The Only Winning Move

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.

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.

As a veteran fan of 1970s science fiction, I’m good at suspending disbelief. Wobbly sets? No issue. Pitiful special effects? Bring ‘em on. Rubber suits and facepaint? I eat it for breakfast. Hell, I could probably even take someone standing with a sheet over their head as a ghost if I really thought the budget was that bad.

I can do all this and more, provided the plot works. But screw with the story, and we have issues.

Now granted, there are plot holes and there are plot holes. No one gets it right all the time; even in the best-planned series it’s inevitable that minor slipups will happen. And of course sometimes you let things go just for the sake of the story. For example, I couldn’t stomach Next Generation’s 5th season episode “Next Phase” because I could never get over the fact that invisible/semi-immaterial people who can walk through walls should also fall through (or at least sink into) floors, and yet Georgi and Ensign Redshirt seem to walk about just like everyone else. Worse than that, they can handle tools sometimes, when you’re not paying too much attention, but other times other things slide through their hands. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I’m certain someone along the editing process noticed it - but since explaining it all would’ve been little more than a distraction from the story, I guess they just quietly decided to let it go.

But then there are plot holes that are just … spectacular. The kind of thing that not only is it so obviously wrong that there’s no way anyone with even a barely adequate daily caloric intake would miss it, but that the writers have hidden right there in plain sight, apparently hoping you’ll be so stunned that you blink and shake your head and say “naw….” That’s the kind of plotholes I had to sit through in “Mission to Destiny” just now.

“Mission to Destiny” is an episode of cult BBC scifi series Blakes 7 - arguably my favorite TV show of all time, which just makes this all the more painful. I guess I should cut my losses and take as consolation that Blake never did anything half-assed: if they’re going to screw up, they give us the full royal fanfare.

The “plot,” such as it is, goes something like this. Jenna notices a ship on long-range scanners holding an odd pattern: it’s circling endlessly. The ship is an obsolete model, which makes it likely that it’s been abandoned years ago and just left. But on teleporting aboard, Blake, Cally and Avon find that the crew is simply sleeping. They’re victims of sabotage: someone has put tranquilizer gas into the air filtration system.
It’s a crude job, and Avon and Cally fix it quickly. When the crew comes back awake, it’s discovered that one of them is missing and one of the lifeboats launched. Dum dum dum.

The captain instantly worries that their precious cargo has been stolen. It turns out (and this, at least, is very cool) that they’re from Destiny, a small agricultural colony on the edge of the galaxy. Due to a deficit in light along a certain spectrum range, a terrestrial fungus is eating most of their crops and will soon consume the entire planet. They’ve mortgaged their whole economy to buy a specially-manufactured light refractor that they’ll put at a specific position between their planet and their sun which will bend the light to the necessary wavelength and kill off the fungus. Since the object - called a “neutrotope” - has been so expensive to manufacture and is worth the entire GDP of Destiny for several years, IF someone could manage to sell it (and give the writers credit - they make that point three times) they would be wealthy beyond imagination.

So, probably what’s happened is that the missing crewman has knocked out the crew and taken the missing neutrotope with him in the shuttle.

Bucept … they check and find the neutrotope right were it should be, in a “molecularly-locked” box in the captain’s quarters to which only the captain knows the combination. And then shortly thereafter they discover the body of the missing crewman. He’s been MURDERED. Oh, and by the way, the pilot’s been found MURDERED as well.

And of course from here the story falls apart rapidly. Blake suggests that he be allowed to take the neutrotope on to Destiny while Avon and Cally stay behind to help them with repairs. Incredibly, the captain agrees and doesn’t even insist that anyone from his crew accompany Blake to Destiny! That’s right, just hand the most valuable object in the known galaxy to a complete stranger based on his word that he’ll deliver. Oh, and the fact that he’s leaving behind two “hostages” in the form of Avon and Cally, though it’s not clear what good killing them will do if Blake absconds with the device and sells it. Even if Blake did care, he could presumably simply show up again in a day, claim to have delivered the goods, teleport Cally and Avon off and no one would be the wiser. But the BEST part is that the captain doesn’t even hand over the neutrotope himself. He orders Sara to go fetch it - not 5min. after he’s just told us that only he has the combination.

It helps a bit, I suppose, that Sara turns out to be the killer. So maybe Blake’s just too thick to notice that Sara must also know the combination … but surely Avon noticed? And yet, Avon spends most of the episode being completely wrong about who the killer is. And the thing is, when he does figure it out, it has nothing whatever to do with Sara knowing the combination - which would’ve been a clever way for him to figure it. No, it’s because the murdered pilot had helpfully written her name in blood - only not very neatly so for most of the episode the letters look like numbers.

Of course, Sara has done all this without her husband/boyfriend/whatever being in on the deal - so of course she tells him about it now that the die is cast and there are strangers running about on the ship. When he decides not to join her, she kills him too. ANOTHER MURDER. But the thing is, apparently he had decided to join her as Cally has only just seen him stuffing a Mysterious Device into another crewman’s bag. She retrieves the Mysterious Device to take it to Avon and ask him what it is.

Ok - so we’re expected to believe that Sara told Mandrian about her Nefarious Plot only after Blake et al show up, he then declines to join her, AND she lets him run about on the ship a little longer killing him ONLY LATER? AFTER he’s had a chance to go blab the whole thing?

And then there’s the matter of this homing device. Now - at the beginning of the episode, we saw Liberator scan the ship for any signs of life. Presumably this includes checking the entire known spectrum of communications frequencies for signals. And yet, they failed to detect this Mysterious Device that turns out to be a homing device to lead the rendezvous ship to them? Also - CALLY fails to notice that this is a homing beacon and has to ask AVON to tell her? Cally, who is a communications specialist, has to ask Avon the computer expert what a homing device is, and yet Cally who is not a computer expert but a communications specialist recognizes before Avon the computer expert that the sabotage was specifically designed to keep the ship in a holding pattern. Um… (And just why was the ship put in a holding pattern anyway? Why not just stop it dead in space? I mean, if it’s a homing beacon that’s going to signal your getaway car, it isn’t really necessary to have the ship going ’round in circles - a feat which requires a highly specific kind of sabotage of the kind that can’t be disguised as an accident.)

