The Only Winning Move

While by and large in agreement with Noah’s interesting post on the overrated linguistic accumen of Avatar, I’ll have to take issue with this bit:

One of the most disappointing aspects of the Star Wars franchise is the laziness of the approach to language.

I’ve actually always given Star Wars reasonably high marks on its approach to language. Which isn’t to say I’m not grading on a curve here, because I am. Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters certainly didn’t make their reputation through anything like scientific accuracy, and Linguistics seems to get a heartier brush-off than most sciences. So Star Wars‘ high marks are only because they’re near the top of the class in this field. But surely that counts for something?

What I certainly can’t credit is this:

Numerous other sci-fi shows and movies at least address the issue, even if this only amounts to asserting the existence of a hugely implausible universal translation technology.

First of all, inserting a magic device into a universe that makes the problem go away is NOT anyone’s idea of “addressing the issue.” Sorry, but it’s handwaving pure. Second, since it’s Star Trek that’s (unfairly) most closely associated with the universal translator, I’ll have to add that I can only remember a handful of times in ANY of the infinite iterations of that series when it’s even mentioned, let alone malfunctions or runs across a language too alien to digest. It does happen from time to time, but of course this only begs more questions, like why it is in the general case that Captains Kirk/Picard/Janeway/Deep Sleep Nine Dude have no trouble talking to completely undiscovered species of rubber-foreheaded humanoids, and why aliens are still able to pronounce the odd easily-translatable word in their own language despite presumably being plugged in to the universal translator that’s translating all the rest of their speech. Nope, won’t do. Star Trek gets an “F” for “Full of Crap” on the language issue.

Star Wars at least makes an effort. No, it doesn’t succeed. No, it doesn’t do all it could or should. But in its defense, it’s technically science fantasy and not science fiction, which does let it off the hook for scientific accuracy (unlike Star Trek, which wears its scientific plausibility vanity on its sleeve in the form of endless treknobabble), and in any case the story it’s telling isn’t one about communication with alien species. Aliens and droid are second-class citizens in the Star Wars universe - there for stage decoration more than as thematic engines.

As background noise, the pastiche of assorted noises and bits and pieces of real languages works reasonably well, but the issues of multilinguality and translation are never addressed. Somehow, Han Solo and Greedo understand one another just fine. It’s silly, and it goes beyond my ability to suspend disbelief.

Presumably what’s going on with Han Solo and Greedo is exactly what’s, somewhat more obviously, going on with Han Solo and Chewbacca: each is anatomically incapable of pronouncing the other’s language, but they can hear and interpret what one assumes is a homogenized standard version of each that each is speaking for the other’s benefit. This isn’t so unprecedented even here on planet Earth. In most parts of India, I’m given to understand, there is no shortage of people who are fluent in a few local languages plus can understand, but not necessarily speak, a few more on top of that. Now, it’s true that anatomy isn’t an issue for fellow humans the way it is between Wookies and Humans - or whatever-Greedo-is and Humans - but in a universe as packed to the gills with species as the Star Wars universe seems to be, it’s not too hard to imagine that you do get a large number of pairings for whom this description holds. For the others, their are protocol droids such as C3PO (who at least claims to be “fluent in over six million forms of communication”) - which, incidentally, speaks against Noah’s assertion that Star Wars “doesn’t even address the issue [paraphrase].”

A fairer thing to say would be that Star Wars addresses the issue, but maybe not as much as we’d like. It’s certainly true that we wouldn’t expect all (though I can accept “most”) species to evolve audition-based communication systems. And among those that do, given how different auditory ranges among earthbound species can be, it stretches creduilty a bit to think that Greedo doesn’t say some things which are outside Han’s hearing range or vice versa. And on top of that there’s the fact that humans are evolved to recognize linguistic productions as such - which wouldn’t be the case with linguistic productions from Greedo’s species. Nor is there any reason why Greedo’s speech should consist primarily of recognizeable human phonemes with some altered timbres, which it does to my ears at any rate. And all of this is not to mention that vocal/auditory systems that evovled in different atmospheric densities would malfunction in whatever atmospheres our heros tend to be in - though this goes a bit beyond the Linguistic issue. So no, Star Wars doesn’t quite succeed. It would’ve helped to have Han snap on a small earset - like a hearing aid - that would’ve converted Greedo’s speech into some sequence of sounds that his brain was wired to interpret - agreed. Or, if it’s a cochlear implant-type thing, to have mentioned it at some point (though doing so without resorting to expository dialogue is admittedly tricky). But the point, I think, is that I can layer cochlear implant soundwave translators on top of an India-like environment without too much trouble in my own imagination. The function of Willful Suspension of Disbelief, after all, is not to actively believe in things which are inherently believable; rather, it’s that the author of the universe gives me enough internal consistency that I can ignore the stuff that contradicts science as I know it for the sake of enjoying a good story. It’s a pact that the reader makes with the author that leapfrogs the technical implementation so that we can get to the stuff that we’re interested in. I can do that with Star Wars - because, after all, there are scenes where C3PO is needed to translate (the scene in Jabba’s palace between Jabba and Leia-as-bounty-hunter, on Endor among the Ewoks), and we do get snatches of alien speech that is actually alien (the Ithorians in the cantina scene). Star Wars acknowledges that the alien communication issue is there, it reassures me that this universe has solved it, and so what frayed ends are left over I understand to be outside the storyteller’s specialty, and I let him off the hook. The ONLY reason that might be easier for some people to do with Star Trek is because Star Trek simply sweeps the issue under the rug.

Indeed, I think the most interesting thing about scientific accuracy of any kind with regard to Star Trek is how ludicrously underdeserved its reputation in this area actually is. It’s not just language - take almost any area of comparison and Star Wars does better. But - if I can channel the Wizard of Oz here for a second - Star Trek has got one thing that Star Wars hasn’t got: treknobabble. And that apparently makes all the difference, since ask any random sample of science fiction fans which series is more scientifically accurate and I’m guessing you’ll get a 90+% majority for Trek. Just because of a random sequence of syllables peppered here and there that sounds vaugely like something they would name some particles that Swiss collider might turn up someday. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a Linguistic Issue!

In the end, I suspect that the post-2005 revival of Doctor Who tackles the interspecies language issue best. When Rose asks the Doctor why, if he’s an alien, he sounds like he’s from the North, he replies, condescendingly, “Lots of planets have a North!” Well said.

[cross-posted at Language Module]

Vienna Blood isn’t just a novel, it’s TWO novels - and I’ve read both of them. Recently. So I felt the need to clarify, since this review is only about the Vienna Blood that Adrian Mathews put out in 1999, and not the (vastly superior) Vienna Blood that Frank Tallis put out last year.

Both Vienna Bloods are mystery novels (broadly defined), both have pretentions about taking Vienna and the roots of Naziism as a subtext, and both got really good press on publication. Unfortunately, the Adrian Mathews Vienna Blood - which is, additionally, a science fiction novel - doesn’t really deserve its accolades. Overrated, in a word.

It has an interesting premise. And, for once, it’s a crossover genre science fiction that actually works as science fiction. We’re innundated these days by clever people who think it’s terribly clever to combine science fiction with some other genre and call themselves clever (*cough* Joss Whedon *cough*) - and Adrian Mathews isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be, one of those people. I won’t say too much about the plot - just that it deals with speculation about near-future advances in genetic engineering, including one very interesting potential use for “junk” DNA.

Unfortunately, it squanders the goldmine premise by being annoying in a whole host of other ways.

For one thing, it’s not very convincing as a “near-future” setting. Global Warming, for example, has advanced to the point where it’s perpetually springtime in Vienna, and yet no mention is ever made of the globe being uninhabitable at the equator, or any other catastrophic side effects. And this is 2026, a number that even people living in 1999 must have known was an implausible date for observable climate change! But it’s really just a whole host of minor details that don’t seem to fit. People all still read print magazines, security decryption keys are only six digits long, ad absolute nauseam. It just - subtly - doesn’t work.

And you know what else doesn’t work? Setting the thing in Vienna. Not that I’ve ever been there - well, not for any length of time, anyway - but I’ve been to Austria, and these characters are not Austrians. And the American who shows up? He’s American enough, but only in a Bad British Stereotype of Americans kind of way. So bad that you’d almost think Mr. Mathews were writing in 1918 kind of way. In fact, the descriptions of Vienna and Austria are so unconvincing that you find yourself defensively weeding out the mentions, only to stumble across a passage wherein the main character speculates about his nonexistant Austrian national identity and find all your best efforts to ignore it in a rubble heap about your feet. Adrian Mathews is just bad - rotten, awfully, spectacularly bad - at writing about people from other cultures, and I wish someone would have told him that BEFORE he wrote the book so that we could’ve had the same story set in the UK. Which brings me to what’s really offensive about the setting, actually: it is - or at least comes across as - a way of deflecting responsibility for Britain’s own racist past.

OK, it’s no great spoiler to tell you that a thriller about genetic engineering set in near-future Vienna is going to be about racism, is it? Well, it is - about racism, I mean - so there. And I couldn’t, the whole time, shake the uncomfortable feeling that Mathews is just the kind of philistine who thinks that to write a book about racism you have to have a racist setting, and that it’s all very worldly of him to know that Austria is a more plausibly racist place these days than that old standby of Germany. To give credit where it’s due - he’s right that Austria has managed to dodge a lot of the soul-searching that Germany has done since the war by falsely claiming to be a victim, rather than the enabler it actually was, of Naziism. In fact, as we all know, the Anschluss was widely supported in Austria, it wasn’t an invasion in anything but the most surface reading of international law, and in any case it was in the cultural millieu of Vienna that Hitler developed his attitudes in the first place. Hitler was an Austrian. True as all this is, it’s a pretty shallow reading of Austrian history. If it’s true that Austria hasn’t properly confronted its Nazi past, then not primarily because they’ve managed to explain the Anscluss away as an invasion, but rather because of an uneasy political compromise between ex-Nazis and Socialists that dominated Austrian politics until quite recently. This gets some mention in the book, but incorrectly as a mechanism for keeping fascism just below the surface. Little mention is made of its role in allowing old war criminals to stay in power. So Mathews knows nothing about Austria, and it shows, and this is insulting becuase … if you’re going to make the setting of your story an important part of the underlying political statement, as is pretty patently the case here, you really, really, really, really, really owe the people who are actually from the place you’re slandering the courtesy of doing even basic reserach into their culture and history. And having done that research, the story needs to be dependent in some way on details that you learned therein. But this story isn’t. It could just as well have taken place in the UK, and in fact should have done, if for no other reason than Mr. Mathews patriotism shines through. We get obscure mentions of unimportant British scientists left and right in memos that purportedly Austrian experts on genetic engineering are writing to each other - mentions that either are not germane to the matter at hand, or are but would have been so obvious to the characters writing the memo that they wouldn’t have wasted the ink. Like, for example, the time the world expert on genetic engineering notes in a parenthetical in a purely company-internal memo to other experts on genetic engineering that was never intended for public viewing and was in fact encrypted and password-protected that the first test-tube baby was born in the UK in 1978. As though there is possibly any genetic expert anywhere in the world who would consider such a fact obscure enough to be worth mentioning in a memo to other genetic exerts. Please! There are scores of such examples, and they all underscore a kind of childish Canadian sensibility to the book - where national identity is (to borrow from Heinlein) kind of like dandruff: ultimately a nuissance but so much fun to pick at that people can’t leave it alone. The first rule in the book about how to have maturity beyond that of a high schooler in your speculations about national identity is, of course, to be fair and not slander other people without doing some soul-searching of your own. But Britain gets only a handful of favorable mentions here, end of story. Great.

