Jacqueline Pearce made it through the episode without wandering off set in bewilderment.
As for said dazzling example of manliness, Jarvik ostensibly seems like another have-a-go Travis, except he somehow ends up calling the shots. This might not seem too surprising given that he for-real-this-time captures the Liberator, though in the first of numerous howlingly bad directing choices, we don’t see that bit. (Other dodgy moments include some confusing continuity and Jarvik’s hilarious death, when a gunshot meant for Dayna hits him by seemingly-impossible accident.) He overpowers seemingly all of Tarrant’s gang - which we should probably call them at least for this episode, as they cower helplessly at a safe distance. Has two years of fighting the Federation taught them nothing? They can’t defeat one large but not particularly muscular bloke wearing (for no apparent reason) one of Blake’s outfits? They need Tarrant-whoever-that-is to do all their fighting for them? Absolutely no one walks away from this episode a stronger character.
Anyway, in the end Avon uses one his magic rocks (I bet you thought that wasn’t going anywhere!) to trick Servalan into abandoning the Liberator, putting yet another nail in her reputation. Cheers everyone, good work. Here’s hoping she finds another hobby at last.
Anything to recommend? Well, there’s a random moon lander type thing that the gang uses to get back to the Liberator. That looks pretty good. There’s a fairly complex-looking giant insect monster that, despite their obvious efforts, looks like a bloke with a bad case of worms. That’s hilarious. And there’s a bit where Avon observes, not without reason, that his new favourite rock is smarter than any of the people he knows. But this technically innocuous episode still manages to make the Liberator’s crew look like complete idiots, Servalan a misogynist parody and the show an aimless mess. Utter, utter bollocks.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! The whole episode is harmful.
WHO’S WHO: Andrew Burt (Jarvik) was in Terminus. Frank Gatliff, one of those Federation people who totally don’t exist any more, was in The Monster Of Peladon. Andrew Gardner, here capturing the Liberator entirely offscreen, was in The Macra Terror.
6. City At The Edge Of The World
By Chris Boucher
Good episode, good episode! I can hardly believe it. We should have a parade.
Still, it gets off to a fairly annoying start, with Tarrant throwing his entirely unearned weight around by ordering Vila to go on a mission. Again I’m wondering who the hell this guy thinks he is. Is he supposed to be charming because he’s really plummy? Vila crumbles and goes down to a planet where his temporary services, in theory, will earn the Liberator some crystals they need. Naturally it’s a trap and, in theory, they were never going to get Vila back.
There follows a lovely scene where Avon makes it very clear who’s in charge and that if Tarrant keeps acting like a spoilt birthday boy, he’s dead meat. It’s almost worth having Tarrant act like this if it means underlining the good stuff about Avon. Hopefully he’ll properly take command soon; even Dayna thinks the twatty newcomer needs putting in his place.
Meanwhile, Vila has been conscripted to break into a vault. A gang of criminals are responsible, and not the Boring Feudal Society In Space Of The Week locals after all. The gang is led by Bayban the Butcher and bloody hell, it’s Colin Baker! And bloody hell, he’s great! Not exactly a shy type when playing Doctor Who, he’s a well oiled scenery-chewing machine as the bad guy here, armed with lots of sharp dialogue. The script is quite witty in general, which makes it all the better that it’s a Vila-heavy episode.
And that’s probably the best bit. Vila’s been in the show from the start, and while his snarky comments are funny, they’re usually all he ever gets to do. In this one he doesn’t seem too fazed by his kidnap, being more interested in applying his skills to the vault. He considers the designer to be his opponent, who he also admires, and takes loads of pride in the whole thing. It’s refreshing to stop and make light of what a character is actually good at, especially one as underdeveloped as Vila.
