A Stroll Against Time
Orac
Series A, Episode 13. First broadcast on Monday 27 March 1978.
Episode 13
Sunday 12 December 2021
And now on Maximum Power, the Liberator crew discover what a perspex box full of flashing lights is really worth as they meet Orac.
This week Nathan is explaining to Si what went on last week, despite Si actually being there for the Deliverance podcast. Pete’s willing to pay ten times what Orac is worth, while Brendan is a lot of trouble, as usual. Meanwhile Colin is all about the maps, the dazzlingly detailed maps. Join us as we laugh our way through Episode 13 of Series A of Blake’s 7 - Orac.
Recorded on Sunday 20 June 2021 · Download · Episode Gallery
Transcript
Maximum power.
Hello and welcome back to Maximum Power.
The Blake 7 podcast, which is starting to wonder if our three-week camping holiday on the planet Cephlon, was such a good idea.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Brendan.
I'm Colin.
I'm Pete And I'm Si.
So this week, we've finally reached the end of series one.
No one's going to leap an incorrectly.
Hey, series thing.
Which is episode 13, Aurak, written, as always, by Terry Nation on the back of a napkin and directed by Ver Lorimer.
So let's just see how we thought the episode went, and so I might go around the table, if that's all right.
I'm starting on my left with Brendan.
Look, I think this is perfectly fine.
I think it suffers a little bit from Blake and Kelly possibly being not a particularly fun pairing and they're who we spend most of the story with, especially seeing as the pair they're up against, us Servolad and Travis being rather fabulous.
But look, I think lacklustre is better than actively terrible.
Wow.
Put that on the DVD cover.
What did you think of it, Colin?
I, again, I think it is lacklustre as well.
I think it is, it is.
I mean, for the want of a thesaurus.
It's just a kind of, well, it's part two.
It's the only kind of part 2 they've done up to this point and they, I think we'll talk about it when they do their, their recap, but it really doesn't have a much material to stretch out that far.
And it just feels like a lot of wandering through underground caves for no reason, which, of course, is you know, it's totally impenetrable and the security fuel will get them.
And they won't get that far, and of course, they get that far.
So it's full of the usual kind of tropes of saying something won't happen and then it happens.
So, um, yeah, it's all right.
Pete, you're actually well known for your ability to enjoy things.
Only very particular things.
How did you find this?
Well, now, yeah, it is interesting because someone who apparently was me reviewed this on IMDb a few years ago.
Didn't like it much at all.
I thought it completely failed to be a grand finale, yada, yada.
But coming back to it now, I feel I don't like that person as much as their opinion anyway, because it was just, I thought it actually was quite fun.
If you don't go into it, expecting a grand finale, which Blake 7 later on becomes the high watermark of providing with more of a last day of term.
Oh, thank God, we've nearly finished kind of feel to it.
It's got that stuff that can be called padding, but it's also, but it's, it's at least mainly, the characters are so good and the, the actors are all so comfortable, that it, it's padding, it's luxuriant padding.
If it's padding when they are doing their character bits.
So, um, yeah, I, I found, I found things to like about it in this one, which I, which we can go into in a bit, but yeah, I think it's maybe given a bit, a bit of a bum deal.
And what about you, Si?
Oh, God, it's a thin episode, isn't it?
What you say, Terry Nation's watching this on the back of the napkin.
I think the 13 episodes are just are really showing now.
He's he's really struggling.
So we've got his old ideas.
Oh, an acid C.
Oh, radiation sickness, but there's no pills available on the ship, the ship that's got everything.
And it's, um, radiation gloves is the one thing it's not got.
That's what they were looking for. come with those down on Cephlon, couldn't I?
But basically, it's just a race against time, isn't it?
It's a chase story.
It's who's going to get to the prize 1st and the price being a big specs box.
Which is super fun.
But it, I mean, I don't think there's any ambition to do anything more than get 50 minutes of story onto the screen here.
And that's fine.