And you know what further doesn’t work? The plot. I said the premise was interesting - and it is. But unfortunately this doesn’t translate into a good plot. Here again, the term that springs to mind is “high school.” Mr. Mathews seems to have designed the plot first and then hung the characters and setting on it. He knew the twists he wanted, and he made them happen, never mind that it leads to several of the characters doing hugely implausible/inconsistent things. I guess listing these implausible things counts as indulging in spoilers, so skip the rest of the paragraph if you’re sensitive about that kind of thing - but in one case a man bombs the apartment of someone he’s trying to save for no good reason; in another a death is faked by someone that seems to serve no purpose other than to restrict his future movements, causing distress to someone he purports to love in the process; a character who claims to want another character to know something deliberately deceives him about that thing, etc. etc. etc. ALL of these things happen purely for the purpose of having plot twists. For example, the faked death seems to have happened just so that a character we assume for most of the novel to be dead can be alive in a surprise twist at the end. And the character who deceives the narrator about the point that she later claims to have been helping him to discover was only so that we can be shocked that she’s the very person she’s claiming not to be later on. NONE of these “twists” make any sense from a character point of view - some of them (the faked death) not even from a conspiratorial point of view (what does it accomplish other than restricting the character’s movements? it hardly furthers his political cause!) - and it’s all just very sloppy.

The cherry on top is that Mathews can’t write. If you guessed that the prose here is straight out of the Reader’s Digest School of Amateur Writing - that is, “describe EVERYTHING, include pointless dream sequences, and use your thesaurus like you’re getting paid by the letter” - go to the head of the class. Painful.

So how did I make it to the end? Well, it wasn’t ALL grit and determination. Like I said, the premise is actually pretty good, and the first half of the book is significantly better-plotted than the second. For the first 150 pages or so you really care and are honestly puzzled about what’s going on. By the time you get to the last sections, you know what’s going on, and wouldn’t care if you could even believe it, but you’re - or at least, I was - still kind of interested in sniffing out what the political axe to grind here is. I know what you’re thinking: book by a crappy amateur British writer on genetic engineering that takes place in Austria for no discernable reason - it’s GOTTA be anti-fascist, right? And I think it’s trying to be, yes. But it can’t quite take the final step, and that’s interesting. It comes across as something written by someone who wants to be anti-fascist because that’s what all the cool kids are, but he can’t make all the pieces fit. As such, this had potential for being a really thoughtful book on the subject.

The trouble with political fashions, such as the knee-jerk vilification of fascism, as we all know is that they tend to oversimplify complex issues. And one side-effect of such oversimplification, naturally, is that the more convincing arguments don’t get enough air time. Unfortunately, I think that’s Mathews’ problem. He’s heard all the left’s slogans about fascism, and he’s on board (or at least willing to let his audience think he is) about hating it, but the slogans just aren’t all that convincing when you start to really think about them, and so he’s stuck. The slogans are all against straw man versions of fascism - wherein the state needs an external enemy to crush, etc. etc. But what if fascism really were about what it claims to be about? That is, what if it really were just a glorified tribalism, dedicated to the health of the state as a cohesive body, the promotion of the nation, to which each citizen owes obligations and from the strength of which he can expect to benefit if those obligations are met? And what if it admitted without prompting that the nation-state is an arbitrary construct, but a beneficial one, and made the argument explicitly that we have something to gain in breathing life into this construct? In fact, these are pretty popular ideas if you’ve ever spent much time in a bar, and, more to the point, they’re not all that inimical to the way Socialism is generally sold. Once you give up on the cartoon version with all its race hatred and homoerotic uniform fetishes, it gets a little more difficult to convince the average Joe that this stuff is poison. Which, of course, is the reason National Socialism - broadly defined - has such international appeal. If Mathews had made wrestling with these questions the centerpiece of the book from page one, he would’ve had a lot of really interesting stuff to write about. But again, the situation on the ground seems to be that one of the index cards in his pile said something like “give a more complex treatment of fascism,” and it was at the bottom of the pile, and so we only really deal with it as a result of a bunch of contrived plot turns there at the end of the book.

Exhibit Q, ladies and gentlemen, is that the book ends on elipsis. No shit - he actually tapered the book off with three dots - JUST in case you missed that the ending is ambiguous and deliberately refuses to tie up some loose ends.

So, OK, I’ll be avoiding the name Adrian Mathews like the plague in future - but I don’t necessarily think everyone should. If theme is what you read for, and you like questions posed but not answered, and you like to question taboo, and you’re looking to improve your vocabulary in the process, then this book is for you. And, let’s face it, I’ve just described the bread and butter of a certain breed of science fiction fan. There IS an audience for this kind of book, and for that audience, I would say that this is above-average fare. I am not a member of that audience, and so my opinion is pretty negative. Just thought I should make that clear.

Out of four stars? Two. For the interesting premise. And for the potential. This could’ve been a superior book if the author had been willing to do third and fourth drafts. Mathews may become a good writer someday, for all I know. So two. I wouldn’t call it grading on a curve, exactly, but it probably is generous.

There is an interesting but misguided post on io9 about a new show on Fox called Reincarnation. It speculates that this show is a watershed that means the end of TV SciFi as we know it.

Um, probably not. SciFi fans live with a not wholly unjustified seige mentality that they tend to take a little bit too far - and this is an example of “taking it too far.” Sure, there isn’t as much SciFi on TV as straight demographic research would suggest there should be, and sure, what SciFi does make it onto TV does have an annoying tendency to get made by people who confess in interviews that they hate SciFi. But meagre though our slice of the pie often seems to be, I don’t think it’s shrinking. Certainly it’s not shrinking in any unprecedented way that points to terminal decline for the genre!

But Charlie Jane Anders is annoyed enough by Reincarnation to think this might be The Big One - and I think it’s interesting why.

The show is apparently Dead Again: the TV Series. It involves a Mulder/Scully team consisting of a professional “Regression Therapist” - someone who takes people back into their PAST LIVES looking for the source of emotional trauma - and a disbelieving ex-police detective sidekick. Only this time Mulder is a girl and Scully is a guy, but no matter. Needless to say, past lives are real, and these episodes are all human interest/detective stories with the twist that there’s a supernatural element. A superficial glance at scenes from the pilot suggest that the supernatural element is just a schtick: there isn’t anything to put the “Speculative” in “Speculative Fiction” in this one at all.

That, of course, is the complaint - to wit, that this is the same kind of crap show generation algorithm that spawned the deplorable Quantum Leap. Take a SciFi premise, remove anything that could be remotely appealing to SciFi fans, and produce in its place a sentimental cliche porta-potty show that belongs on Lifetime, but market it to scifi fans anyway.

It’s easy to see why I’m not worried that Reincarnation is some kind of watershed. Quantum Leap came and went just ahead of a general explosion in SciFi programming in the 90s; it didn’t kill anything (except possibly its fans’ imaginations - but that was a mercy killing). The premise isn’t exactly the same, but the effect probably will be.

The thing is, detective novels and shows frequently resort of importing psychic themes to liven things up. There are countless examples of this being tried - and it never, ever works. And it just never will work, and that’s becuse the detective and psychic genres are simply not compatible.

Detective fiction serves to empower its readers - to make them feel more in control of the world around them. There are essentially three strategies you can take with this - let’s call them the Rationalist, Scientific, and Badass strategies. The Rationalist strategy is Agatha Christie and her many imitators. The detective hears the story from a couple of people, sits down for a while, thinks real hard, and figures the whole damn thing out. The message is that no matter what it is, it works according to the world’s logic, and any attempts to hide things will spawn inconsistencies that you can always spot if you just pay enough attention. The Scientific strategy is Sherlock Holmes and modern police procedurals. The message is that no matter what it is, it left little microfibers and scratches and some sort of lab test will tell you exactly what’s going on. The Badass strategy is Philip Marlowe and film noir. This is the coolest subgenre, being the most cynical - but even though the hero gets beat up a lot and left for dead, he always has a clear street smart, an uncanny ability to see through bullshit, that sets him apart from his world. The world may be rougher in noir, but the hero is still gifted with insight.

No matter which of these strategies a work of detective ficiton takes, it should be obvious that throwing in psychic elements brings the whole thing down. It’s no fun if the detective is handed the solution on a platter! Nor does it soothe anyone’s need to make rational sense out of the world if your crucial information all comes from somewhere the very nature of which you don’t understand. All psychic phenomena do in detective fiction is call attention to the fact that it’s the author doling out clues in a way that’s convenient for his story - precisely the meta-textual information that we have to be distracted from if we’re to believe in the story. It really is like pulling back the curtain on Oz and showing us that there’s a machine.

It’s also easy to see why this inherently unstable genre blend gets tried so often, despite virtually no record of success (OK - The X-Files - but you gotta admit that calling X-Files a detective show is pushing it). It just smacks of network executive out of touch gimmicks. They think “Well, ‘mystery’ is contained in ‘mysterious,’ so why don’t we have a mystery that’s REALLY mysterious!” Pedestrian fucking wankers.

io9 Commenter jokono gets it right:

Yeah, like Quantum Leap. Or… BSG. To me, BSG signaled the end of scifi.

BSG is, of course, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. And I totally agree. If TV SciFi dies and you want a plausible culprit for what killed it, look no further. BSG was a for-real trojan horse. It pretended to be SciFi so hard that it convinced a lot of us that it really was. It wasn’t a totally worthless ride. The first season and a half had some of the best and most consistent character interaction I’ve seen on a show of any genre ever. I was really in love with BSG for a while for that reason. But it was never SciFi, and unfortunately an awful lot of people kept hoping against hope that it would be long enough to make it to the final episode, which is just a giant spiders web that traps genre fans like flies and feeds them to the Evil Hippie Spider wholesale. We’re talking every retarded brainfart from the late 1960s in one giant technicolor bong, ladies and gentlemen: we decide to give up civilization as a bad mistake and never dream again. There is NOTHING less “SciFi” than that!

Reincarnation, as far as I can tell, doesn’t hate science fiction fans, doesn’t want to punish them for being science fiction fans, and isn’t marketing itself as hard scifi. It’s insipid, maybe, but it isn’t malicious. I wouldn’t worry about it. Every one of the approximately 6900 times this experiment in genre-blending has been tried, it has failed, and not with a bang, but a whimper. I see no reason to expect this one will fare any differently. If you want to worry about something, worry about Galactica. Or maybe Star Trek.