He also noticeably strikes up a romance with one of Bayban’s crew, Kerril. There’s a definite whiff of contrivance here to move it along: Vila and Kerril eventually get through the door and find themselves in a spaceship with limited air, and decide not unreasonably to sleep together. (When Vila later notices they still have air, Kerril observes that they’ll have to die “of exhaustion” instead of suffocation!) From there - the ship having landed - they find a world and consider living on it. Yes, all of this is very sudden and rushed, and Kerril certainly trades in some of her badassery the moment she inexplicably changes out of the threatening leather into a dress. But Michael Keating and Carol Hawkins manage some real chemistry, and Boucher’s script puts them on a similar page. I buy it.
There’s not a lot else going on. Avon and co must rescue Vila (with a rightly shamed Tarrant in tow), but they get some decent lines en route. Dayna also shows off a remote control bomb on wheels, which suggests untapped talents. Eventually it turns out the people here were always intended to reach another world via this spaceship, and the only thing in the vault was a teleport pad. Boucher overthinks this a bit, because welcome to Boucher: the ship is designed to accept and then kill people smart enough to get into the vault if the ship hasn’t landed yet. Why bother? And the planet they reach is, apart from having the crystals the Liberator needs, a complete dump that looks like a cheap recreation of the moon. The handful of people would be better off where they are. But hey, it’s sort of a cool idea, particularly the vault door not being a real door at all, but a forcefield.
Like many obsessive baddies, Bayban goes back for what must be untold riches and ends up destroying himself. Pity, I’d welcome another episode with Colin. Vila loses Kerril, but she gets to go and live on “Vilaworld” (as they dub it during their brief honeymoon). Avon gets his crystals.
A slightly too complicated (but still satisfying) plot, a great villain of the week, and good material for the whole crew, especially one who’s been lacking it. City At The Edge Of The World doesn’t do much for the overall malaise of Series Three, but bloody hell, I’ll take it.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! For a criminal of such infamy, Bayban doesn’t do anything too violent.
WHO’S WHO: Colin! And Valentine Dyall, aka the Black Guardian, who inevitably uses his booming voice for the recording on the spaceship. He’s also one of the aliens.
7. Children Of Auron
By Roger Parkes
Mixed feelings about this one. There are some hugely dramatic moments in it, but good grief, do we REALLY need to see Servalan go after the Liberator again? This relentless and tedious obsession makes the galaxy, and the show’s whole remit seem roughly the size of two spaceships. Get a life, Servalan.
To be fair, she has another motive in this one: she wants to clone herself. (Probably reasoning that half a dozen Servalans might hold onto the Liberator for more than ten minutes.) To this end she tracks down the planet Auron, famed for its cloning powers, and infects an incoming pilot with an alien plague. This promptly infects the entire planet - take that, Covid! Servalan’s ship arrives to offer miraculous (but limited) aid, and the clones are her price. It’s a decent scheme, but I’m surprised she bothered with the subterfuge. She’s mean enough to just demand the clones and withhold any help until she gets them.
Meanwhile one of the clone scientists is Cally’s twin Zelda, who summons her help. (This cuts off a weirdly specific plot where Avon wants to go to Earth and take revenge for Anna Grant, the girl we found out about in Series Two. Why do that all of a sudden? Oh well, maybe next week.) The Liberator arrives and weirdly doesn’t notice Servalan’s ship. Zen and/or Orac must be slacking, but to make up for it they easily (off-screen) come up with a cure for the plague. That’s one of those throwaway bits that makes me wonder if Orac could be put to grander use than the show’s random attack missions.
What follows is a fairly action-y runaround where Servalan wants to baggsey the Liberator, almost dies it (again), takes hostages, loses them, and ends up firing on the planet hoping to kill the crew once and for all. She’s convinced by a guard to blow up the cloning chamber and her progeny, after he tells her another guard swapped out the DNA for his own. (He’s lying to spite the other guy, who passed him over for promotion.) When the place blows, she feels the death of the foetuses - I guess they were born psychic? - and promptly kills both guards on the spot. It’s a genuinely horrifying moment. I almost hope it informs her character going forward, but it probably won’t.