That's okay.
I mean, that achieved more than Bounty did, for instance.
Yeah, to be fair, it's a stroll against time, really, isn't it?
I was going to say 30 minutes of story onto the screen.
I was late for the podcast.
I was late this morning, so I had to watch it at one. 5 speed on the disc.
How was that?
Great.
It's...
It's really pasty.
It's really pacy.
They all sound like the mice from hitchhikers, but it's...
That bloke at the end actually moves like Stephen Grife.
Holy crap.
No, I don't think even one. 5 speed will get back. absolutely will get to that.
That's a high point.
So, well, let's start with the A plots or maybe the 1st of 3 B plots.
There's A plot.
There is an A plot.
There maybe three.
So Callie and Avon are getting to Ensor on the base.
They're, what, the only ones who don't have radiation sickness?
Sorry, why didn't I say...
Because it would have been far more interesting.
Yeah, I know.
I love Callie and Avon together.
No, Blake and Kelly.
That's super tedious pairing.
Heading down to the planet Aristo with its stock footage acid C.
Yep. which was really had never been sort of quite so obvious to me before as it was this time. that no one's anywhere near the sea in this episode.
I have to say, much like you, Nathan, that I felt the same.
This was the 1st time because Rod said, oh, it looks like they're in a quarry and it suddenly occurred to me, ah, that's why.
They're in Rickmansworth, which is not really very close to the sea as far as I understand.
No, really not.
But yeah, Blake and Callie have come down with blocking syndrome, which is what happens when you're not required for the filming of the previous episode, so you can be the leads in the next one, I think.
I think that's a new Terry Nation space disease.
That's actually super clever.
That's exactly what's happened, isn it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they've just sort of divided them up.
Is it like a, you know, like a doctor line episode in New Doctor Who.
Yeah, and and so, yeah, we've got the the A-team and the B-team, but there's this that thing of, hmm, I think I know which one is the A-team, and it's not the one with the lead actor in. across these 2 episodes, but it shows that the show can work really well with different characters taking the lead each week.
Wonderful film in hand.
Yeah.
That's worked really well throughout the season because we have built up different relationships between the different characters, not just with one central character all the way through.
So you can see there's different interactions depending on who they're paired up with.
And unfortunately, as you say, these are the 2 dullest ones to care of, which is a shame.
I actually wonder why Avon and Callie work better than Blake and Callie because like it's not like the relationships are sort of explicitly sketched out.
Like I don't think you could write a paragraph about the relationship between any pairing of the characters at this point.
So it is something.
It has to be something about the performers, I think.
Yeah, or the fact that they're both characters who sort of got very rounded edges, whereas Avon's got those really rough edges.
And so, because Villa, they can be spiky. whereas Avon, sorry, where Blake, Blake and Callie are the 2 nice teachers who aren't going to be sarcastic to you, or to each other, and so there's just a lack of that spark.
That's it.
She really has gone from like, you know, a gorilla to, you know, the ship's nurse or something at this point, hasn't she?
Yeah, it's completely forgotten about. her history and um who she was supposed to be and and she's being nice to Jenna.
They've finally bonded there.
I think the other thing we get, you know, before they all sort of teleport down is Blake forces Avon to listen to his podcast.
Oh my goodness.
Worse than that, it's a vlog.
They're awful.
It's written in a style of Enid Blyton as well.
Why don't you sit down, Avon, and watch what you did last week and let me...
Is that just padding?
Could that have been a I mean, literally, did they have time left, so they put that in, because they could have just scattered that through the dialogue of this episode?
No, I think it's just ineptitude, isn't it?
I mean, it is just like, if we had previously on Blake 7, that's what we would do.
It reminds me of, you know, Encounter at Farpoint, the Star Trek, the Next Generation Pilot, where they make Will Riker sit down and watch the episode so far.
Retrieval. pictures confirm is there's a bit of dialogue I wrote down, retrieval pictures.
That the thing apparently.