TOWM quote of the day comes from Paul Darrow (you know, Paul “you’re him, aren’t you?” Darrow - guy who played Avon in Blakes 7) who, asked about the possibility of a Blakes 7 remake at a convention in 2006 or so, replies:

It’s already been re-done. Has anyone seen Serenity?

A line worthy of Avon, really. Unfortunately, I’m now obligated to note that my source for this is a random post on Facebook from someone who was there when he said it. So, you know, it might be true.

On the up side, in the same thread someone points out a scene in the Firefly episode “The Train Job” where Jayne shoots Crow - saving Mal’s life - what might just maybe be a Blakes 7 reference.

MAL Nice shot!
JAYNE I was aimin’ for his head.

Here, as it happens, is Avon in season one’s “Orac”:

BLAKE Good shot, Avon.

AVON I was aiming for his head.

Yeah, looks like stock dialogue to me too. Could show up in any show. The idea that it’s a reference hinges on the idea that Mal is Firefly’s version of Blake and Jayne is Firefly’s version of Avon. It’s an interesting idea.

IFF (stressing that second “f”) Firefly really is such a transparent ripoff of Blakes 7 that all the characters have Blake analogues, then there’s certainly no doubt that Mal is Blake. And Zoe is a really good fit for Jenna, too. But is Jayne Avon? I can see the case. Avon was the most selfish, least moral character on Blakes 7 - the one who was very definitely in it for profit and profit only. So on that level it works. And then there’s the matter of Jayne’s intelligence. On the one hand, since Avon was clearly the most intelligent member of Liberator’s crew where Jayne is easily the least intelligent (ah, but is he really?) on Firefly, you could say they were opposites. On the other hand, it’s been pointed out before that opposites are alike in all respects but one, so the difference here only serves to highlight how otherwise the same they are. Back on the first hand again, intelligence was pretty crucial to who Avon was, so this isn’t really a parameter you can flip. But to go back to the other hand once more, maybe Jayne is a parody of Avon.

OK, so that’s three pretty good fits.

So who’s Kaylee? Off the top of my head, she’s Cally, and not just because of the name similarity. She’s the one most native to the quadrant, is also the “brainy,” technically inclined female, and - the cherry on top - there are hints (never very strong) that Jayne likes her. It helps that she’s the character that seems the least thought-out when the series starts (she seems more like a device for Whedon’s “I’m a feminist, but still realistic about how girls are” vanity) but grows into an identifiable individual in short order - no doubt due in large part to the acrtess’ stage presence.

And I guess Sheperd is Gan. Big guy, calm, strong, mysterious and possibly (well, make that “definitely” in Gan’s case) violent past. Seems interesting at the outset of the show but doesn’t really develop into anything; writers don’t seem to know where to go with him. Least useful member of the crew - definitely candidate for “most likely to die in the course of the series.”

Wash? I’m for Vila. Loyal enough but a bit of a coward. Loveable rogue. Has one outstanding and useful skill and boy is he good at it! Largely exists for comic relief.

And … done. But then there are the obvious problems of what to do with Simon and River. We could pair them with the computers - in which case Simon is Zen and River is Orac. It helps that we were never really sure whether to count Zen and Orac as full members of the crew: Simon and River are likewise of ambiguous status. And not just in that it’s not clear whether they really fit in - but also in that they’re peripheral characters in a lot of ways - there to further the plot when and as needed more than as interesting people in their own right. This is especially true of River - the least convincing character of the show. Little more than a walking gimmick to my mind. And, well, who can really say different of Orac?

OK, so this is working out a bit better than I thought when I started. I thought to get about as far as Wash and give up - say something like “Of course, the fact that I can’t decide whether it’s Simon or Wash who’s Vila or Zen - or if maybe it isn’t Jayne that’s Gan - means that we’re forcing pegs into holes here.” But actually, I’m pretty satisfied with this analysis. Which doesn’t say a lot of Whedon’s originality, really. No, these characters aren’t perfect matches, and yes, there’re a lot of significant differences between each and his counterpart, and yes, those differences are great enough that calling Firefly a blatant copy of Blakes 7 would be A LIE. But it really is looking more and more like Firefly pretty directly took Blake as a template - flipped some bits here and there, shuffled some characteristics between the leads, smuggled in a few ideas from elsewhere and … rightclick, open window, BAM! new show!

In which case, kudos to Paul Darrow for saying it out loud. And - to get me back where I started - maybe there are grounds for thinking that scene a Blake reference after all. If so, I’m sincerely glad to hear it. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t mind so much about Firefly riffing on Blake if we got some nods now and then. The wider world doesn’t even have to notice - just some occasional winks at us Blake fans that say he hasn’t forgotten his roots. Maybe we are getting them, and it’s my fault for not noticing.

The guy who made the claim says there are two other such duplicated scenes but he couldn’t point to them from memory. So - looks like I’ve found an excuse to rewatch Firefly! Not that I, um, have time to do that right now…

Redemption is one of Blakes 7 more delightfully subversive episodes, and is enjoyable for that reason. Spoilers follow.

The butt of the joke here is Prophecy-as-Literary-Device. Series One ended with a bang … literally, as the newly-acquired Orac showed onscreen the “immutable certainty” of a ship that looks very much like Liberator exploding “not far distant.” Of course, since that was last season, it’s easy to forget how carefully Orac phrased his “prediction:”

BLAKE It’s not much of a prediction, just travelling through space.

ORAC It is not a prediction; it is an immutable certainty. Space vehicle will be destroyed.

The two points worth noting are, of course, that Orac talks of “space vehicle” rather than “Liberator” (though, as far as anyone knows at this point Liberator is unique), and that he insists that it is “not a prediction; it is an immutable certainty.” It’s a nice twist by the end of the series two opener Redemption we know that it was indeed not a prediction but rather a self-fulfilled prophecy: Orac destroys the ship (which is of the same model as Liberator, but is not actually Liberator) just to make sure his “immutable certainty” comes true. Not that Orac’s hiding this much. Here it is at the begining of the episode:

BLAKE Orac, why won’t you give us the background to that prediction?

ORAC Because that would invalidate the prediction.

BLAKE And if we knew the future in detail we could change it, and so it wouldn’t be the future.

ORAC Correct. That is the paradox of prediction.

In other words, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill myself.”

The episode opens with the tension between Blake and Avon turned up to 11. Avon - presumably as a result of his treatment in Deliverance - is newly-resolved to take a bigger share in the decision-making that goes on aboard Liberator, and he’s taking every opportunity to show Blake up. The most interesting of these attempts comes with the smug way he drops the hint that he knows how to avoid Orac’s prophecy.

BLAKE How long have you been there?

AVON I was here when you came in.

BLAKE Why didn’t you speak?

AVON I had nothing in particular to say. Besides, you looked as though you were planning something you didn’t want the rest of us to know about.

BLAKE Orac’s prediction still hasn’t come into effect. I am trying to find some reason why he was wrong.

AVON Have you found what you want?

BLAKE No.

AVON That’s because you’re looking for the wrong things.

BLAKE What exactly does that mean?

AVON It’s a common enough failing. Now if you’ve finished with Zen, I’d quite like to get on; we have a malfunction on the intermediate range sensors. I need to check the systems.

BLAKE Leave it! If I’ve missed something, I want to know what it is now, Avon.

AVON Well now, all you had to do was ask. Zen! Replay, half speed.

Avon has apparently been hovering about waiting for Blake to start obsessing over the prediction - just so that he could be superior about it. But the real point here, of course, is that Avon is announcing that he will no longer be volunteering information. He is smarter than the rest of the crew, he knows it, and as a more valuable crewmember, he’s renegotiating his contract - such as things are - to get a better position. I find this a nice touch. It’s plausible that he would’ve spent the 13 adventures they had in the previous season testing the waters, making sure that everyone was as they seemed. Satisfied that he is indeed the superior intellect he believes himself to be, and probably stung a bit by Blake’s dismissive attitude to his display of natural leadership ability in Deliverance, Avon is finally asserting himself.

BLAKE Do you think you could forget your superiority complex for a moment and get on with it?

AVON All right. But first of all, let us examine the nature of prediction. The human mind is capable of seeing into the short- range future with reasonable accuracy. For example, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff.

BLAKE As long as you’re not standing behind me.

AVON [Pause] There are a number of alternative futures. You could take a pace forward and plunge to your death. The cliff could crumble under your feet with the same result. A gust of wind could carry you over.

BLAKE All right, all right, yes. But the probability is that I would turn round and walk away again.

AVON Exactly. You have just made a prediction based on the known facts. A computer works on precisely the same principle.

BLAKE But all you’re saying is that prediction is not immutable fact.

AVON Right. If you hadn’t gone near the cliff in the first place, you wouldn’t have had to face any of the inherent dangers.

BLAKE So?

AVON Zen, selective magnification. Show us the background.

ZEN Confirmed. [Zooms into starfield on the main screen]

AVON Look at it, Blake. Look at the configuration of the stars. That position is unique in the universe.

So it’s simple: avoid going there and Orac’s prediction can’t come true. The catch, of course, is that Orac is not human, and Orac has access to a a considerably greater number of facts than Avon does. Like, for example, the fact that the people who previously owned Liberator are coming back to get it. If an outsider has a code that can override your computer systems and gain control over the piloting functions of your ship, it’s pretty hard to guarantee that you don’t end up at precisely the coordinates Orac predicted you would. And this is, of course, exactly what happens. So Avon is smart, but Orac is smarter.

But even Orac isn’t infallible - and interestingly, the point of Orac’s making the prediction in the first place seems to be exactly the same as Avon’s withholding information about what it means: Orac is ensuring he isn’t taken for granted. He’s demonstrating that he has a lot of relevant information, and that he controls how and when it is dispensed. All of which is a pretty prescient view of power for the pre-internet 70s!

The underlying truth about prophecy, then, is something any economist could’ve told you: it only ever works in the short-term, and when you have ALL the relevant facts, and when you make rational assumptions about what people will do (they walk away from cliffs rather than jumping to their deaths in the general case). “Prophecy,” then, is just rational prediction dressed up in all kinds of vagueries and/or missing crucial bits of information. In exactly the same way that “magic” is just technology we don’t understand, “prophecy” is just prediction made on the basis of facts to which we don’t have full access. Unsurprisingly, then, it’s the rational Avon who sees through the charade while the others obsess in fear.

By the end of the episode, when Orac blows up the pursuing ship just to make sure his “immutable certainty” comes to pass, everyone is less impressed. Which is rather a wry deconstructionist comment on the genre, if you ask me. For Orac is using prophecy here in the same way that a fantasy author does. If you get to control the flow of events, and if you further have the luxury of not being very specific about what the prophecy means, then it’s not very impressive when you “cleverly” manage to make things work out technically as you predicted, but in some unexpected way. If you’re the one pulling the trigger on the ship that explodes, it’s no fair calling it a “prediction.” “Immutable certainty,” which Orac does call it, is much more like it, actually.