And of course, there’s the nagging question of why Sara’s knocked out with the rest of the crew at all. This is apparently her brilliant plan to sell the most valuable object in the galaxy. She’s going to knock out the entire crew with stun gas - herself included - and wait for a rendezvous ship to come pick her up. Why can’t the rendezvous ship just leave her sleeping and take the neutrotope itself? Well, presumably because it’s locked in that supersafe. But then, they’re going to have to wake her up selectively to get it opened, since we know she knows the combination. So I ask again, why is she sleeping with the rest of the crew and not wearing a gas mask or something? That way, at the very least, she would’ve been awake to kill Blake and Cally and Avon when they teleported aboard. More importantly, what is the point of framing Donovan (remember, she’s killed him and then launched off a lifepod, a plan that was disrupted when she discovered that moving his body to the lifepod was harder than she’d thought - apparently they uninvented the handtruck and the forklift when they developed faster-than-light travel)? Was she honestly planning to just hand off the most valuable object in the universe and then stay on the ship to avoid suspicion? Come now - even if she COULD trust her pals to cut her in for her share, she’s surely going to have some trouble explaining to the tax authorities back on Destiny why she’s suddenly worth their entire economic output for a year?

But the best, most stunning, display of plot holes is in the beta plot - as Blake and the Liberator crew go to deliver the neutrotope to Destiny. They need to do it in the Liberator because Liberator can make the trip in four hours - compared with five days for the Ortego. Fine. But halfway there they encounter a giant asteroid field. Going around it would add a day to the journey, and Blake is unwilling to do that. So what he does instead is burn out the forward force shield plowing straight through. We know that he burns it out because Zen forces him to choose at the last minute between power for drive and power for shields and - apparently unaware that even a dust particle will destroy a ship that impacts it at faster-than-light speed - Blake chooses drive instead of shields. Ohhhh-kaaaay. But they make it. Of course, as they’re coming out of the field the hermetically sealed box with the neutrotope conveniently slides off the table. Worried that the most valuable object in the galaxy might have been stored in such a way that allows it to shatter if the box it’s in has dropped (never mind that this thing is designed to hang in space and presumably collide with things from time to time), Blake decides to open the box (and, apparently, he has the combination, since we see him enter it successfully - I guess it’s available at openmylockedboximmediately.com), only to discover that the neutrotope is - gasp! - not inside. Because, you see, Blake undertook this critical mission to save the planet Destiny without bothering to check that the registration was there in the glove compartment. You almost wish the writers had skipped with the whole asteroid field thing so that Blake could’ve made it to Destiny and handed them an empty box with lots of ’splainin’ to do. THAT would’ve been entertainment!

But no, they decide they have to head back immediately to get the neutrotope. Which is sensible - and what’s even more sensible than that is that they decide to just ignore the asteroid field on the way back. You know, what with their forward shield being completely burned out and all. Maybe they backed through?

In any case, they’re back at the Ortega in no time. Meanwhile, Avon is playing Hercule Poirot. He has everyone gathered in the captain’s chamber so he can give us a normal detective speech about every minute detail about how clever he is at finding out the killer. Of course, at a crucial moment he turns his back on the killer whose identitly he supposedly knows long enough to let her pull a giant laser gun out of her tight-fitting suit (where was she keeping it? O.O). Because hey, it’s no fun for the audience if you arrest the killer BEFORE the big revelation scene and deny us our chance to be in little-to-no suspense as she pulls a gun on everyone!

The best moment in the episode comes when Blake literally does That Thing that you were always waiting for to happen on Star Trek but which somehow never did: he beams down at precisely the moment that will distract Sara long enough that she can be disarmed, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Apparently concerned that we might have missed two of their biggest, most artfully crafted plot holes, the writers then treat us to a final scene on board Liberator, where Blake has helpfully decided to take the entire Ortega crew with him to Destiny. That’s right - what someone, ANYONE, on the ship would’ve/should’ve suggested earlier (”Why not take us all with you, and they can send someone back to salvage our ship later?”) is now happening. So just in case there was someone watching out there in TVland who missed this angle, we can now rest assured that everyone now gets just how silly the earlier part of this episode was. To add insult to injury (’cause hey, why not?), the closing line of the episode is Vila asking Blake to take them ’round the asteroid field rather than straight through it this time. So - in the extremely unlikely even that anyone missed that they had to come back through the asteroid field after having burned out their shields and power reserves, Vila has helpfully reminded them. Unless, you know, it’s a one-way asteroid field - one of those that is there if you approach it from one side but transparent otherwise?

I can only hope that this was intentional self-parody - but as the 7th episode in the entire series run, it seems more than a little unlikely.

There are signs, to be sure, that more was going on than met the eye. For one thing, there’s that scene where Avon turns his back on the killer just as he’s sketching out who she is for everyone to see. IF I could believe that it was intentional, it would’ve been a brilliant satire of the locked room armchair detective fiction genre - certainly in keeping with a show whose whole MO is turning Star Trek on its head. You know, Avon’s strutting back and forth being clever even though he doesn’t actually have a clue who the killer is - he’s counting on intimidation to make him (erm, her in this case) reveal himself. Maybe. Given the way that scene was played, I can almost believe it (of course, since he does say her name before she announces she is pointing a gun at everyone it doesn’t quite work…). Also - there’s the matter of Mandrian stuffing that homing device in another crewman’s bag - apparently framing him. That just doesn’t square with the official story that Mandrain wasn’t in on the plot. Why would Sara just give him the homing device that is her only escape route if he hadn’t agreed to join her? And if he’d agreed to join her, why kill him? Or, if you’re going to kill him anyway, why kill him just in time to broadcast to everyone that the killer is still on board and hasn’t escaped in the lifeboat? Why not just wait until you’re rescued and kill him then? Something about the whole setup with Mandrian doesn’t add up - and not in a “plot hole” kind of way - more in a “there’s actually another story going on here if you’re clever enough to catch it” kind of way. It is interesting, after all, that Avon admits to suspecting Mandrian for no good reason.