That's the BBC cameras.
For me, it does that thing we've already mentioned of, you know, Terry's gotten to the end of 13 weeks and he's just wanting to get this out.
So he does this. he does this recap scene in the most perfunctory manner possible, whereas a logical way to do it, as people would actually talk to each other, would be Blake saying, okay, Avon, tell me what happened on the planet, and Avon's saying, well, Blake, you tell me what happened on the ship. they tell each other the things they don't already know.
Because Blake's recap of the planet completely leaves out the people who were on the planet and the gene bank ship and everything, but also leaves out the fact that Ensor's son bloody held a gun on Blake and Callie to get them to try and go to Aristo.
Oh, it's like the sanitised version of the episode without all the interesting bits.
Yeah, it's like, it's like Terry Nation was saying, I think in 9 years time, there might be some BBC video releases, and they'll probably cut that bit out, so let's make sure this narration makes sense.
Yeah, it's just utterly perfunctory and I understand the need for it because I think you don't need it in space fall because anyone who's watching Space 4 watched the way back last week, most likely.
But by this point in the season, they could be worried that people are dropping in and out.
You do get it in Signus Alpha, don't you?
Actually, yeah, and there it makes sense because it's a captain's log.
Yeah, but I mean, this is the ship's log.
Do you know, yeah, but it's just crap.
Yeah, it's terrible.
I never mentioned again.
Yeah, but the 1000000 extra people who watched this week, you'd haven't watched the previous week.
Probably thought it was great.
Because there was a big rating spike for this episode.
Do you know, I actually like it slightly, and that is just because I'm here for scenes of them sort of on the ship doing their stuff.
And it's like when I was a kid, I always wanted there to be Tartar scenes.
And so, like, so when Doctor Who sort of reached the 1980s and it was basically all Tartar scenes, they barely left the ship.
I was super excited.
And so there's something about them just sort of sitting around talking about what they need to do next and stuff that I'm actually weirdly on board for, even though I kind of realise that those scenes really have nothing really very much going for them as far as big drama is concerned.
There's at least a minute of Gan realising he's got a headache and pouring it off.
I've seen that before at the moment.
You know what?
These days, people keep saying, particularly my line of work, that, oh, yeah, artificial intelligence is coming along, machine learning.
Don't worry, it's not going to steal your jobs and I just see Gam pouring himself a glass of water and just thinking, and you enjoy that glass of water, mate.
We're just I'm getting your replacement.
Well, to top it all off, I'm pretty sure David Jackson doesn't actually speak until that scene in the teleport room where Avon discovers him hiding behind the teleport.
He's watching everything, but he doesn't have a line until then.
Yeah, I wonder if this is the one where he slid Chris Boucher, the piece of paper saying four.
That's how many lines I've got, Chris.
Is that the story?
That's the story.
Yeah.
It just had the number 4 on it.
Boucher said, what's this?
And P Jackson's like, that's the amount of lines I have.
It's really kind of a bit tragic, isn't it?
Because he's, that's the, he's actually good and I know I'm getting way into the episode, but when Avon sort of snaps at him.
Like, David Jackson plays it really well of actually being a bit hurt.
You know, he doesn't look like he's about to smack Avon across the face.
You see, he looks like, mate, I am in as bad a condition as you.
Don't be an...
Yeah, yeah.
And Avon looks a bit guilty then, doesn't he?
Well, he stops himself.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, he at least accepts that maybe he shouldn't have under the circumstances, which is an interest, which is an interesting thing for Ivan to do.
Yeah, rather than to just sneer even harder, which is what he might have done in a later series.
One of the best things about all the scenes on the ship is Paul Darrow's ill acting.
His ill acting is brilliant.
It's a masterclass of, oh, I'm feeling something.
Oh, this is not quite right.
Yeah, because otherwise, ill acting can just come across as looking tired and bored if you don't quite nail it.
And he did not look tired and bored.
He's definitely unsettled by it at the same time, isn't he?