The overall point seems to be a kind of comment on Blake’s sense of destiny. Sure, in some sense the course of events in the universe is entirely determined. Physical laws are inviolable, and people put in situations will respond according to their natures. But there is no “destiny” in any meaningful sense - because to make accurate predictions about the future we have to have a lot more information than we do, or a lot more control over things than we do. Since we have neither complete information nor total control, long-term prediction is sort of pointless (a point made all the more accute by the sheer number of implausible-seeming lucky breaks that enable Blake to escape once the ship has been captured). The best you can do is get your philosophy straight and react to events as they happen. All of which is a nice foreshadowing of what will go wrong with Blake this season: he spends too much time looking at the forest and not enough negotiating his way through the trees.

Despite the satisyfing philosophical point, though, I can’t really count this as one of the greats. It’s a typical Terry Nation epsisode - high on action, excitement and cleverness, but not much for Sense of Wonder. The cool thing about Liberator up to this point is its uncanniness. It looks and feels like a human spaceship, but its origin and superior functionality is a mystery. We don’t know who built it, or how it came to be abandoned Marie Celeste-style - and that was Very Cool. Having its owners come back to reclaim it is a bit of a let-down - especially given that they’re not very interesting. Just some kind of computer-run society devoid of personality. Although - it’s interesting that the controllers are all women. As is Servalan, actually. And as were the people who staged the fight between Travis and Blake in Duel. Nation seems to equate female control with technologically advanced but soulless societies.

Still, I suppose they couldn’t have pulled this one off without Liberator’s owners involved. At least, I can’t think of any more plausible way to get the crew to an exact location in the galaxy they’re trying to avoid - certainly no more plausible way that allows that Orac knew what he was takling about when he made the prediction. So - 3 out of 5 for sheer fun and useful philosophical musing. Two points come off for answering questions about things better left mysterious.

History tells us that Terry Nation wrote all the scripts for series one of Blakes 7 - albeit with more than the occasional nudge from script editor Chris Boucher. It also tells us that series one came off on a wing and a prayer. Nation went into the program planning meeting that resulted in Blakes 7 without any idea what he was talking about (claims not to even remember what he said at the meeting) and suddenly found himself solely responsible for a new space opera. This, the experts tell us, explains some of the sub-par plotting in the first year. By the end of the series, Nation was running out of ideas - and it is this that gives us stinkers like “Mission to Destiny” and “Bounty.” General consensus is that things picked back up for the finale - a two-parter consisting of Deliverance and Orac (in which we finally meet Orac). But I have never been one to follow consensus.

Both parts are generally inferior episodes with oases of truly redeeming scenes. Of the two, “Deliverance” is more enjoyable than “Orac.”

There are two good things about “Deliverance.” One is the standard case of Blakes 7 taking a tired Star Trek vanity and presenting it in more realistic terms. In this case, the reference point seems to be the much-derided Spock’s Brain - the one where a race of beautiful women steal Spock’s Brain to run their underground compound. The men on the Sigma Draconis VI are all savages and live on the surface, which is in some kind of ice age. Well, same setup here, only instead of an ice age, the surface is war-ravaged and the natives (of whom some are probably female - it’s hard to tell) are all mutants. In the nick of time Avon, Gan and Villa are admitted to an underground compound - this one with only the one beautiful woman. But she’s just as ignorant as the ones on Sigma Draconis VI, and she seems to assume that Avon is some kind of prophesied savior who will deliver their people. In this case, the people are all frozen gene samples on a rocket, and what Avon is expected to do is launch it. Never mind that the setup is hugely improbable (how is there only this one remaining priestess? And how did the underground civilization manage to collapse just in time for no one to be able to punch the launch sequence, but everyone apparently remembers enough about it to be sure an educate their children that Avon is coming to do it for them someday?). The point is that Avon reacts believably. Since there is clearly no point in trying to talk this woman out of a lifetime of cultural delusion, and since he anyway needs her help to affect his rescue of Jenna (captured by the surface mutant locals apparently for breeding stock), he simply plays along with her idea that he is the Second Coming. He’s even kind enough to launch her rocket for her in return. I appreciated this - since in the Star Trek version, as you may have guessed if you haven’t seen it - Kirk is able to talk the Eyemorg out of their entire comfortable subterranean way of life into going back to the surface and breeding with the noble savage men running around in furs up there. Uh-huh. Because I know from experience here on Earth that if someone’s culture has goofy religious beliefs, it is always possible to correct them with conversation. Especially if you gesture and punctuate your syllables dramatically, like Captain Kirk does.

The other good thing about “Deliverance” is the growing conflict between Blake and Avon. This will get turned up to 11 in the opener of series 2, but it’s nice to see it subtly growing here. I guess the tradeoff with having Terry Nation write ALL the scripts is that in exchange for occasional mental exhaustion on plotting we get remarkably consistent character development. The main point of this episode seems to be to show us that Avon is a much better leader than he’s given credit for - possibly better than Blake - and that if no one else recognizes this yet, Avon himself clearly does. The episode opens with Blake giving Avon instructions on heading what is apparently his first (official) away mission. Avon wryly comments that all the advice seems to be motivated by a fear on Blake’s part that Avon will show more of a talent for leadership than he does:

BLAKE Life forms?

ZEN There is no current information. Logic units suggest that remaining life may have mutated through exposure to high radiation.

BLAKE None of which sounds very promising. [To Avon] You’re sure you want to go down?

AVON Are you afraid that I’ll be able to cope with it better than you?

BLAKE [Chuckles] No.

AVON Well, perhaps you ought to be.

And perhaps he ought to be at that. The team is teleporting to the planet to recover escape pods from a ship they have just seen explode. They are able to locate them, but Jenna is caputred. She is with Gan, and not Avon, at the time (Avon and Villa are elsewhere), and Gan does not deny this, but Blake blames Avon and angrily orders him back. Here’s where it gets interesting. Avon just takes the abuse, clearly accepting proper responsibility for what happened on his watch, even though there is no way he could’ve prevented it, and if anyone Gan is actually to blame. Blake is in any case overreacting (Jenna is clearly his favorite among the crew - there are hints of a romance between them), but rather than point this out to him Avon simply gives Blake his promise that they will find her. Avon, it seems, understands leadership perfectly well, and handles it in a much more calm and collected fashion than does Blake. We get further evidence that Avon is a natural leader when they are rescued by the mysterious priestess woman who lives in the underground compound. She senses by instinct that Avon is in charge, and perhaps even fudges prophecy a bit to make it come out so that he can be the one to save them. What all of this adds up to is a heavy dose of irony at the end of the episode when this exchange takes place:

CALLY Meegat does. [To Avon] Did she really think you were a god?

AVON For a while.

BLAKE How did it feel?

AVON Don’t you know?

BLAKE Yes. I don’t like the responsibility, either. [Avon rises, looks at Blake, then leaves the flight deck.]

A pointed look. Blake is making assumptions here. In fact, Avon seems quite at home with the responsibility, and seems to handle it more easily than Blake - probably because he’s unencumbered by Blake’s sentimentality. Here in the real world, Spock really is a better captain than Kirk - something that will become a major theme of the second series.

“Orac” is a pretty miserable episode on the whole, greatly redeemed by the interesting character of Ensor - Orac’s creator. I think the reason why this episode and all its glaring plot holes gets such a pass from fans is … well, it’s probably mostly to do with the fact that this is the episode where they meet Orac. Admitting that this bit of series history transpires in a sub-par episode probably causes short circuits in fanboys’ brains. But it’s also because Ensor the Genius Curmudgeon is so much fun. I enjoyed the scenes with him, and it’s sort of too bad they couldn’t have found a way to keep him around for a few more episodes.

There is one other good moment. Servalan is genuinely frightened by one of the Phibians in the tunnels of the old city. This was quite a nice touch, and one that’s very much at home with the image-versus-reality character theme that runs throughout the show. Servalan, much like Avon, cultivates an appearance of being cold, ruthless, and constantly in control that has as much to do with how she wants to see herself as it does with how she actually is. In the predecessor episode “Deliverance” we got to see her trying to impress this vision of herself on Travis - who shows signs of being unimpressed, but politely going through the motions anyway because he needs her to find Blake. Here, outside of her comfortable office and not surrounded by her protective guard, she screams when things jump out at her. Not so collected as she would appear, then.

But on the whole, the plot holes make this one impossible to enjoy. Now, most of them are not technically plot holes. For example, one often hears complaining on the internet about the fact that Blake, Cally and Ensor have to run through the tunnels to get out from the shield in order to teleport back to Liberator on the pretext that it takes the shield 5 hours to dissipate when we’ve only just seen the shield lowered and restored as Blake walked in. Technically, though, this isn’t a plothole at all since presumably the place they’re running to through the tunnels is precisely the place at which Blake and Cally entered earlier - i.e. the shield has a designated entrance point.

That’s all very well, of course, but fans are still right to be bothered by this. It doesn’t matter if it technically works - fiction is like a magic trick in that what’s actually plausible is less important than how you sell it. And this doesn’t get sold at all - it feels like an excuse to have everyone have to go through the tunnels so that Ensor can die along the way, and we can have our final, onsurface confrontation with Servalan and Travis out in the open where Avon can save the day. It works according to the logic of the world, but not according to the spirit of these things.

And just why was Ensor so close to death anyway? If your life is sustained by a pacemaker that runs on batteries that last 40 years, give or take a few, then surely you send out for replacements after 30 years of use? Why has Ensor waited until the last possible moment to send his son out for a recharge? If he has the components in his compound necessary to build something like Orac, surely we can conclude that they’ve been making supply runs all this time? Why put off the crucial batteries? I suppose someone will be clever and say “you cut it close to get the maximum life out of the batteries, since they decay on the shelf, after all.” OK, maybe. But you still don’t cut it this close!

But the moment that brings the whole thing down for me is that final confrontation. I can take almost any amount of punishment in my plots, so long as the characters remain believable. But that is, unfortunately, just where this one goes wrong. Travis is completely obsessed with finding and killing Blake. He even overlooks the fact that Servalan murdered one of his loyal associates (whatever Travis’ many faults, a tendency to betrayal is apparently not one of them) to stay in her good graces so that he can get his command back, something that he evidently considered essential to finding Blake. He accompanies Servalan on this unauthorized (and apparently unnecessary) mission to steal Orac in that spirit. They’re violating Federation directives in hiding this errand from the authorities - something Travis can’t afford to have discovered if he ever hopes to get his commission back. He’s taking a real risk here. Which really does beg the question - if he’s stuck his neck out like this and compromised his morals (such as they are) like this just to get Blake, why in the hell would he, now that Blake is unarmed and in his sights, actually hold fire on Servalan’s orders? It just doesn’t add up. Perhaps we’re meant to think that Travis isn’t quite as obessessed as he lets on? But nothing up to this point has given us any cause to think so. Travis seems the type to get this obsessed over killing an opponent; we believe him when he says nothing matters but killing Blake. Only now, apparently, taking orders from the woman who killed one of his associates (something he pretty clearly disapproves of) is more important? It’s not even as though Servalan could report him for this: she’s not supposed to be here any more than he is. Avon’s restraint is equally implausible. He’s complained before that they didn’t kill Travis when they had the chance. Well, now he has the chance. Servalan and Travis don’t know that Avon is about until he fires. One does wonder why he waits until Travis is aiming at Blake to pull the trigger. It’s possible, of course, that he’s only just shown up (only how? How did he get inside the force shield? Previously we’ve needed Orac open the portal, and no one seems to have given such an order…). But even so, why wouldn’t Avon just disobey Blake’s order not to shoot here? Avon has the gun and Blake doesn’t, after all.