CALLY I agree. So who do you think it is?
AVON Mandrian.
CALLY Why?
AVON Instinct. I discount Dr. Kendall.
CALLY I thought you mistrusted instinct.
AVON I do, so I am probably wrong.

That line sort of tickles at my brain. The hyper-rational Avon actually admits, for the first (and last) time ever, to going on instinct, and that he’s probably wrong for this reason. This is soon after we’ve been shown a scene of Mandrian planting a homing device on someone - an action that squares with no possible explanation for the plot, but would make sense if Avon’s instinct were right. WAS Avon right about Mandrian? Conveniently, we never really know since Mandrian gets snuffed soon afterward.

But of course, no matter how convincing this line of reasoning, nothing makes up for the one-way asteroid storm. That’s just … wow.

A lot of the reviews I read online of this episode were unfazed by the plot holes. Everyone seems to notice at least some of them but likes the episode anyway. And I can see that. It WAS fun, in spite of itself. But more than that, I think it’s because whatever went wrong with the main plot, the characters stayed consistent - and in fact we even got some good development scenes. Why does Avon agree to stay on board? Why - to be with Cally, of course. It’s hinted throughout the series that he’s attracted to her - and here’s yet another hint. His “I don’t like leaving mysteries unsolved” explanation certainly isn’t the real reason! Even better is the way Cally rolls her eyes when Avon is berating her for having bet their lives on Blake returning. If everyone else is convinced that Avon is completely callous and selfish at this point, Cally at least sees through the charade (as does Blake, actually, but that’s always been more obvious). And I think that’s what explains everyone’s affection for this obviously broken episode: we get to see Avon and Cally up close, and neither slips out of character. Some people have pointed to Blake’s booby trap at the end (he plants bombs on the entry hatches so that when the rendezvous ship arrives to pick up the neutrotope from Sara it will be destroyed) as inconsistent, but I don’t think so. Quite the contrary - we know from plenty of other examples that Blake is highly conflicted about the use of violence. Ideally he would avoid it, but realistically he knows it’s necessary. When he does use it, it tends to be because he’s getting restless, plauged by the feeling that he’s accomplishing nothing in his fight against the Federation. So blowing up the rendezvous ship seems perfectly consistent to me. Blake is a man with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it. Here is a situation where he can be reasonably sure he’s killing people who would’ve condemned an entire planet to death by selling the means of survival they had purchased at huge expense on the black market. They’re clearly a legitimate target - IFF, of course, we’re right about the situation and IFF the rendezvous ship isn’t something like a passenger ship with conspirators placed on board. The beauty of this setup is that Blake can be reasonably certain he’s right, but he doesn’t have to stick around to take any unintended consequences that might arise from factors he failed to foresee. It seems like the perfect time for someone with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it to do just that.

But let me not kid myself. Despite some bright patches and some unexplained plot twists that I would like a second look at, this was a horrible episode, absolutely eaten to shreds by plot moths. Even for the 70s, even for the BBC, it’s hard to see how this one made it past the script editors and the director and even the actors, and onto film.

Harvesting links for an earlier post, I came across this announcement that Blakes 7 will be revived. Color me skeptical.

I’ve been a big supporter of the “re-imagining” of Battlestar Galactica. Granted, I had my doubts about SciFi’s ability to pull it off - what with it being the casting catastrophe network and all. And on hearing that Starbuck was to be a woman I admit my PC alarms went off. But the miniseries put paid to any misgivings. The miniseries plus the first two episodes of the series regular rank as among the best hours in TV history in my book. And even though the series has been a huge disappointment since then (starting, roughly, with season 2.5), it’s indisputably better than the original.

I don’t think a remake Blakes 7 would meet with similar success. True, the shows date from the same time, and true that they serve roughly analogous social functions in their respective nations (as allegories for the role of the US and UK in the Cold War at a time with both nations were dispirited), true that they both self-consciously emulated westerns, and true that - at least on paper - both had dystopian premises - but that’s about where the similarities end. Where Battlestar was ripe for a remake, I think Blake should be left alone.

As I’ve said before, I think if ever there was a show that deserved a second chance, it was the original Battlestar: Galactica. It was a good idea with a poor execution, and there really wasn’t a good explanation for why it failed so spectacularly. Certainly ABC funded it well enough. And it had a good timeslot. And the premise - a ragtag fugitive fleet of humans fleeing from a race of cyborgs of inscrutable motive after a near-brush with extinction - was nothing if not ripe with potential. And with Lorne Greene as Adama, coupled with the conscious aping of TV westerns, it had a readymade target demographic. But despite the solid foundation, everything went wrong. The show was poorly planned, the actors weren’t very good in their roles, the late-70s insistence on “family friendliness” was supremely annoying (not to mention out of step with the dystopian premise), the writing proved to be sub-par. 1970s Battlestar was a gooey, sentimentalist bomb. A few standout episodes notwithstanding, it can’t have been much of a loss for TV scifi that the show saw an early cancellation after only one season.

The point here is that Battlestar failed in spite of everyone’s best efforts. The money and network support were there - the trouble is that no one took the time to think it through. Campy attempts at “alien culture” - like calling minutes “centons” - were as embarrassing as they were inadequate. The stereotyped characters - ESPECIALLY the much-lamented Starbuck - simply lacked dimension. And the plot JUST. DIDN’T. WORK. Baltar’s self-conscious betrayal had no good explanation, and it strained credulity to think that the kind of by-the-book bait-n-switch the Cylons pulled would actually succeed. Worst of all, there was a real timidity to the show. The show’s premise was a thematic goldmine - all it needed was a writer willing to explore it. But none were forthcoming. Instead of the thoughtful series the premise should have supported, we got a run-of-the-mill live-action cartoon with clear good guys and bad guys. Eminently forgetable.

The remake fixed all that. The Cylons are more interesting now. The writers don’t shy away from difficult themes. The characters are flawed, human, real. In particular, Baltar is believable, as is the success of the Cylon sneak attack. Granted - there were problems from the outset. The show was definitely once bitten twice shy on the “alien culture” motiff. Caprica is so much like Earth they’re practically carbon copies. And it’s pretty clear that no one really thought through the technology. It’s hard to believe, for example, that a culture that has long-range teleport for ships also uses cassette tapes for sound recordings. And sure, this show ultimately went off the rails plotwise too - but at least this time it wasn’t for lack of trying. No - all told, the re-imaginging of Battlestar is light years better than the original. I’m glad it happened.