Speaking of psychic links, more or less the same thing happens to Cally after Zelda refuses to teleport up, so she can stabilise the clone babies. (Admirable but stupid, given the whole reason they’re evacuating is that Servalan is destroying the place.) Cally feels Zelda’s death, and it’s a chilling moment for the character we know, but the episode doesn’t do anything to establish Zelda, who seems a bit one-note. It also doesn’t back-fill Cally as a character all that much. We learn a few facts, but it’s not like City At The Edge Of The World where the story was tailored to Vila. Cally has a psychic conversation for once, but other than that and Zelda’s death, it’s business as usual.
After all that horror, the episode ends with that old TV traditions of ending on a joke to defuse the tension. This would be horribly inappropriate even if it wasn’t badly done, but the thing Avon says to trigger it isn’t especially funny. It’s an amazingly bad ending.
On the whole, it left me a bit cold. I suspect it’s one of those episodes people hold up solely for a few good bits.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Plague boils and psychic deaths are pretty nasty indeed.
WHO’S WHO: The doomed pilot is Michael son-of-Patrick Troughton, absolutely wasted here. Head of Auron, Ronald Leigh-Hunt was in The Seeds Of Death and Revenge Of The Cybermen. Servalan’s right-hand-man-of-the-week Rio Fanning was in Horror Of Fang Rock.
8. Rumours Of Death
By Chris Boucher
It’s all kicking off here! We start partway through the action, a trick that has enhanced a fair few Doctor Who stories: Avon has been captured and is visited by Shrinker, the man who tortured Anna Grant to death. Only, it’s a trap! Tarrant and Dayna arrive and now Shrinker is theirs. Avon plans to exact information, then revenge.
Meanwhile on Earth, revolution is proceeding independently of the Liberator. Sula, a high-ranking official in the Federation, turns on her husband and leads some rebels in official garb to hunt for Servalan. Soon Avon has Shrinker alone, and he’s adamant he never met Anna Grant. Avon gets the name of someone responsible - Bartholomew - and leaves Shrinker to starve to death or shoot himself in a cave. Well, no one ever accused Avon of being sentimental.
By now the viewer will have noticed (thanks to flashbacks) that Sula and Anna are the same. I slightly wish they hadn’t done that, as it does suggest where the plot is going. But anyway, Sula/Anna captures Servalan. Seriously, these guys are running rings around Blake and co. They could teach this stuff.
Avon confronts Servalan demanding to know who Bartholomew is, and soon finds out: it was Anna all along, using Avon to keep her political aims a secret. (I think? I’m a little hazy to be honest.) Inevitably, he shoots her. He escapes a presumably broken man.
Heavy, isn’t it? And not just for Avon: Servalan has a pretty rough time of it, somehow bonding with Avon during their well written and intense scenes in the cellar. He lets her go and she tries to kill him anyway, but you sense they enjoy circling each other too much to ever go through with it.
It’s one of Chris Boucher’s best scripts, really highlighting the grey areas of this world. There are two Federation men observing a lot of the action, bickering like a Robert Holmes double act, and after we grow to like them they’re shot. The rebels dress like Federation men. Sula/Anna, ostensibly a bigger hero than Blake, betrayed her lover, then her Federation husband, then Avon again. Avon and co inadvertently leave Servalan back in charge, despite the rebellion being in the black for once. Even Shrinker has a history of swapping sides. This kind of stuff is what makes the show interesting, and I wish there was more of it.
It’s satisfying to pick up on a thread established in the last series; character development for Avon is always a gift and Paul Darrow is predictably great with it. There’s not a lot else to say really. It’s strong stuff. Poor Avon.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Servalan’s bruised and bartered face at the end is pretty grim.