Avon’s subordination is more believable than Travis’, but neither is particularly in character. All told, this scene, as do many points in this episode, has the heavy feel of the author’s plotting hand at work. Avon didn’t finish killing Travis because we want Travis around for future episodes. Travis doesn’t shoot Blake for exactly the same reason. And they’re only here having this little exchange in the first place because the force shield just happens to function in such a way that requires them to be here. It’s all so very convenient.

No, this episode is horrible. It just doesn’t work at all. Yes, it’s interesting to know where Orac came from. Yes, it’s nice to see that Servalan is a big faker. And sure, Ensor was fun to hang out with for a bit there. But none of this is stuff that couldn’t have been done with a more competent script. Terry Nation was exhausted by the end of the series, and it shows.

Fortunately, he would have some help in series two, which would be the best year of the show, and one of the best in scifi television.

Bounty isn’t one of series one’s high points, but it’s interesting that it’s nowhere near as bad as it probably should’ve been.

Even if I hadn’t read the story on the internets, I would’ve had my suspicions. Bounty, it seems, is a bastard child filler episode. Terry Nation apparenty turned in a script that was inadequately short - filling barely half the alotted time - and so Chris Boucher had to fill in the gaps. Which he did by writing a completely separate script and unceremoniously gluing them together. It’s amazing that it works - and, OK, it doesn’t really - at all. Somehow it manages to be the same good ol’ show.

The plot goes something like this. As the story opens, Jenna and Blake are on some planet somewhere looking for some important prisoner who lives in a goofy castle and drives - erm, is driven - around in a 20th century motorcar. Blake and Jenna sneak in to find that he isn’t directly aware of being a prisoner at all. He prefers to think of the Federation troops that follow him around everywhere as a kind of honor guard - personal protection or something. He seems to think that Blake has come to kill him and is strangely not disturbed by the idea. It turns out that he’s the disgraced president of a planet called Lindor (any relation to the chocolatier is purely coincidental I’m sure). Blake seems to think the Federation rigged the election that deposed him as a way of generating strife - apparently the former president is the only candidate who forms an acceptable compromise for the most powerful factions. By sowing strife, the Federation is hoping to trigger a civil war that will give it a pretext for annexation. So far so typical.

Sarkoff (the former president) doesn’t want to go back and fight. Blake won’t take no for an answer, and eventually coerces Sarkoff into coming back with him to Lindor by smashing all his toys (no, really). Can’t have our toys smashed, so we’re off.

Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated plot development, the Liberator has been captured by some of Jenna’s old pals who are from the Negative Arab Stereotype planet. They tricked Liberator into thinking that they were a distressed civilian liner, so naturally Gan teleported over. They then synthesized his voice to order Avon to teleport “Gan” home and seized the ship from there, putting booby-trapped collars around the necks of the crew in the process. Zen is typically uncooperative throughout, but doesn’t seem to mind taking orders from the Arabs. Jenna pretends to betray the crew to gain the Arabs’ trust and then feed them a flimsy story about having hidden treasure on the ship to split them up so that she can knock them out and go rescue the crew, which is being held in a nondescript room somewhere. Since this is Blakes 7, she’s only in the middle of her plan when the crew gets out on its own and they all make it to the bridge to overpower the pirates just in the nick of time to blast Liberator out of the way of approaching Federation ships. They deposit Sarkoff and daughter on Lindor as per original plan. Since the show continues from here, we deduce that Lindor isn’t that vital a strategic asset, but maybe the Federation has to eat a little crow.

OK - so the plot about Sarkoff and the plot about Jenna’s faux “betrayal” have nothing to do with one another. At all. But we know what’s up: Chris Boucher wrote one (the political plot, I presume) and Terry Nation the other, and they then grafted them together with a soldering iron. Both plots are, in their own way, filler stories. The story about Jenna’s “betrayal,” in which she fails to do anything the crew doesn’t end up doing for itself without her help, seems mainly a vehicle for giving her something to do besides agree with Blake. And the story on the planet exists primarily to remind us that Cally (a) exists and (b) is telepathic. The fact that it’s Gan that needs to teleport over to the approaching ship just rounds out the unholy trinity: this is the week where the actors who play the minor characters earn their salaries.

Each of the two plots are pretty forgetable on their own - and since Boucher and Nation never really make them depend on one another, all things equal this episode should’ve gone down in the annals of Blake fandom as one of the worst. But I see from discussion on the internet that a lot of people like it (it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s favorite, mind you!) in spite of its many flaws, and I am inclined to agree. What follows is my assessment of its redeeming (”redeeming” in its literal meaning, for once) qualities.

First - the treatment of the politician Sarkoff is a showcase of what makes Blakes 7 unusual. In a way that is both understated and accurate, we’re given a believable figure for the role. Sarkoff is no one’s idea of an inspiring politician, and it’s difficult to see how he could’ve united anything, let alone channeled an entire planetary government’s will to resist annexation. He plays with 20th century artifacts, for cryin’ out loud! But unlike in most TV SciFi, where collectors of 20th century “artifacts” and appreciators of 20th century “culture” are one of the least plausible cliches in the genre’s miserable closet of embarassing tics, Sarkoff’s habit actually makes a believable point. This is a chastened boy who, hurt by his planet’s rejection and frightened of responsibility, retreats to his bedroom to live in a fantasy world. The implication is clear: Sarkoff isn’t an inspiring or visionary figure - he’s a typical politician to whom popularity is everything and principle a distant second place. This has the double benefit of making Blake’s story believable: the planet is descending into civil war not because their chief visionary has left them directionless, but rather because the only acceptable compromise in an inherently unstable situation (presumably the one all factions believe they can manipulate to a satisfactory degree, and who offends none of them directly) is no longer on the ballot. It helps immensely that in the one scene where the two otherwise completely unrelated plots tie together - where Sarkoff and his daughter Tyce are discussing the inevitable handover of Blake to the Federation for bounty with the pirate king Tarvin - Sarkoff speculates that winning is more important than being morally correct:

SARKOFF Nothing was further from my mind. I welcome Blake’s capture.

TARVIN Why? What’s he done to you?

TYCE He didn’t give up. He fought. Blake shamed him.

SARKOFF And in the end lost, it was inevitable.

TARVIN Inevitable. I am the better man.

TYCE You? Selfish, greedy, vicious–

TARVIN I WON.

SARKOFF Yes, my dear, you see, it’s a, it’s a paradox. He won because he is not the better man.

TARVIN What?!

SARKOFF And yet by winning, it seems, he becomes a prince among people.

TARVIN Among MY people.

SARKOFF Does it matter which people, Tarvin? Do you care?

Sarkoff is trying to make a virtue out of his loss in a way that frees him from the responsibility of taking the chance Blake has offered him. It’s a cowardly mental evasion - but a perfectly believably one for a throwaway politician character. Star Trek’s version of Sarkoff would’ve been a genuine hero beaten down by circumstances who, after a few choice words from Kirk to appropriately dramatic background music, would’ve rediscovered the will to fight and gone back to do so - a man of destiny. Blakes 7’s Sarkoff is just a man, and pretty mediocre one at that. But since that’s what most politicians seem to be, I’ll take Blake’s realism over Star Trek’s camp any day. As a bit of an aside - I think Sarkoff may be meant to be a bit of Jim Callaghan satire. You know, the amiable, likeable but not particularly special or heroic man who happens to be on duty when the ship starts to sink and does what he can, but everyone suspects isn’t trying as hard as he should. Airing on 13 March 1978, it would’ve preceded the Winter of Discontent by half a year or so, meaning that the splintering of the pacts with the trade unions that caused it was well underway. The “warring factions” on Lindor may well be a reference to the public and private-sector trade unions, and Sarkoff as the hapless only acceptable compromise may be a reference to the widespread perception in Britain at the time that Callaghan’s greatest and only virtue was that he was more or less acceptable to both the militant and moderate wings of the Labour Party and - as a Labour PM - someone the trade unions would actually listen to. That is, the only acceptable compromise, despite (or perhaps because of) being ironically pretty ineffectual on the whole.

Second - I absolutely adored the fact that Jenna’s heroic faux betrayal and rescue attempt turn out to be completely unnecessary. The story goes that Jenna pretends to betray Blake and crew to the pirates (whom she apparently knows from her own smuggler past) in order to avoid capture herself, hoping to gain an opportunity to free them. And on any other space opera, that’s exactly how things would’ve unfolded. There would’ve been some stock confrontations where the crew laments ever having trusted Jenna, a camera focus on her conflicted face, and then she would’ve pulled off her rescue attempt flawlessly. As it happens, her rescue attempt is constantly frustrated by pirate guards finding her sneaking about and her having to come up with explanations for them. This delays her long enough that Avon and Villa have time to break the locks on the door and the collars all by themselves: they don’t end up needing Jenna’s help, so her “betrayal” act is for nothing in the end. The other nice twist is the ambiguous feelings of the rest of the crew toward the whole thing. No one’s attitude toward Jenna changes much, and they seem to have no trouble accepting that her betrayal was just an act. And that is, of course, as it would be. The relations among this crew are shaky - and all of them, each to differing degrees, would probably accept that Jenna was just her keeping her options open. The pirates were her old pals, after all, and there’s no reason not to exploit that loophole when the alternative is certain capture by the Federation. They all seem to tacitly respect her right to self-preservation. When it turns out that her betrayal was a ruse, no one seems surprised, and there is no visible damage to their trust in her. They all understand it according to their own predilections (Avon probably on the principle that pirates aren’t very trustworthy people, and so Blake is the safer bet - Blake of course on the belief that they’re really friends, and you do what you can to help your friends), and the writers have enough faith in the audience to get that we understand this without needing to resort to expository dialogue.

Indeed, I think the main reason why everyone seems to like this episode in spite of its obvious and many flaws is that the character development was all right on point. Much has been made of the fact, for example, that Avon and Jenna leave Vila alone on the bridge and responsible for blasting the approaching ship to bits with Gan on it at the first sign of treachery, even though he’s the least likely of the three to actually follow through on the plan. It’s argued that Avon in particular wouldn’t have trusted Vila to follow through and so would’ve insisted on remaining behind himself. And yet - to me this seems perfectly consistent, in a sly way, with what we know about Avon. Avon’s self-image as the cold calculator, always willing to sacrifice his friend if it’s in his interest, isn’t exactly “all bark and no bite,” but it’s still as much image as it is substance, and there are plenty of instances where Avon prefers to bark if he doesn’t have to bite. This may be one of them. Avon may be less willing to kill Gan than he lets on, only if he stays on the bridge and it turns out to be a trap he know he’ll have to kill Gan, and further that he really is capable of doing it. Leaving the bridge allows him to kid himself that he’s every bit as cold as he says without having to put it to actual test - NOT in the Star Trek sense that he’ll “fail” the test by turning sentimental at the last minute, but in the Blakes 7 sense that he really will end up killing Gan if it comes to that and possibly regretting it. And yet, Avon would be right kill Gan to save the ship. Like the politician Sarkoff, in other words, he’s allowing circumstances to take control so that he doesn’t have to assume responsibility for doing something that he’s just as comfortable not having to do. Avon wants Gan to live, and he’s even willing to take the associated risks to give Gan a fighting chance. What he ISN’T willing to do is admit that that’s what he’s doing - and so he leaves Vila in the hotseat knowing good and well that Vila won’t fire. Very interesting.