Where Jenna just looks tired and bored, to be honest.
And they're sprayed for that.
Have they forgotten what happened to them last week?
They all do seem to be sort of suddenly quite surprised that they have radiation six.
And they set off at standard by 6 quite happily. trundling along in the slow lane at the end of the last episode.
And suddenly now it's like, oh, we're all dying. wish we'd got somewhere more quickly.
Yeah, no, it's all a little bit miserable.
Well, let's leave them on the ship for a 2nd and go back down to the planet Aristo.
And we have our one really proper guest star for the week, and that's Derek Parr as Ensor.
How do people feel about his character?
He's terrible.
Oh really?
Wow.
Well, let's just write like a really cantankerous guy feeding his fish has a computer.
Um, that's it, really?
He's colourblind.
He has layers.
Yeah, I wrote down.
Now, okay, he's a scientist who can't tell the difference between green and red and everything in his room is coloured. his green and red button, his green and red radiation detector.
Clearly, this is going to come up as a major.
Oh no, no, it didn't.
Oh, but was so is the fact that he can't tell green from red?
mean that he's wrong?
And in fact, that his heart thing is actually quite well charged?
Then why does he die?
Yeah, just boredom, I think.
I bet there was definitely a draft where he did.
And then someone probably said to termination, hang on, Terry, this needs a little bit of work on it because and he was like, oh, fuck it, crisscross.
I'm guessing there.
But he's a very experienced actor.
He's got a huge CV of, you know, stuff like Bergeracs and...
It was a regular in crossroads.
Yeah.
So he's a familiar face, if not a big name to the viewers.
I was glad, the reason, so the reason Colin, I was surprised that you were so took against him, was because not remembering what he was going to be.
I was just going thinking, oh, I hope he's not going to be badly aged up to be like 120 years old.
Uh, and and the fact that he wasn't, and he is just a guy in his 60s, who's a bit of an old grouch, came as a relief to me.
So that's why I was maybe a bit more positive towards him.
I think I'm just comparing it to getting ahead of ourselves.
To what, sorry?
TP McKenna.
Oh, or Tice.
No, when there are a bunch of scientists on another planet in another episode called Orbit, featuring Fred Elliott from Coronation Street, it's really, really kind of intense.
They've got characters.
They twist and turn.
They've got some stuff to do.
Whereas this guy seems to like turn on the BBC shower of the plants.
Imagine all the safety precautions that went on there.
And then, and then says, can you get that sort of plastic crate, there it is, and have you got these pills and, okay, well, I was going to die now.
It's just, it just, didn't feel very useful to me.
I mean, I liked his performance.
He is a character that, like, as you say, Colin doesn't have very much going for him.
And he's given some sort of nice quirks and I do, I really, um, bl- like the way that he reacts to his son's death, even though it's sort of massively underplayed.
But, you know, we're never going to do that properly on Blake 7.
But there's, you know, he sort of goes, well, I wonder if you'll ever know how much I loved him or something like that.
It's like, what?
Yeah, but he sort of drops the sort of cantankerous bastard thing and we get a little sort of extra laities performance, I think.
And he gets the information, he gets the information from the universe's most insensitive telepath as well.
Yeah, yeah, Ali, I guess you, this is now a thing with her.
Oh, yeah, some people came to our ship.
They both died.
Oh, one of them was your son.
Yeah.
Also, I do love the, um, yes, I think we really got the idea of how much he loved you from the fact that he was pointing a fucking gun at us in the last episode.
Demanding that we rush to rescue you, but we said no.
We will not go any faster than standard by pick.
Here we are.
And have you got any drugs?
Please save our lives.
From that point on, I actually really like Ensor when he starts being silly about the plants and, you know, the fish and what have you.
But that whole thing of breaking the news from about his son's step.
Yeah, it's it's it's not underplayed.
It's just not played.
Because Terry Nation is not interested in that.
Yeah, Ter Nation's not interested in human emotions generally.