WHO’S WHO: David Haig, looking fluffy and cherubic here, is best known for The Thin Blue Line and The Thick Of It. He was also in The Leisure Hive. Avon’s nemesis, John Bryans, was in The Creature From The Pit. Donald Douglas was in The Sontaran Experiment. Philip Bloomfield was in The Keeper Of Traken.
9. Sarcophagus
By Tanith Lee
Female writer alert! And Sarcophagus is a fittingly memorable one.
In the first place, it’s bloody weird. We begin with a long-ish, dream sequence-ish funeral procession where aliens in a room use various psi-powers...ish... stuff. Look, there’s a scene, okay. Moving on, the Liberator finds another ship in space and it’s calling to Cally. She’s still reeling from the loss of her home world and, unspoken though it is here, her sister. Avon - who went through his own loss with Anna - seems closer to her now. An investigative mission is cut short when the ship threatens to explode, and Cally only just pulls Avon and Vila out in time, having salvaged a piece of equipment first. The object is inevitably a source of trouble; Cally soon finds herself in a coma and a spectre that looks like her haunts and attacks the crew.
Much of this cuts between the crew as normal and them dressed in mourners’ robes back on the alien ship. At one point there’s a musical interlude where Dayna sings a song - though she’s off screen at the time so it’s hard to know if it’s diegetic. Much of what happens in Sarcophagus is possibly not real. Rather than being infuriating, this is spooky, particularly as the Liberator malfunctions and the always steadfast Zen starts talking funny. It’s amazing how much atmosphere you can get from just dimming the lights.
It all comes down to Avon and not-Cally, a being the drains life force and takes things over, but hasn’t reckoned on its link with Cally. The being can’t bring itself to kill Avon; shippers can no doubt fill in the blanks. He goes in for a kiss in order to prise off a ring Cally took from the ship, which is its source of power. Later, after the broken creature fades away rather sadly, Avon and Cally share some significant looks. Paul Darrow and Jan Chappell are incredible here. Pretty much off their backs, it’s beginning to feel like Series Three is actually going somewhere.
There are moments when it threatens to get too weird or silly, but Sarcophagus keeps it in check. Besides, Blake’s 7 should be allowed a little inexplicability now and again, and certainly some unspoken character building. And we get some that’s spoken, as they finally stop arsing about and canonise the idea that Cally is a full psychic... now and again. Also, more importantly, Avon and Tarrant finally discuss the elephant in the room, which is who really runs the ship. I wonder if Tarrant knows that nobody watching the show has any doubts.
Great stuff, anyway. Come again Tanith Lee.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! There are some mouldy skeleton.
WHO’S WHO: Val Clover, one of the weird alien mourners at the start, was in Full Circle.
10. Ultraworld
By Trevor Hoyle
Meh. Just some space shit innit.
After really enjoying City At The Edge Of The World and Sarcophagus, it seems hypocritical to complain that an episode is self-contained and has nothing to do with story arcs. And yet that’s a problem with Ultraworld: it’s just a sci-fi-of-the-week, with no relevance to anything else. You could easily skip it. As to what those other episodes had that this one doesn’t, that’s easy: they serviced the characters. Ultraworld is just a Star Trek-ish thing that happens to the Liberator. (And anyway, the story arcs are mainly dead in the water at this point. Blake’s 7 might as well BE Star Trek.)
So anyway, they find an artificial planet. It has some kind of effect on Cally. (Really? This again, so soon?) She teleports over, probably under duress. The rest of the gang except Vila go to rescue her, only to find a planet-sized computer obsessed with gathering knowledge. (This, too, feels like a repeat of the last episode, but it’s a much more literal take on alien-thing-that-absorbs-people.)
There’s no conflict here beyond the obvious. The blue-skinned “Ultras” want to drain the smartest people and use the rest for manual labour. (Tarrant, hilariously, is in the latter category.) They obfuscate this at first, but then start draining Avon in earnest. Dayna and Tarrant must put a stop to it. But at one point, the Ultras want to record these two having sex because they don’t have that process in their records. (What, not anywhere?!) This scene is noteworthy for seeming even more bizarre than anything in Sarcophagus. Whatever floats your boat, guys.