Likewise, I didn’t find it at all unrealistic that it was Avon who chastised Jenna in the most explicit terms for betraying her friends in that scene in the holding room.

GAN Hello, Jenna. [The prisoners are sitting around the walls, with their hands behind their backs as if still bound. Jenna walks about the cell, "inspecting" them. She comes across the discarded manacles, pauses, and moves on.]

JENNA I’m glad to see that you are all behaving yourselves. Tarvin doesn’t want you damaged, unless necessary.

BLAKE We’re touched by his concern.

JENNA It’ll be more impressive if he can hand you over alive.

GAN A man who takes pride in his work.

CALLY What do you take pride in, Jenna?

JENNA Survival.

AVON At the expense of your friends?

JENNA I didn’t know that you cared, Avon.

VILA He didn’t. And he was right. [Jenna exits.]

It’s a nice touch, of course, that this dialogue goes on mainly for the guard’s benefit: Jenna already knows they’re mostly finished freeing themselves (though they don’t know she knows). A lot of people have complained that it’s Avon - the one who values friendship the least - who is the quickest to chastise Jenna for betraying her friends. But I find it completely believable. Admittedly, the show is still in its infancy at this point, but as the show plays out Avon comes to learn about friendship and to make an uneasy peace with it. The writers have this EXACTLY right: if Avon is the one talking about it now in the most explicit terms, that’s because he’s the one who understands it the least. All the others already believe in friendship (to varying degrees) - take it for granted, even. Avon’s the one who would like to believe in it, but can’t quite bring himself to trust anyone enough. He’s in a space where he’s not entirely sure whether to trust in the bonds forming between him and his companions, or to stick to his philosophy of never taking anything on faith and always doing what’s in his immediate self interest. It isn’t that he’s the one most hurt by Jenna’s “betrayal,” it’s that he’s the one who most needs to know whether she really has betrayed them. Blake, the man of faith, is predictably unphazed:

CALLY [Listening at the door] They’ve gone. [Avon goes back to work on the door lock.]

VILA [Works on Blake's neckband] I wouldn’t have thought it of Jenna.

BLAKE I’m still not sure that I believe it.

AVON What does she have to do to convince you, Blake — personally blow your head off?

VILA If this goes wrong she won’t get the chance.

Lots will read that as Avon’s typical cynicism. But notice what it’s about: information. I think behind the sarcastic quips there is a level at which Avon means this question quite literally. He really would like to know on just what basis it is that Blake continues to hold out hope that Jenna is his friend.

Bounty doesn’t REALLY work, of course. However much of a Jim Callaghan reference Sarkoff might be, it’s not really plausible that planetary survival comes down to the one man. Nor is the way in which the pirates located and overpowered Liberator entirely believable. And we certainly don’t buy that Tarvin would buy Jenna’s story about there being treasure on the ship. It helps that they play the scene in such a way that he seems to genuinely not believe it: he’s just playing the lottery in the “what do I have to lose?” sense. But of course he DOES have a lot to lose, and that’s why I don’t htink he would’ve listened much. The low point of the episode for me, though, was the cheesy “greedy Arab” stereotyping of the pirates. I get that racial sensitivities weren’t so high in the 70s, but even then they surely could’ve seen through THIS degree of selfishness. The line Tarvin gives about how he sold his grandmother - “but only because she was going to sell me!” - is the kind of low-grade camp that should be below Blakes 7. It might make a nice throwaway joke if it weren’t such a cliche - but it really does undercut my ability to suspend my disbelief here in exactly the same way the Ferengi always do on Star Trek. No society that ruthlessly acquisitive makes it to the stars.

Still, given that they were working under the gun while Terry Nation was fighting some serious writer’s block, this is much better than we might have hoped for. Like most of the reviews I read, I give it two stars. Not good, not bad - watchable.

Having just rewatched season one of Babylon 5, it was a bit of serendipity to come across this excellent essay on the show by Abigail Nussbaum, Israeli computer scientist and (hobbyist?) genre literary critic.

Like Nussbaum, I have a complicated history with Babylon 5. I missed (didn’t even know about) the pilot when it aired - apparently around the same time the execrable Deep Sleep Nine hit the waves (this one I watched with friends as it broadcast). Which is just as well, because it turns out to be wince-inducing to an almost unbelievable degree. More on this later. The following year the series proper went on the air, and being the nerd I am me and my equally nerdy roommates counted down the days to showtime. So imagine my disappointment when they opened with Midnight on the Firing Line, which was pretty god-awful in its own right. I decided immediately I was done with the thing. My somewhat more forgiving roomies talked me into watching the second episode, but about halfway through I realized I had forgotten to check that the number of bristles in my toothbrush was some multiple of a prime. I’m pretty sure they watched episode three before giving up themselves, but in any case Babylon 5 ended up symbolizing for all of us everything that’s ever been wrong with TV SciFi.

Several years later, when I guess the show was somewhere near the beginning of season 3, unrelated friends started telling me they liked it. And since these were people I respected who were not necessarily science fiction devotees, I eventually decided to give it a second chance. I found some reruns on one of my trips home on TNT and watched them and was - well, I was going to say “pleasantly surprised,” but “shocked” is more like it. It was suddenly really engaging. I cared what happened, was curious about even minor plot details - and yet, it was so clearly the same awful show I remembered from 1994. Cognitive dissonance is a bear, what can I say? When I told my old roomies I was watching it I mostly got smirks. I’m pretty sure to this day they haven’t gone back and given it a second view.

I ended up buying all four seasons (like Nussbaum, I’m reluctant to count season 5 as part of the same show, though unlike her I recognize a couple of good episodes in there) as they came out on DVD to get caught up, and I’ve seen the whole thing through a couple of times now. But that was all pre-gradschool. Since I’ve been here (i.e. since 2003), I’ve had to budget my time a bit better, and so it was only recently that I thought about going through it all again. But I did over the last couple of weeks rewatch season one and … well, damned if I don’t feel like I’m back at square one.

Here’s Nussbaum:

Up until now, I’ve always thought of B5 as a better-than-average show with a poor first season, an execrable fifth season, and three deeply flawed yet ultimately successful middle seasons. And as it turns out, I was wrong, because Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows.

It does at that. And she’s even right about why:

More than anything else, Babylon 5 is a show for teenagers. The overblown dialogue, the broad humor, the melodramatic plots, the frequent monologues and speeches, and just in general the show’s palpable sense of its own profundity must have been irresistible to the teenage set–to viewers looking for something grand and inspiring who weren’t too interested in, or capable of, noticing the bad writing and obvious plotting.

All correct. And I’d like to leave it at that, I really would. But this all puts me in quite a difficult situation. If the show is such crap, and I know it’s crap, and it’s obvious that I always knew it was crap even from day one when I could barely make myself sit through the first episode … then why do I still enjoy it? And why do I still enjoy it not in the “guilty pleasure” sense of watching something like That 70s Show, but enjoy it as for-real escapism?

The only thing I can come up with in which MY BRAIN isn’t simultaneously inhabited by a 48-year-old Pakistani shoplifter is that Babylon 5 did manage to accomplish something in its own accidental way. Certainly not in any way that Joe’s Mighty Senseofselfimportance thinks it did. To read any of his chatroom quotes from back in the day on The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 and keep a straight face you’d have to believe he was Shakespeare reincarnated come to make television respectable. But no - I mean just in the quiet way of managing to be one of those epic space opera/fantasy novels that we geeks like to read while also being on television.

The point to get here is that while there is plenty of genre television, and while there is plenty of escapist television, there is precious little escapist television for space opera fans. Television - in America, anyway - is and always has been horribly prejudiced in this way. There is no shortage of tear-jerkers for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of sexual melodrama for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of action-adventure for people who like that sort of thing. Police procedurals, courtroom dramas, locked-room mysteries, you name it. Everyone gets what they want - except scifi and fantasy fans.

Or at least, that’s how it was back in 1994. The reason me and my roommates were excited about Babylon 5 wasn’t because we’d actually heard anything about it or had any idea what it was going to be about. We just saw the spaceships and the space battles and had some vague notion that there would be interstellar political intrigue, and that was enough for us. And it was enough because genuine space operas are so rare on television that beggars can’t be choosers. We’ve never had the luxury of - as, say, mystery fans have - of looking at the 5 or 6 new series guaranteed to be out in the fall and deciding which of them we’d like to see. Babylon 5 was just all there was.

Yes, yes, Star Trek. What about it? If you want to count the original series as space opera, I guess I’ll let you get away with it - but that’s precisely the point, you see. That show ran from 1966 to 1969 for a whopping total of 72 hours of campy television (that I love, don’t get me wrong!) that we more or less had to make do with for 30 years. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was plain horrible. And while I guess back in those days we all had some affection for the original Battlestar Galactica, try catching it in reruns … or taking it seriously when you did. Everything else either wasn’t space opera, or found some way of massively apologizing for itself. Yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’m talking about YOU.

Massively apologizing for itself. That’s the part that sucks so bad about being a scifi fan. In the magical world of paperbacks, people aren’t so selfconscious. Straight-ahead space opera exists, and it even reaches a profit-generating audience. Sure, there are those annoying authors who can’t say often enough that SF to them is “Speculative Fiction,” and that they sleep through space battles. And some of them even aren’t annoying and write really engaging fiction that does deserve to be called “high art,” sure. But there is good old fashioned space opera too, and I’m glad of it. Try to put it on TV, though, and suddenly up is down. Suddenly you need all kinds of treknobabble to flatter the audience’s vanity that it’s all on the scientific up-and-up. Suddenly you have to devote whole episodes to please-mix-glass-shards-in-with-my-corn-flakes pop psychology to convince the producers and the critics that you do “character studies.” And don’t even get me started on the endlessly irritating self-parody shows. It didn’t even take X-Files a whole fucking season to start strapping on its tapshoes, flashing its huge white teeth and saying “yesSUH!”

So sure, Babylon 5 was crap. Just as Nussbaum says. Yes, she’s right that there’s nothing at all plausible about a seasoned politician like Londo accepting Mr. Morden’s sketchy offer to mysteriously wipe out a whole Narn fleet for him without first checking what the bill would come to. Sure, I’m not buying it either that an EarthGov politician actually says “peace in our time” without being aware he’s just struck a Chamberlain bargain (only has he really? Another annoying thing about that arc is that there’s no real sense in which Earth comes to regret its cowardly decision. Earth has other problems of its own making, so it was a misplaced reference in any case). And yeah, Sheridan’s “weighty” decision - between holding out a hugely ephermeral hope of finding his wife versus saving the galaxy - isn’t actually weighty at all, and all the misplaced Churchill reference does is call attention to just how unearned the gravitas here is.

