The Only Winning Move

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.