At least Vila enjoys himself: he’s busy teaching Orac riddles, jokes and rhymes, which ultimately confuses Ultraworld enough to get them out of there. Cally meanwhile spends the episode mostly asleep. Tarrant seems a little less of a dick after confronting Avon last week; I’m not sure if that’s the end of that as far as the leadership contest goes.
And I’m out of things to say. Ultraworld is an episode that exists. I doubt you’ll hate it. You don’t need to find out.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! There’s a big gloopy brain spitting green stuff everywhere, but kids are gross.
WHO’S WHO: Stephen Jenn was in Nightmare Of Eden. Hugh Cecil popped up in The Dalek Masterplan, The War Machines and The Silurians. Tex Fuller did stunts in The Masque Of Mandragora. Ridgewell Hawkes was in Warriors Of The Deep. Reg Woods was in State Of Decay.
11. Moloch
By Ben Steed
All right: who watched The Harvest Of Kairos and said, yes that’s good, let’s have that writer back? Sure enough, Moloch includes great ugly gobs of misogyny. But it’s mostly just boring and pointless as an episode, not actively offensive. Hooray I suppose.
The Liberator is chasing Servalan. I’ve no idea why, since the last time we saw her they’d inadvertently put her back in power. Her ship disappears, having found a planet that is completely shielded from view. (They go on about this at length but ultimately it doesn’t matter.) They go in after her, but to do this Vila and Tarrant must first sneak about a Federation troop carrier. (Again, it seems like a big deal but they never quite explain why. TL;DR, everybody goes to the planet. Just get on with it.) Aboard the carrier Vila makes a friend, Doran, who in all probability is a serial rapist and murderer. The cheeky chappy!
The planet is seemingly staffed by women - uh oh - and run by a computer named Moloch. Some thoroughly unpleasant Federation men have made themselves at home here and summoned Servalan. The planet houses a machine for perfectly replicating matter, which would be awesome enough on its own, but their specific plan is to duplicate the knowledge of a great pilot and copy Servalan’s flagship with that installed so anyone can fly it. Who cares, quite frankly; I wasn’t aware that Servalan’s ship was the best thing in space. (That’s the Liberator, surely?) It’s marginally more interesting that Servalan’s forces are in the minority, and the thoroughly grubby Section Leader Grose wants to take over. Series Three has seriously phoned in the difference between Federation-at-full-strength and Federation-in-tatters, so it’s nice to make something of that for once. I could have done without Servalan being chained up “for the men” as punishment - and she’s the second woman in the episode to be “given to the men” - but by all accounts, she doesn’t actually get raped, so er, I guess all is forgiven?
As for the misogyny, the instant takeover of what on the face of it is a planet run by women speaks for itself, as does that gleeful punishment of women by men. You might well argue that these are bad people and we’re not supposed to see this behaviour and think, this is good and I approve - villains gonna villain, after all, shouldn’t they be reprehensible? But it’s interesting that these examples of villaindom keep occurring to this writer. And don’t forget Doran, who takes Vila for a go on the chained-up Servalan, so he must be terrible, right? Except he’s essentially painted as a good guy by the end, and Vila’s sad when he dies. Amazingly, this could all be worse: in Ben Steed’s last opus, Servalan likedbeing treated like garbage by men. I’m sure there are some who will argue that her consistent annoyance here, and a bit where she kills a potential rapist with a rock, is progress. We’ll be giving her the vote next.