That’s all true - and yet I’m right with Nussbaum on this bit too:

I can’t put my finger on it–maybe it’s just that unearned sense of profundity, getting to me as thoroughly now as it did when I was a callow teenager–but I care about this world. I may be cracking snarky comments every five minutes, but when it comes down to it, and the music swells and the heroes strike their pose and the lovers are reunited, I’m touched, and I want more. I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole.

I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole. What a brilliant way to put it. Yes, that’s what it is for me too. All I do when I sit and rewatch Bablyon 5 is nitpick about what’s wrong with it, but when the episode ends I find I’ve enjoyed myself immensely - NOT for the ironic pleasure of picking apart bad drama, but because I’m really glad to have seen this story with these characters in this world.

Here’s where she and I finally part ways a bit:

Maybe, in much the same way that Ronald D. Moore has extracted the beating heart of something as campy as the original Battlestar Galactica and transplanted it into a better, smarter body, someone will come around one day who can take whatever it was about Babylon 5 that worked, the core of the story that’s still bringing me back, and give it the treatment that J. Michael Straczynski couldn’t.

I don’t think so - because I don’t think there’s actually anything beating at the center of Babylon 5. There is nothing intrinsically special about this show at all. The only reason it’s watchable in the first place is beacuse Straczynski managed to somehow cast Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar, Stephen Furst as Vir, Bill Mumy as Lennier, and, what the hell, Peter Jurasik as Londo and Michael Doyle as Garibaldi. And really - out of that lineup - just Andreas Katsulas. He’s the only truly brilliant actor on the show, the first one to find a way to take his wooden lines and make them sing - and gradually the others got the courage to follow. No - I don’t think there’s anything special about this story or this world or these characters. There WAS something special about Battlestar Galactica. It was a really intriguiing premise really poorly told. If any show in the history of television deserved a second chance, it was that one. I don’t think Ronald Moore had to scratch very deep to see that the diamond in the rough of the original campy mess was how people react to an existential threat.

By contrast, the “diamond” in the rough of Babylon 5 is nothing special to this show. It’s all in the “meta-”bits. The theme of evolution by violent chaos versus evolution by slow deliberation has been done before, and better, by other shows and novels. No doubt someone (anyone!) could do a better job with it than Straczynski - but no matter because it’s been done before and will be done again. No, what’s special about Babylon 5 was just that it was unapologetic space opera at all. It was the first - and to date ONLY - time I’ve seen space opera on television by a genuine space opera fan who never felt the need to pass it all off as allegory. That isn’t to say that there isn’t allegory in Babylon 5 - obviously there’s plenty. The point is that it isn’t allegory as a way of apologizing for being space opera. It isn’t allegory as a means of legitimizing our fun. It’s allegory only to the same degree, and tackling the same grand historical themes, that allegory is always at the heart of space opera. We aren’t kidding ourselves with literary mumbo-jargon about how the epic scale brings the weight of individual decisions into stark relief. No - what we’re doing when watching Babylon 5 is daydreaming about being the kind of person whose decisions change something as big as the universe.

As much of a self-important, ego-inflated gasbag as I think Straczynski probably is in real life, I can’t ever feel too bad about him for the simple reason that he did what no one else, that I can tell, has ever done. He put Lord of the Rings on TV AS Lord of the Rings - AS the kind of literature that we genre fans like - and not with some moronic sop to the mainstream viewer.

There’s something about being a genre fan that’s like having a sexual fetish, I think. We’re all human, and we all have our quirks, and some people’s quirks are more acceptable to society at large than other people’s. For whatever reason, science fiction isn’t one of the acceptable quirks. And so liking science fiction is a bit like being gay. You can pass yourself off as normal if you have to, but there’s always something about your tastes that’s just slightly “off” enough to tip people off to what you are. And you can go all out and embrace it, but then you’re giving up friendships with ordinary people forever. Most of us spend most of our time doing something like those gay activists assuring people that gay marriage is just like regular marriage, only with two completely committed guys rather than a guy and a gal. Some people buy it - more people pretend to buy it so as not to look bigoted - but here in scifi fandom we all suspect more than the outsider even that SF literature is not literature by the same standards at all - just as gay marriage isn’t marriage by the same standards. And even while we spend so much time producing perversions like “Next Generation” to show just how normal we are, in the privacy of our own minds we prefer stuff like Babylon 5.

So I think of Babylon 5 as space opera’s “comming out” party on mainstream TV. And the same way that while not all gay men like disco music, there are few gay men who don’t miss that scene - I think while we space opera fans might privately think Babylon 5 was cheap and over the top, we do miss the days when we could turn on the TV and see something that was made for us.

There’s nothing special about Babylon 5 itself, and so there’s no need to remake it. Making ANY similar space opera - i.e. NOT one like Ronald Moore’s reimagined Battlestar that only pretends to be science fiction while actually being a hippie gaiafest - would be a better tribute than trying to find something unique to this one that just isn’t there. Babylon 5 was almost entirely derivative. The Minbari were the Japanese, the Centauri the Romans, the Narn proably the Arabs, etc. etc. The Chaos vs. Law fight of the Shadows and Vorlons was straight out of Doc Smith. Sheridan back from the dead is pure Lord of the Rings. And all the stuff with the PsiCorps - the most interesting and least-explored part of the series - flirts with Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester. Stracynski, in other words, is a genuine science fiction fan remixing his favorite songs. If there’s something in Babylon 5 we like, it’s that we’re proud that one of our own made it on TV without selling us out. So it wasn’t the best it could be. It was what it was, and that in itself is a kind of minor miracle.

Heartfelt thanks for that, Joe!

TOWM quote of the day comes from Roger Ebert, writing about the latest Star Trek movie:

But the franchise has become much of a muchness.

Indeed. I’ve been toying with the idea of going to see it in the *gasp* theater. I extend that honor to few movies these days - because so few seem to deserve it. We’re living in a post-theater distribution age, like it or not. I like it - my dad probably not. But then, things he likes include Bob Dylan and Richard Dreyfuss, so what does he know, I ask you?

These days, you really only go to the theater to see the Big Explosions and the Cool Effects in proper surroundsound. Which probably has more to do with the increasing switch to formulaic plots that showcase exactly these things, come to think of it, than the vast improvements in special effects technology that allow us to do them more impressively and on the cheap besides. So does that mean that if I go to see Star Trek in the theater I’m part of the problem?

OK, maybe I won’t. But for the reason Ebert gives - because Star Trek has become “much of a muchness” - rather than to shy away from supporting more Hollywood inhouse braindrain. There’s just too damn much Star Trek. And yes, that’s a problem I don’t want to be part of.

I was a huge Star Trek fan in junior high school - of the Original Series, never really Next Generation (which, to give away my age, was brand new when I was in junior high). But I watched both, and didn’t see the cracks until Deep Space Nine came along and held my eyes open to them like those clamps in A Clockwork Orange. Deep Space Nine was unalloyed garbage, and it brought Next Generation’s faults into stark relief. And then I couldn’t like the old show as much anymore either, and I found other things to watch. I still enjoy the old show (having recently confirmed this by watching some of it on CBS online), and I like Voyager OK too (no, I’m not ashamed to admit it). But enough is enough. When you take the same basic universe and remake it that many times, it can’t help becoming formulaic. And that is because things this big and popular can only be designed by committee.

It gets to the point, after a while, where it seems like it should be a genre all its own. Not science fiction, not space opera, but “the Star Trek genre.” Paramount should open source it. Just relinquish all copyright, and let people write Star Trek stories and film Star Trek movies ad libido. THEN we might see something interesting - if only in the form of everyone’s creative riffing on a familiar theme. But another rehash of the same material from the same company that already rendered it bland long ago? Maybe not such a good idea … no matter what Wil Wheaton says.

Blakes 7, as I’ve said before, isn’t just a send-up of Star Trek, but it’s frequently at its best when that’s what it’s doing. No surprise, then, that I’ll be counting Season 1’s “Duel” among my top ten episodes.

This one isn’t a subtle jab so much as an outright taunting - for not only are we inverting Star Trek’s moral sensibilities like usual, we’ve actually singled out a specific episode to pick on. That episode is the first season’s Arena - you know, the one where some powerful aliens (the Metrons) decide to teach Kirk a lesson by making him fight that giant lizard bareknuckled on an empty planet. There’s enough stuff lying around to let whichever of the two is more intelligent (Kirk, of course) cobble together a cannon and kill the other. Kirk’s shot wounds but does not kill, and at the last moment Kirk declines to kill, thus demonstrating to the super-powerful aliens that put him in this jam that humanity may some day be civilized. (Any resemblance to any other episode is, naturally, entirely coincidental.)

By now this is a stock plot in science fiction. Arena was based on a short story and may well have been what started it all. I say this because in Frederick Brown’s original (1944) short story “Arena,” the Kirk analogue actually does kill the creature. Self defense, you see.

As usual, the problem with the Star Trek version is that it’s treating its morals as a luxury item. They’re not there to guide or inform or to help anyone grow so much as to flatter the viewer. Back here in reality, when a powerful alien race puts you and a murderous lizard on a planet to fight to the death, you either band together and try to find a way out, or you kill before you get killed. Only on goofy 1960s science fiction shows do things “just work out” so that you wound without killing and then have the luxury of showing off how merciful you are. The whole purpose of that ending is nothing more than ethical pornography for the viewer - so that he can pat himself on the back and say “yes, like Captain Kirk, I would have spared the giant aggressive lizard who destroyed Cestus III and Redshirt O’Herlihy and who was trying to kill me too because killing is WRONG. If only, if only the rest of humanity were as advanced as I am.”

As every 9 year old knows, killing is wrong with one glaring exception: self-defense. The only people who reach adulthood honestly believing that it’s not acceptable to kill in self defense are hippies trying to avoid the Vietnam draft - and even they don’t really mean it. It’s just a huge moral perversion to go around telling people that killing is always and under every set of circumstances wrong. People who believe that don’t survive. But that’s why the flattery works, of course. The viewer can only convince himself that he’s on a higher plane than the rest of us apes if what he’s supporting is so counterintuitive that it’s either collossally wrong or only seems so to feebler minds.

So of course in the Blakes 7 version Blake has no ethical issue with killing Travis, and the reason he spares his life is … well, complicated, but probably not based on mercy. But that’s only the beginning.

How is “Duel” an inspired improvment on “Arena?” Let me count the ways.

First, Blake is set to fight Travis, someone he conveniently is already on the run from. This is a huge improvement over it being Some Random Space Monster - since it was never really clear what the fight between the Federation and the Gorn was really about in Arena anyway. From the audience’s point of view, the Gorn were just being unreasonably hostile, and if these überpowerful Metrons that wanted so badly to teach Kirk (and the Gorn captain) a lesson in pacifism that they put him in a deathmatch (wait, wha…?) hadn’t been snoozing they surely would’ve noticed that … and just spiffied the Gorns across the galaxy or something. So good - at least now we’ve got real history and motive.