But all these are good reasons why I really think a revival of Blake won’t work. If the original Battlestar was a good idea that failed in spite of everything, then Blake is something like the opposite of that. We know that its premise is something Terry Nation just kind of farted out of his brain at a program planning meeting. Nation is the first to admit that he was just running off at the mouth - had no idea what he was talking about. And unlike Battlestar, 70s Blake was underfunded. It looked terrible, even by BBC standards at the time - which takes some doing. Some of the actors - notably Blake himself - weren’t really satisfied with their roles - and Terry Nation, for his part, wasn’t really satisfied with the actors. In spite of its popularity, the show was constantly plagued by threats of cancellation, meaning that it was difficult to stick to any kind of coherent plan.

And yet, somehow in spite of it all, Blakes 7 really worked. Even ueber-skeptic Gareth Thomas (who played Blake) did a standout job in his role. The actors turned out to be really good - and while there were definitely some duds in the writing department (Horizon stands out for me as an unalloyed piece of crap), for the most part the episodes were superbly written as well. Despite a lack of initial direction or planning, the show’s story arcs worked. And the treatment of the show’s themes had an admirable subtlety - one that arguably has yet to be equaled by another science fiction show. It may have been an accident, but Blakes 7 came off.

And that’s the trouble, really. You can’t expect lightning to strike twice. If it’s something of a miracle that Blakes 7 worked in the first place, then you’re playing with fire trying to make it happen again. In particular, who’s EVER going to do as good a job as Paul Darrow playing Avon?

Here is a(n admittedly impromtu) list of things I expect to go wrong with the remake.

(1) Overplanning. Blakes 7 is famous for its moral ambiguity, and there will be a lot of pressure to recreate that. I think this will result in a lot of contrived situations. The moral ambiguity has to be an ambient thing - it can’t be something that you set out consciously to do. It should be something that naturally comes out of the world and the characters. But it won’t be. The temptation to “go Dark Angel” and make snarky, superficial, predictable political points in the name of being “edgy” will be too great for modern TV writers. What we’ll get in place of Blakes sardonic thoughtfulness will be a preachy, politically correct sledgehammer.

(2) Who’s going to play Avon? Sorry - but it’s a point that bears repeating. The major appeal of the original show was that fascinating character. As a reviewer on Amazon UK amusingly puts it:

[Paul Darrow's autobiography] is a must for anyone who remembers the BBC’s sci-fi series “Blake’s 7″ and spent the late ’70s and early ’80s wanting to a) be Kerr Avon or b) sleep with Kerr Avon.

Right. It was a show about Avon, and Paul Darrow was Avon. Any actor who touches that role does so at his extreme peril, and any conceivable “re-imagining” of Blake without Avon just isn’t Blakes 7.

(3) Atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine Blakes 7 being made any other time than the late 1970s. We’re just not this depressed anymore, and I don’t see how any modern show is going to be able to recreate the sardonic atmosphere. What, in particular, will be missed in any attempt to recreate the atmosphere is the feeling of “soldiering through.” Back in those days there was a sense of “detached involvement” that has been completely lost in modern times.

(4) Shocking ending? Most importantly of all, how are they going to redo that ending now that everyone knows what happened? (And not just the finale - but all through the series it pushed the envelope of acceptable plot developments.) That series ending has got to be the ballsiest note a show has ever gone out on, and I just don’t know what they’re going to do to top it. In particular, it’s the kind of thing that can’t be done intentionally. What happened on Gauda Prime was all there - latent in who the characters were and what kind of goals they were pursuing. To consciously try to top it is to impose something on the show that might not be there naturally.

All of which is to say that Blakes 7 is just fine the way it is, thank you very much. It succeeded in spite of itself; trying it twice seems like a bad idea.

What might be a good idea instead is to do something very loosely based on Blake. I mean, the show’s basic premise is generic enough that it can safely be redone - with some modern brushing up of course. And certainly I’m all in favor of another morally ambiguous show with an ensemble cast of complex characters. There are things in Blake that can be reused, no doubt about it. In fact, I’m one of the first to agree that Blake is a show that hasn’t been imitated enough, that wasn’t as influential as it probably should have been. And I’m enthusiastic about any show that exist to break Star Trek’s hegemony. So there’s no real problem using it as a shoving off point. It’s stamping anything with the brand name that seems doomed to fail. Blakes 7 was one of a kind, and recycling the moniker will either (a) bury the original show or (b) invite comparisons that are unlikely to cast the new show in a flattering light. So fine, “redo” it. But keep the “remake” far enough away from the original that you have room to maneuver. By which I mean, none of the original characters or even any plot connections to the original please. A similar show, set in a totally different universe with an otherwise clean slate to write on, in other words.

For the past year I’ve been slowly going through the criminally underappreciated BBC cult space opera Blakes 7 on YouTube, and it’s been thrilling. Granted, it takes an iron stomach for bad special effects to appreciate this one - even by BBC standards - but as fan of the Beeb from a young age, I’m a veteran.

Last night I saw the turning-point series two cliffhanger Star One, and it was better than I expected, even after reading all the praise it gets online. Of the episodes I’ve seen so far, this one is second only to series finale Blake, which is probably impossible to top anyway.

What’s so good about Star One? Hard to say, really. It was enjoyable all the way through, but there was something about the last couple of lines that triggered the idea that this was one of the greats. The interesting thing is that in isolation they’re the most medicore of stock space opera dialogue:

AVON Stand by to fire.
VILA Avon, this is stupid!
AVON When did that ever stop us? [pause] Fire!

Roll credits…

Yeah, see what I mean? Taken by itself, it’s standard sub-par Joss Whedon jokiness. But in context it works really well. Why?

Damned if I know. But here’s my stab at an idea.

The cliche about Blakes 7 is that it’s “the anti-Trek“ - a kind of calculated inversion of Star Trek, particularly of all the “goody two-shoes” moralizing. And the cliche about that cliche is that while it’s mostly right, we do Blakes 7 a disservice reducing it to merely a response. I wholeheartedly agree. But whether or not Blakes 7 set out to deliberately invert Star Trek, it’s frequently at its best when doing so - and this is one of “those episodes.”