Back to the episode: after Vila chooses sportingly not to have his way with her, he lets Servalan go and they briefly work together. Then she escapes, largely off screen - odd choice, and it’s interesting that she doesn’t try to seize the matter replicator first, but I can’t blame her for sodding off. And here’s where things get... well, interesting is the wrong word. Moloch, it turns out, is an evolutionary experiment: a replicated being that’s 2 million years further along than a human. Needless to say he’s hideous and he wants to possess the Liberator. (Oh whatever, most people do.) But he dies the instant he teleports out of his computer chair, and that’s that. Fascinating. Grose and co seem to have been dealt with and, apart from Avon cleverly using it to restock some teleport bracelets, no one is ultimately bothered about the replicators. Great. The Liberator departs, but not before finding Servalan in hot pursuit. Will she attempt, for the five thousandth time, to steal the Liberator? Oh what excitement awaits.
It’s a nothingy runaround with added unpleasantness. Please stop asking this guy back.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Rape threats top the bill, but there’s a seriously freaky body in a tank.
WHO’S WHO: Doran is Davyd Harries, who was in The Armageddon Factor. Moloch is Deep Roy, aka Mr Sin in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. Stuart Fell, perennial Who stuntman, is one of the guards.
12. Death-Watch
By Chris Boucher
Hunger Games, anyone? Chris Boucher’s got his ideas hat on this week, and rattles off a dystopian sci-fi scenario that will sound familiar now.
Somewhat breaking continuity with the last episode, where the crew were once again on the run from Servalan, this one finds Vila suggesting they all have a nice rest. He suggests - for some reason - a nearby region that has just declared war. The “restful” bit is that spectators are encouraged, and are afforded neutral status; the “war” is really two combatants who fight to the death, and have their experiences relayed to everyone watching via a mind link. It’s a funny form of entertainment, but then it’s a solid satire. (The only bit I don’t get is that Vila’s “rest” ends up being strictly within the confines of the Liberator’s flight deck. Not exactly shore leave, is it?)
One of the combatants is Tarrant’s brother. (Wouldn’t you know it, they’re identical twins. Bit Children-Of-Auron, isn’t it?) And the “neutral arbiter” of the fight is Servalan. This might seem a strange use of her time until Avon et al figure out she’s planning to somehow violate the rules, thus triggering a real war and using the resulting chaos to claw back some power. This is a nicely subtle use of the ongoing “Servalan/the Federation ain’t what it used to be” idea, and it’s just as subtle that Avon’s “resistance” is to make sure no one kicks off in the first place and the fight goes as planned, leaving her with nothing. It’s all a bit more Cold War than we’re used to in Blake’s 7, but at least it’s a kind of rebellion against a kind of Federation, and isn’t yet another attempt of Servalan’s to steal you-know-what. This time last series events were actually building to something, so I’ll take any rebellion plot I can get.
Not-Tarrant is a little too nice to shoot his opponent in the back, and not long after that he’s killed. Tarrant feels his death by mind link. (That’s another bit of Children Of Auron. You’re slacking, Chris!) Orac figures out Servalan’s wheeze: the opponent was an android, so there was no way not-Tarrant could have won. (Apart from shooting him in the back. D’oh!) Once that is discovered, it’s war! So the gang swoop in, Tarrant demands a rematch and wins. (Even though he, too, is uncharacteristically squeamish about shooting him in the back.) Vaporising the android leaves Servalan with nothing. And unlike something like Doctor Who, where the whole Hunger Games business would surely come under scrutiny or be dismantled, Avon and Tarrant leave them to it at the end.
The whole thing’s very neatly put together, even if it does all feel a bit like small potatoes. The satirical stuff works like gangbusters, particularly a bit where the fight newscaster bitches off-screen at his director. The direction is frequently excellent, particularly some snazzy camera angles during the face off with not-Tarrant. And the cast seem to be enjoying themselves; I wasn’t bowled over by Stephen Pacey’s other Tarrant, but actual Tarrant seems more defined by all this. Avon and Servalan share a scene where flirtation and a kiss seem to come naturally at this point. It’s a strange little relationship they’re having.