For our second neat twist, no one actually learns anything from the goofy ellaborate lesson, and indeed it’s made clear early on that the person who most needs to learn isn’t actually Blake or Travis but one of the godlike and (not-so-)morally superior aliens themselves. The whole time Blake and Travis (and Jenna and Travis’ mutoid pilot - another nice touch is that the aliens want Travis and Blake to experience the death of a friend as part of their lesson in pacifism, but of course Travis ironically doesn’t have any friends and ends up paired up with one of the Federation’s genetic slave class which he regards as a piece of equipment more than a person) are fighting, one of the pair keeps interfering to make things more violent since she apparently gets off on watching people fight. Unlike Kirk at the end of his encouner with the Gorn, Blake and Travis leave unimpressed with and unaffected by the whole ordeal.

And actually, that is rather the point not just of this episode, but indeed one of the major themes of the series: you can’t change people, not really, and you certainly can’t control them. Social engineering just doesn’t work. The entire Federation is a giant failed social engineering project - and there’s no better proof of that than that Blake is running about at all after all the mental conditioning he went through. And if these aliens’ little social engineering experiment with Blake and Travis doesn’t work either - it’s not the least because they themselves apparently haven’t learned the lesson they’re trying to teach.

This theme of control and power is introduced a bit clumsily in the space battle that opens the episode. Liberator is low on power and cornered by three Federation ships. It’s a desperate situation, so Blake resorts to the desperate measure of ramming the one of the three he thinks is Travis’ ship to get out. Where the scene is implausible is that Blake actually consults with the crew. Probably when time is this much of the essence you just tell them to trust you and ram full speed ahead - but never mind, because we get this brilliant bit of dialogue out of the confrontation between Blake and Avon:

BLAKE Have you got any better ideas? [Violent impact. As Blake and Avon reel back, Avon clutches Blake protectively, perhaps to steady him]
AVON As a matter of fact, no I haven’t.
BLAKE Does that mean you agree?
AVON Do I have a choice?
BLAKE Yes.
AVON Then I agree. [Lets go of Blake]

Maybe not the time for Avon’s wit (and it’s certainly out of character for Avon to be arguing about this - he’s the rational one who should have seen the merits in this plan even before Blake did), but the point is a good one. You can’t “agree” to anything you don’t have a choice about. And indeed, we’ve already seen this earlier in Giroc’s (Giroc is one of the two aliens who put Travis and Blake in the “arena” to fight) complaining about how she had no choice in becoming “The Keeper” (whatever that is). It comes full circle in Travis’ unsuccessful taunting of the mutoid pilot about her original identity. You see, mutoids are people who have been converted into cyborgs - or something. This one, like most of them, remembers nothing of her past and has been completely reprogrammed. But Travis knows who she was before and during some down time during the battle clearly hopes to tease her with the knowledge. He’s visibly disappointed when not only doesn’t she beg him to reveal her old identity, she’s not even the slightest bit interested.

MUTOID Memory is an encumbrance. All trace of it is removed and with it all trace of identity.
TRAVIS And it doesn’t concern you?
MUTOID Why should it? That identity doesn’t exist, even in the central computers.
TRAVIS Yes it does. I know who you were. Your name was Keyeira, Keyeira.
MUTOID Keyeira.
TRAVIS You were very beautiful, very much admired. Shall I go on?
MUTOID As you wish.
TRAVIS [Obviously disappointed] This doesn’t interest you at all, does it?
MUTOID How could it?

Which reinforces the theme - that there’s a paradox in the very idea of wielding power. No one thinks of having power over a computer: it’s just a machine. For Travis to have real power over this mutoid that obeys his every command it too would have to be human. And so he is disappointed to learn that it is indeed just a machine. It doesn’t resent his orders in any way - and there’s no fun in lording power over something that exists to be controlled! The irony of power is that one can only enjoy it when he doesn’t completely have it. Travis’ total control over the mutoid is meaningless because it is total.

The reason Blake is the good guy is that he understands this. He’s already made the decision to ram Travis’ ship, and Avon already knows that it’s the right choice. It’s still important to both Blake and Avon that it be clear that Avon is acting voluntarily and not under orders. As Avon wryly points out - one cannot “agree” if he hasn’t been given a choice.

But the critical scene in the whole episode - giving us what is probably the best line of the whole series - is that scene where Avon decides to go to sleep while everyone else is watching Blake on the viewscreen. This was satisfying on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

First, there’s the silliness of the fact that they’re allowed to watch Blake and Travis fight at all. To what end? That was an even harder question to answer in Arena. Even if we deign to buy this hugely implausible story that some demigods whisked Kirk and this Gorn to an isolated planet to let them fight it out hoping that the winner would somehow learn that killing was baaaad, there’s really but really just really no explanation for these aliens’ need to show the whole thing like a movie on the Enterprise’s viewscreen. Nor is it any more plausible here in Blakes 7 - but Avon at least gets that. It gets dark on Blake’s planet, and he and Jenna climb a tree to get some rest. Watching from the Liberator’s control center, Avon promptly announces that he is going for a kip as well.

VILA Have you thought of another plan?
AVON Yes. I’m going to get some sleep.
VILA How can you sleep with all this happening?
AVON With all what happening? Blake is sitting up in a tree, Travis is sitting up in another tree. Unless they’re planning to throw nuts at one another, I don’t see much of a fight developing before it gets light.

HA! But here’s the clincher:

GAN You’re never involved, are you Avon? You ever cared for anyone?
VILA Except yourself?
AVON I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or, indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all. [Exits]

Hear, hear! Point, set, match to Avon (as usual). There’s nothing they can do to help Blake, and in any case there’s nothing going on. Why NOT sleep? And why, indeed, does Avon have to prove he cares? There’s the dagger in the heart of the vanity that was Star Trek. In order to prove humanity’s “civilized,” Kirk has to do somthing as irrational and sentimental as refusing to kill in self defense? Really? What kind of dope-smoking aliens are these? More to the point - would Kirk make the same gesture if he didn’t know the aliens were watching the whole thing? Is it all just for show? We never know - but we do know it’s stupid whatever the motive. Having to go to irrational lengths to prove that you aren’t a natural born killer sort of betrays the whole thing as a sham. It’s the lesson of King Lear, actually - the people who put on a show of feeling something generally don’t really feel it. If your answer to the question of “when did you stop beating your wife” is “My God I would never hit a woman! Hitting women is ALWAYS WRONG! I would rather cut off my hand, even if she started the fight!” - then I take your answer to be “just last week.” The crux of the whole matter for me is indeed why anyone should have to prove affection at all. Affection’s either there or it’s not. Surely it matters more whether one really cares than it matters how much he shows it. More than that - caring is the default assumption among a crew - even a mutually antagonistic crew - that lives on a ship and goes into battle together. OF COURSE Avon cares!

To me, the least plausible thing of all about Star Trek episodes like Arena (and the hundreds of others just like it) is the hugely pessimistic view of humanity they operate under. It just doesn’t square with the humanity I am a member of and with which I interact every day. In my experience, most people are not cold-blooded killer savages, and Kirk (and Picard, at Farpoint) should rather have been insulted (or, actually, amused) that anyone was questioning humanity’s generally caring nature to begin with. These aliens that forced Kirk and the Gorn to fight to the death may think we’re all barely literate bloodthirsty savages, but that seems a really irrational thing to think about a species that managed to survive long enough to build warp capable ships and traverse the galaxy! If humanity were anything like as mutually antagonistic as most Star Trek aliens constantly accuse it of being it’d hardly be capable of reaching their planets to get trapped into playing their games to begin with. And of course, Blakes 7 understands this. The aliens who force Blake and Travis to fight are, to all appearances, the last survivors of their civilization, which destroyed itself in a war. Note the contrast with the relatively stable Federation. It takes one to know one, in other words, and indeed, Giroc - one of the teachers - is the only character on the stage who actually seems to enjoy violence for its own sake. (Travis might - but it seems more reasonable that Travis is just obsessed with killing Blake in particular.)

So right - Avon has the right idea. When it’s night and there’s nothing you can do, you sleep. Irrationally keeping vigil doesn’t prove anything, and why should anything need to be proven at all? It’s rather the same point that Blake makes to Sinofar at the end of the episode.

GIROC Why didn’t you kill him?
BLAKE Too weak? Or maybe I didn’t entirely trust your motives. Besides, as long as he’s alive, he’ll be the one chasing me. And I know I can beat him.
GIROC [Laughs] At least you’re not stupid.
BLAKE [To Sinofar] I need time enough to get my ship away and to recharge the energy banks.
SINOFAR They have been recharged. I will see that your ship gets away.
BLAKE Another reason why I didn’t kill Travis: I would have enjoyed it.
SINOFAR Perhaps there was nothing for you to learn.

Blake never really answers Giroc’s question because he feels he doesn’t have to. “At least you’re not stupid,” she says - which, along with Avon wanting to sleep through the aliens’ filmschool project, nicely encapsulates the point of the show. Blake and his crew aren’t stupid - unlike some other interstellar dogooders we could name - and the outcome is so predictable you might as well wake me when it’s through. (Nor do I think anyone’s missed the fourth wall point that it’s actually Arena Avon is opting to sleep through.) To Sinofar he gives a somewhat better answer: I already knew what you were trying to teach and you needn’t have wasted your time.

Giroc and Sinofar’s lesson doesn’t teach anyone anything. Travis is a psychopath, and so forcing him to kill someone with his bare hands is unlikely to be a life-altering experience for him. Blake, for his part, knows better even before the fight starts. He’s already got his morals straight about killing, so he stays focused on getting out alive. Giroc (who might be the actual pupil the lesson is intended for?) only discovers she enjoys the violence - a fact which doesn’t stop her from laughing at Blake and calling him a savage at every possible opportunity. Sinofar is no closer to understanding killing when it’s all over. The whole episode has been a pointless, staged sideshow. Meant to be a moral lesson, it ends up more than anything just being entertainment for Giroc.

Thought experiments are useful to the extent that they help us discover our hidden assumptions. And science fiction is interesting as a literary genre in part becase it has a wider range with the thought experiments it can pose. But this only works IFF (a) some minimal effort is made to render the implausible situation plausible and (b) there’s actually something to be learned from the whole ordeal. Arena, of course, fails on both counts. As for the first - the writer is God. Any time you have to resort to omnipotent aliens to explicitly drop your characters into the situation you want to write about you’re probably not trying hard enough. And for the second - the “lesson” Kirk is supposed to have learned is neither useful in any way, nor does it really follow from the situation he was placed in. It’s moral pornography - an implausible situation contrived not to teach and explore but so that viewers can imagine they’re morally superior to the rest of humanity by kidding themselves that they agree with and understand Kirk’s “decision” not to kill the Gorn.

Blake’s reaction is more realistic: reject the lesson as a pointless waste of your time and go about your business as though it hadn’t happened. I love it.