The Hollywood cliche that’s being turned on its head in Star One is “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (And in that sense, maybe it’s really Star Wars they’re throwing for a loop here.) The plot, in a nutshell, is this. Blake has discovered the “best-kept secret in the galaxy,” the location of the computer nerve center known as “Star One.” This is a network of computers that runs literally everything in the Federation - including even the climate control systems on most inner planets. Obviously disrupting it would cause an economic catastrophe, leaving the Federation unable to govern itself and paving the way for a new order. Partly for this reason, and partly to keep anyone from holding it hostage, the Federation locked the door on Star One and threw away the key. Not even Supreme Commander Servalan knows where it is.

Of course, someone had to build it, and those people had to be silenced. So the Federation had all of their memories wiped. One problem: the doctor who did the wiping disappeared, and he himself may know where Star One is. (As it turns out, he doesn’t, but he knows someone who knows.) Both Blake and Travis learn this secret, and both go there, it (ironically) turns out, with the same intention: to blow it up.

Which is the first twist, really. In a standard space opera, the arch-villain Travis would be going to Star One to - what else? - hold the Federation hostage. But in this case, he’s gone there to destroy the defense grid that Star One is also charged with maintaining - a kind of interstellar minefield to fend off a possible invasion from an alien species heard from once long ago. These aliens are back, and Travis is going to disable the defense grid for them. It’s revenge on humanity he wants, rather than power. Star One hasn’t corrupted him at all.

So who has it corrupted? Because this is Blakes 7, it’s naturally corrupted Blake, the hero. And because this is Blakes 7, you can be equally sure that it hasn’t corrupted him in the standard way. Blake isn’t tempted to palm Star One for himself and reorder the Federation along popular rule lines. No - he’s going to blow it up, which is an interesting choice for an “idealist” considering that it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to speculate that blowing up Star One would herald the start of a new Dark Age as Federation civilization failed to maintain itself. Notice the subtlety of the twist. It’s a radical rejection of power that’s corrupted Blake - sent him over the line from liberator to terrorist.

As usual, Avon is the one who keeps his head. More on him in a minute, but he is the one character completely unimpressed by Star One or what it can do. Avon doesn’t flinch: he wants what he’s always wanted - for Blake to score some kind of decisive goal so that Blake can make good on his deal to hand Liberator over to Avon. If that means helping Blake blow up the Federation, fine. Avon’s only real contribution to the discussion is to taunt Blake with the knowledge that Blake could use Star One to rule the galaxy himself - but half-heartedly. Avon knows Blake, and he knows Blake could never entertain such a goal, and all he’s really doing here is amusing himself one last time at Blake’s sentimentality. Obviously using Star One to seize the reigns of power and reorder society is the saner goal, but Blake is too well-trained in the slogans of heroism. On All Those Other Shows where the hero is in a position to take power, he always resists the temptation, just as Blake is doing here. And the viewer always wonders what would happen if the hero did actually stick his neck out and use the proffered power for “good” (whatever that means). And the writers always soothe this cognitive dissonance by throwing a contrived situation our way that will allow us to maintain our belief that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In the quiet of our own minds, though, we all suspect that’s not true. We all suspect that power doesn’t affect a person’s character one way or the other - it merely magnifies it. The causality actually works the other way ’round: power attracts already corrupt people to it, meaning that honest people only ever get it by accident. Notice that it’s no accident that Blake is here. Blake has been actively seeking Star One, and it’s a good thing too, as it turns out. Without Blake’s determination, no one would’ve been around to stop Travis (more specifically, Avon wouldn’t have been). But that doesn’t make what Blake’s trying to do “good.” Blake does the right thing in spite of himself. Or, rather, Blake has been doing the wrong thing up to now because he’s stuck in a pattern - but then circumstances change, suddenly things are bigger than him again, and being the good person he is, he reacts properly (ultimately deciding to save Star One).

Even more interesting still is how he got here. In most shows of the genre, characters’ “extreme” actions are explained by formative experiences. Our normally humanitarian character wants to kill Klingons because “they killed my son”, etc. But more often than not, real life seems to work like a negative image of that. Rather than being easily traceable to formative experiences, I think a lot of “extreme” behavior in real life is just an attempt to make sense of a pattern that one finds himself in, to find a larger meaning in it. Which is what’s going on with Blake here. Blake wants to blow up Star One not because anything that’s happened to him has made him particularly angry. Rather, it’s that he’s frustrated by the fact that his rebellion is going nowhere, and he doesn’t want it all to have been for nothing.

BLAKE Well, do we look for Star One?
JENNA We’ll finish what we set out to do. Nothing else is settled.
CALLY Are we fanatics?
BLAKE Does it matter?
CALLY Many, many people will die without Star One.
BLAKE I know.
CALLY Are you sure that what we’re going to do is justified?
BLAKE It has to be. Don’t you see, Cally? If we stop now then all we have done is senseless killing and destruction. Without purpose, without reason. We have to win. It’s the only way I can be sure that I was right.
CALLY That you were right?

Call it a rebel’s midlife crisis - but do so with a straight face because we’ve all been here. You stick with a holding pattern because you lack the guts to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere, and you do increasingly desperate things to make sure it’s all been worthwhile. That’s the story of everyone’s life.

So what about power and its supposedly-corrupting influence? One can argue that at least one character is actually redeemed by power here - and that’s Avon. It’s interesting that Avon is largely outside of the main action. Blake and Cally walk into the lion’s den, but Avon manages to hover just outside. Consequently, he’s in a position to save Blake’s life when Travis fires on him. Blake is wounded, and Avon suddenly steps into the center. He’s right where he’s always wanted to be: in charge of the Liberator in an incapacitated Blake’s place, with the opportunity to cut and run if he likes. But he won’t.

AVON I gave him my word.
VILA To fight off that fleet until the Federation get here?
AVON That is what I promised.
JENNA Why, Avon?
AVON Why not?