Chris Boucher has become the go-to guy for Blake’s 7, and Death-Watch is another good one. At this point I think my issues are more with this series as a whole. What exactly are we building up to? Find out next week...
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Not-Tarrant’s POV death is pretty grim.
WHO’S WHO: Not-Tarrant’s friend Max is Stewart Bevan, who was Jo Grant’s husband. The newscaster, David Sibley, was in The Pirate Planet.
13. Terminal
By Terry Nation
Well, Series Three did go somewhere.
Avon is behaving strangely, following a mysterious signal and refusing to answer any questions. The Liberator’s course takes it through some random space goo and then to the artificial planet Terminal. (Not to be confused with the artificial planet Ultraworld.) He transports down there alone, and promises to kill anyone who follows him. Naturally, Tarrant and Cally follow at a distance.
Avon finds, as well as some aggressive and aggressively shit-looking gorilla monsters, an underground medical facility that has been working on (wait for it) Blake. It’s Blake’s signal he’s been following, and uncharacteristically for this series (wait for it) Blake is bloody there as well! Paralysed by awake, he has some good news to share with Avon, but it’ll have to wait. The sinister medical orderlies get hold of Avon, who from our perspective seems to be cutting between his visit to Blake and unconsciousness in a lab. Something’s amiss here.
And just as you’re starting to think we’ve got away with it, yes, Servalan is here. Of course she bloody is. And it was a trap. Of course it bloody was. She has brought Avon here under false pretences so she can take the Liberator. Of course she bloody has.
Avon, despite the seemingly reasonable offer of Blake in return, orders the Liberator to go, knowing it’ll mean both their deaths. But there’s no need, as they have no intention of leaving orbit and actually go along with Servalan’s request, making sure to take Orac before they close up the shop. She has one final twist of the knife: Blake isn’t here, he’s dead, and Avon’s meeting was an illusion. (Of course it bloody etc.) And off she goes triumphant.
Well, not quite. The random space goo from earlier has been eating into the Liberator’s hull. It’s more than the ship’s spooky regenerative powers can handle, so Servalan has actually inherited a broken ship. When she tries to break orbit - having somehow failed to spot all the gloop and rot everywhere - the Liberator explodes. Servalan is last seen possibly teleporting out of there; of course etc etc.
There’s much about all this that is just plain obvious, and yet it works as a kind of inevitable tragedy. The whole sentence of events pivots on Avon acting out of heroism: he wants to rescue Blake (not discounting Blake’s plan to get rich, of course), and he wants to protect the crew from any potential trap by telling them nothing. It’s presumably this foolhardiness that makes him blind to risks like the random space goo, and ends up costing them the Liberator. But the joke’s on Servalan too, as her hell-bent fixation has resulted in a dead ship and a lot of wasted effort. (Naturally it is hopeless to think it’ll cost her life as well.) Avon and Servalan make more compelling nemeses than when Blake was in the equation, and their shared misfortunes seem apt here. Avon, at least, smiles at the end.
What does it all mean for Blake’s 7? A new ship, probably, and a change of tack for Servalan. She really will have to get a life now. I hope the latest shake up puts the next series on a stronger path; Series Three has had tremendous high points but, overall, it’s been a lot of wiffwaff.
Terminal is a strong closer, and if not particularly big on fresh ideas - such as the gorilla people being hyper-evolved humans, which directly repeats and contradicts a recent episode - it at least puts them in a satisfying character context. Paul Darrow does wonders as the steadily more broken Avon, whose faith is then redeemed at the end. And Michael Keating gets maximum pathos out of Zen’s breakdown; acting your heart out against a giant babbling LED light is nothing to sniff at. Series Three, if nothing else, made the most of the Liberator.
IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! One of Servalan’s lackeys gets sucked into space.
WHO’S WHO: Just Stuart Fell, from the looks of it!
BLAKE’S... 6. Alas, Zen.
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