A brilliant line. Avon doesn’t know exactly why he’s doing it either. It seems to be out of character, but anyone who’s been paying attention knows that it isn’t really. Avon isn’t actually as cold and selfish as he likes to think he is, and putting him in the command seat makes that clear(er). You can kid yourself about who you really are until it matters - and now it finally matters. Given power, Avon surprisingly (or not, depending on your point of view) does the right thing.

Contrast this with earlier, when Avon briefly captures Travis at the entrance to Star One:

TRAVIS Put the gun down, Avon, it’s too late to stop it now.
AVON Convince me.
TRAVIS Be polite and I may let you live.
AVON Be informative and I may let you die. You’ll want that after I’ve shot off an arm and a leg or two.
TRAVIS I thought you were supposed to be the one with brains?
AVON Brains but no heart. Now talk or scream, Travis, the choice is yours.

If Avon’s threat here sounds contrived, that’s almost certainly by design. Two things about this exchange stand out for me. First, notice that the conversation is about Avon’s reputation, rather than how he actually is. Travis is making an appeal to Avon’s vanity. “…you were supposed to be the one with brains.” And when Avon says that he has brains but no heart, it isn’t an assertion about how he is in reality. Rather, he’s simply reminding Travis what his reputation is.

The point here surely is that once Avon’s in the hotseat, he can’t really afford the luxury of his “cold, calculating” persona quite as much as he can when it’s just him holding a gun to Travis. That isn’t to say he isn’t cold and calculating, of course, just that it’s at least partly exaggerated, and to the extent that it’s exaggerated things are different when there’s more on the line than just Avon. More than that, though - notice how it’s Avon who’s now trapped in a pattern. He knows that Vila’s right that it’s “stupid” - by his professed standards, anyway - to hold off the invasion until the Federation shows up, so why is he doing just that? Tellingly, his answer is because that’s what they’ve always done (”When did [being stupid] ever stop us?”). All other things being equal, maybe Avon would like to reconsider. But things aren’t equal, and there isn’t time, and right now he doesn’t know what else to do. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. Even more ironic than Avon getting power and and having some of his corruption cured by it is the fact that power turns out not to really be all that, erm, powerful. Even in the hotseat, your options are limited.

The question we never ask out loud while busily suspending our disbelief during a James Bond flick is something like “So what if Blofeld gets his hands on the raygun and dominates the world? What, exactly, is he going to do with it once he’s got it?” That point is never specified, because there’s never an answer. Blakes 7 is the first show in this genre to really tackle that. Travis isn’t interested in holding the Federation hostage because … well, to what end? Revenge is a much more workable motive. And while it seems out of character for Servalan to be acting to keep Star One’s location secret, what else would she really do? Gaining the nerve center would make her more powerful and more vulnerable all at once. No - much better that Star One continue to do its good work in secret, and she continue clawing her way to the top of the existing power structure. She wants to be top dog, sure, but not to actually be in a position to radically reorder things. Total power isn’t so much frightening as absurd. And so this episode takes place all around it. It looms there in the background rather than actively being in the story.

While Avon is busy turning to fight, Blake shows up on the bridge, and Avon orders him back to sickbay, making clear, albeit unintentionally, that he actually does value Blake’s trust.

AVON [to Blake] Why didn’t you stay in the medical unit? Couldn’t you bring yourself to trust me just this once?
BLAKE I thought I might be able to help.
AVON In that condition?
BLAKE All right I’ll go back.
AVON Can you manage, alone?
BLAKE Yes. Avon, for what it is worth, I have always trusted you, from the very beginning.

And the interesting thing is that we totally believe him. Blake probably didn’t come on the bridge to “help out,” but neither did he really doubt that Avon would be doing exactly what he promised he would do. Avon’s not evil, and he isn’t really a criminal, and it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that even someone as occasionally naive as Blake would know that.

Does power corrupt? I guess we don’t really know, since no one ever actually sought or gained it in this episode. The point seems to be that power’s just “kinda there.” It looms in the background, but it doesn’t change the human equations much. Just when you think you’re standing on top of the hill (in this case, on the nerve center of the galactic economy), you see the mountain on the horizon (there’s another galaxy out there that just might be planning an invasion). It’s all relative, and mostly people just go on being who they are. If power plays a role in the development of people at all, it isn’t a corrupting so much as a clarifying role: when there are real consequences to your actions, you are truer to yourself.

As for formative experiences… To the extent that they shape one’s character, it isn’t so much that something happened to you that you’re trying to set right. It’s more that circumstances put you in a position to take an action, and you took it, and you spend the time after that filling it into your scheme of things, to render it meaningful.

So damned if I know why those closing lines seemed so right. But that’s my guess. Because they draw all these threads together. Avon’s finally in control, but to what end? There’s really only one option available to him. Sure, maybe with some calm reflection he might decide differently, but there isn’t time for that. He opts to follow the pattern, to do what’s expected, and it doesn’t really have the character of a choice. Like everyone else, he’ll have to fit this “choice” into his scheme of things when he has time to reflect, and as those of us who have seen the rest of the series know, that means to some extent taking on aspects of Blake - becoming at least partly devoted to a cause that he never intended on joining. It all starts at Star One.

As I’ve made clear before, I’m a big fan of Blake’s 7, the late-70s cult BBC space opera that time forgot - what I’ve seen of it, anyway. So I thought I’d post a hat-tip to this excellent article on how to appreciate it for newbies.

Yes, yes, I know - any series that needs to tell you how to love it is a bit suspect, right? Well, right - but I think I’m with Mark Steyn when he writes that

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it’s rarely as foreign as Britain in the 1970s.

There is, simply put, a huge cultural divide to get over with Blake’s 7. Like Space: 1999, my absolute favorite show (well, if you ignore the disastrous second season, which I emphatically do), it’s the kind of thing that could only have been made in the 70s. Strange but true: it’s a hopeless product of its time that nevertheless deserves to be a classic. It’s sort of the way you need an education to appreciate Shakespeare - even though those plays were marketed to the lowest common denominator back in the 1600s. Blake’s 7 may have been a cheaply-made timeslot filler, a relic from a weird interlude in 20th century history where everything went wrong or stood still, but it has redeeming qualities in spades to those that can be bothered to see them.

The link goes to an article that’s full of helpful pointers - some more interesting than others. Here are those:

1. Read the Spoilers - In the article of mine I linked earlier, I was polite enough to place a spoiler warning around the whole thing, as it deals with my interpretation of the final episode. The final episode is, to put it mildly, NOT the way fans are accustomed to having these shows end. Just as i09 says, I won’t give it away here in case you’re one of those types who insists on watching these things in order - but I can definitely see the point in this advice. The show is arguably more interesting if you know how it ends ahead of time, just as a study in how these characters got to where they ended up. And in fact, by pure coincidence, the final episode is the first one I ever saw, and though I didn’t watch it through to the end at the time, I knew how it came out before I sat down, years later, to give the series a serious look.
2. Skip Season One - Nice to hear, since I haven’t seen much of it. I’m pretty sure the final episode - Orac - is the only one I saw all the way through.
3. Season Two was the peak - I’ve heard this everywhere. No reason to doubt it, I suppose. It’s like one of those bands like Iron Maiden where the members keep changing on you - but there’s always that classic lineup. Blake’s 7 invented the idea of killing off main characters for no good reason, and it was season two that saw the “classic” lineup though.
4. A nice list of which ones to skip - always valuable for something like this. Given the current dismal state of TV here in the US, where it’s all reality shows now, I’m sticking my neck out a bit by saying this, but I think TV has gotten a LOT better recently - if you take “recently” to mean “since 1990.” Starting, really, with Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure (to a lesser extent), there was a brief, shining decade-and-a-half where television took itself really seriously and put out some great, cinema-quality stuff. Blake’s 7 predates that in sensibilities, and without the special effects and creator’s creative control necessary to pull it all off. It tried, but it was ahead of its time, and that means that a great deal of what they produced is stuff you have to polish away to get at the gem underneath.

In any case, thanks to i09 for the interesting read!

WARNING: This entry pretty much IS a spoiler. Of course, it’s a spoiler for an obscure (in the US) 1970s BBC scifi show, so if you’re not in to that sort of thing, by all means… If you ARE in to that sort of thing, here is a link to the episode I’m reviewing - though I would strongly suggest you watch the whole series before watching this one. (If the video link ever goes out of scope, there’s also a script here).

No question that “Blake,” the final episode of Terry Nation’s excellent Blake’s 7, is the ballsiest way to end a TV show we’re likely ever to see. Only the final episode of Twin Peaks compares - and even that one loses for me on lack of continuity (it comes across as an - admittedly well-deserved - dynamiting of a once-beautiful project that had gone off the rails). It isn’t just that putting “Blake” on the screen took courage, the beautiful thing about it is that it wasn’t even a gimmick: I can’t honestly imagine this particular show having ended any other way.

Unfortunately, if internet chatrooms are anything to go on, I think the story has been largely misinterpreted by fans. This is about what I think they get wrong.

Some review is in order.

Avon, having failed to put together a coalition of feuding warlords on his own to fight the Federation, realizes that he’s not an inspiring leader. Fortunately, he knows someone who is: Blake. Of course, Blake’s been missing in action for two years; where to find him? Since this is Blake’s 7, it comes as no surprise to anyone that Avon has known for some time how to figure out where Blake was.

So they tie up a lingering plot thread - why didn’t they just ask Orac? - and ask Orac, who tells them that it’s highly likely Blake is on Gauda Prime. Gauda Prime is a lawless world which has recently applied for readmission to the Federation, and in the next scenes we see that Blake is taking advantage of this situation to pass himself off as a bounty hunter as a front for recruiting fresh blood to his cause.

And here’s the first point that a lot of viewers seem to have missed: Blake is doing a spectacularly bad job with his recruiting. It isn’t just that Arlen is a Federation agent who nevertheless passed his “tests,” it seems that Deva - the Federation officer in charge of paying bounty on Gauda Prime who is nominally devoted to Blake’s cause - is probably a double agent too. (Remember that just as Blake’s left to go find Tarrant, we get one final shot of Arlen in the brig, and she tries to buy her way out by trading information about her bounty hunter - presumably that he’s Roj Blake. Since Deva already knows this and Blake clearly later thinks she’s passed his test, we can only conclude that Deva never told Blake that she tried to use knowledge of Blake’s identity to buy her way out of captivity. The only reason Deva would have neglected to mention such an important detail is if he’s not as loyal to Blake as he pretends to be - i.e. is a Federation plant. Not to mention, Tarrant has little trouble seeing through Blake’s ruse when Blake finds him. Blake’s off his game.)

The Scorpio crashlands on Gauda Prime and the crew is separated: Vila, Dayna and Soolin take up shelter in an abandoned farmhut, Avon soon joins them after saving their lives from attacking bounty hunters, and Tarrant crashes with the ship where Blake finds him in the wreckage. Neither is fooled by the other: Blake seems to have figured out who Tarrant is immediately; Tarran’s suspicions are confirmed on the trip with Blake back to base. On the way back to base, Blake notices that they’re being tailed by a ship that’s doing a remarkably good job anticipating their pseudorandom flight changes. Though he doesn’t say anything just yet, this confirms Blake’s suspicions that Tarrant is with Avon and that Avon is piloting the ship following them (because cracking his random flight pattern algorithm is something Orac would have no trouble with).

Back in base, Blake plays his “game” again and turns a gun on Tarrant to pretend to turn him in for bounty. There are signs that Blake isn’t serious, but true to character Tarrant sees them without appreciating their significance. Avon soon enters the compound and Blake orders (through Deva) that they be allowed in. He goes unarmed to meet him, but Deva (see what I mean about Deva?) insists he take a security guard. It’s Arlen (of course!), and so Arlen and Blake go off to find Avon.

Tarrant escapes (presumably because Deva let him) and goes to warn Avon that Blake is a traitor, which he does just as Blake is entering the room. Avon meets Blake and Blake approaches him unarmed, but Avon is not satisfied with his lamely ambiguous claim that Tarrant has been deceived and so shoots him in the chest - three times in slow succession. A key point here is that we see blood on Blake’s shirt: there is no doubt that Blake died in this episode. Federation troopers arrive and a gunfight ensues after Vila’s clever diversion in which everyone is hit but Avon. Notably, there is no blood when anyone else is shot. The episode ends on a freezeframe of Avon (who has only just realized what’s going on having spent the last minute in stunned disbelief that he’s killed Blake) slowly raising his gun to fight back as a grim smile forms on his face. We hear an exchange of fire as the credits roll.

Ok - so that’s a lot of setup - but it’s necessary to explain what I think people are missing about the significance of this exchange. The standard interpretation is that the story is about a fatal flaw in Avon: his inability to trust Blake is what got them all killed. The irony is supposed to be that despite a handful of signs of genuine caring and some more convincing signs that he’s now at least partly devoted to Blake’s cause, Avon has learned nothing by the end of the series: he’s still the cynical, self-serving criminal he always was.

Well, maybe. But I think this interpretation not only misses who Avon really is (he isn’t primarily a criminal) but also doesn’t quite square with the events as presented.

Mainly - when have you ever seen Avon hesitate the way he hesitates when he thinks Blake might have betrayed him? Even once in the entire rest of the series? No, and that’s the point. Avon HAS learned something, and he DOES have an fledgling trust in Blake - and it’s the fact that he has real human feelings about Blake that gets him killed, not the other way around.

I’ve said before, as have others before me, that Blake’s 7 is a deliberate inversion of Star Trek. And perhaps the most prominent thing being inverted is the Kirk-Spock relationship. When Spock was popular out of proportion to Kirk on Trek, the writers tried to put him in his place. When Avon was more popular than Blake, the writers ran with it. Blake(Kirk) even eventually goes missing and Avon(Spock) gets his command after all. More to the point, whereas in Star Trek it’s more often than not Kirk’s sentimentality that (improbably) saves the day, in Blake’s 7 it’s usually Avon’s ability to think quickly and dispassionately under pressure - his total lack of emotional/sentimental distractions. When someone has to be sacrificed for the good of the whole, Avon doesn’t waste any time whining about it; usually he just pulls the trigger himself before anyone can waste his time arguing.

The one time he didn’t do that, the one time he let an emotional distraction cloud his judgment, the one time he failed to make a snap, cold decision under pressure was here at the end; it got him killed. The rational thing to do in this situation is to ignore Blake altogether, kill Arlen (the only person on the other side with a raised gun), take Blake hostage and get out while there’s still time. There will be time to hear Blake’s explanations later. If he is a traitor, they have a valuable hostage. If not, they have ferreted him to safety. Sure, Avon doesn’t know Arlen’s not one of Blake’s trusted associates, but he doesn’t know Blake’s still on the up-and-up either. The point is Avon frequently does things like this and never apologizes. The only reason he didn’t do it today because he was genuinely hurt that Blake might have betrayed him, and it caused him to hesitate. For the first time ever, Avon missed a step because of his heart, and look where it got everyone.

I think it’s also telling that you rarely hear pointed out that Avon isn’t the only one having trouble trusting people: Blake is - uncharacteristically - having the same problem. What’s with all these deceptive screening tests he’s using to pick associates now? That’s never how he’s done things in the past. In the past, he picked up people on gut feeling, and that always worked for him. Now he’s taken on an aspect of Avon: he’s cynical and suspicious. Of course, loyalty tests aren’t exactly something we’d expect Avon to do either - but that’s because Avon doesn’t really believe in loyalty at all (to the extent he does think others are loyal, he probably takes it as a sign of bad judgment). Avon would just happily take on people he didn’t trust (which is everyone), use them as long as they’re useful keeping an eye on them all the while, never hesitating to kill them if he thought they had become a danger. The point is that Blake is doing a really bad job being suspicious - because it just isn’t in his nature. Just as Avon is doing a really bad job being emotional (he can keep it up just long enough to do something irrational, which isn’t the same as having developed useful intuition) - because that isn’t in his nature either.

The message of Star Trek was always that Spock should try to overcome his true nature and get in touch with his groovy side. Blake’s 7 is a deliberate inversion of Star Trek, and this episode is no exception. The “message” here, to the extent there is one, is that people should stick to what they know and not try to be something they’re not. If Avon is a purely rational being who lives by his wits and that’s worked for him, then that’s what he should stick with. Going soft for Blake “polluted” him, and you see the predictable result. If Blake lives by his heart and his ideals and that’s worked for him, then that’s what he should stick with. Taking on aspects of Avon doesn’t give him Avon’s intelligence.

If each has taken on the worst aspects of the other (Blake Avon’s suspicious nature without his cold intelligence, Avon Blake’s irrationality without his higher instincts), that’s because they’re absorbing the final product without the developmental phases. A belief in man’s better nature is a prerequisite for being able to live by feelings: Avon’s “doing it backward” by having feelings before he has faith. A ruthless rationality, an ability to see things unflinchingly as they really are, is a prerequisite for a calculating intelligence: Blake’s “doing it backward” by trying to be clever before he’s ruthless. Blake and Avon can work together only so long as they are who they are. Once they start trying to be like each other, however much each might have (secretly) admired the other, it doesn’t work anymore.

I loved this episode for so many reasons. I love it because it puts a stick of dynamite at the vanity that is at the heart of these shows. Can a rag-tag band of 7 merry men (that’s 5 people plus two computers, actually) really bring a galactic empire tumbling down? Star Trek seems to think so - but not Blake’s 7. At the end of the series, our heroes don’t seem to be much further along than when they started. Can people overcome their natures? Star Trek seems to think so. Blake’s 7 not only says they can’t but that they shouldn’t try. Is it our mysterious and unpredictable feelings that make us human? Star Trek seems to think so. Blake’s 7 knows that that you don’t succeed by cheating reality. Does the universe reward good and punish evil? Star Trek seems to think so. Blake’s 7 doesn’t know and doesn’t care: circumstances are what they are, you should simply make the best of them.

ORAC When we reach the appropriate coordinates, I can simulate the necessary signals to open the silo and allow this flyer to enter.
DAYNA Oh, sounds good.
VILA No it isn’t. Sooner or later we’re going to drop into one of these holes in the ground and never come out.
AVON Sooner or later, everyone does that, Vila.

Yes, sooner or later, everyone does that. That’s what happened on Gauda Prime.