No, no.
Exactly.
And I have to wonder.
Anyone else in the cast, any other character who's not Callie or Blake would have actually said, yeah, he loved you enough to shove a gun in our face.
Imagine Villa. responding to that.
He is one of a huge number of these kinds of people that we're going to meet, isn't it?
He's a sort of Justin Hellmelon B, what's the guy who Mueller?
You know, just these...
Yeah, yeah, just these...
These sort of people who live underground and don't talk to anyone and sort of behave oddly.
I think he's probably one of the slighter examples of that genre, say, but I think he's sort of fairly agreeably played.
When he pulls orac out for the 1st time, I just wanted to say, you fool. you know, that's just a box of flashing lights, but a 100000000 for that.
Yeah, it is digetically a crappy plastic box for the background.
I think is that the word we can use?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. podcast.
They could go full on Austin Powers with this, isn't it?
Several times it's, oh, and it's worth 100000000 credit.
And then someone always says, actually, it's worth 10 times that.
And that's what Servolan kept.
They're very precise about this.
People who haven't met are all agreeing that it's worth 10 times that.
Not nine.
Yeah, not 8 times or 13 times.
It's because they just can't work out that what that would be.
It would be 10, 100 million. 1000000 years.
It's like one of those things that gets listed on Amazon, like, you know, it's a 10 page pamphlet that's been listed on Amazon for 3000 quid in the vague hope that somebody's going to accidentally buy it when it's only worth worth pennies.
Algorithms will do that.
It wouldn't go for 100000000 in an open bidding auction, I do not think.
Or 10 times that.
I will say that one thing I do like about Gareth Thomas this week is the few times where he gets really exasperated.
Like that.
And when the transport tube comes up and he's trying to say, there's no door.
And his voice actually goes up an octave.
And it's like, that's acting.
Please keep doing that, Karen.
In the face of that door, that interminable scene that goes for about 15 minutes.
How does an elevator work?
Yeah, that's right.
Amazing.
Incredible stuff.
And and then and then when they come down and he notices the hatch in the wall and we look at that for 20 seconds.
Actually, when I saw that, I thought, that is super weird.
What the fuck is?
And well, Rod said, well, I hope that becomes important later.
I thought I'd seen this episode and I didn't remember why it was important later, but it will be and we'll get to that.
Yeah.
This is the episode Rod gave up on Blake 7, by the way.
Right.
We'll discuss that at the end.
Well, he's going to have to watch and listen to all of it now.
I know, I know.
I keep telling it.
So how do we feel about the relationship between Aurak and Ensor then?
Well, it's fascinating, isn't it?
I, I, I do like the Tony Nation idea here of uh, computer taking on the personality of its creator and I think the personality really crystallises actually after Ensor has died, which is kind of odd.
Because before that, it's almost not quite Auraky, as we know Aurak.
But as soon as they're up on the ship.
He's really sounding a lot more like the cantankerous Ensor that we've known and been indifferent to through the episode.
Exactly.
But I do wonder whether that was a conscious thing.
And also, the sound effect changes when he gets up on the ship.
And I know that's a very small point, but it really does.
If you listen, is, is, is worrying, has changed by the time he's gone up there.
So I wonder if there's supposed to have been something, maybe there was something in the script that says Aurac has changed while this has happened or something, or maybe that's just my head reconning it or I don't know.
I think that there's 110 vaults down on Aristo.
It's 240 in the Liberator.
That's probably doing it.
Yeah, or it's being asked hard questions and its fans have started to work out.
It's probably decoding some large MP things.
Yeah, it starts downloading updates.
That's what it does.
Yeah, in trouble.
It's connected to every single...
Great if whenever Aurac started to speak, the clippy paper clip from Microsoft Office just popped up on Zen's screen, like you're trying to outrun the Federation, would you like something?
In those 1st scenes where we 1st see him, Blake is also or reading up to a scene.
Blake is smiling for the 1st time in quite a while.
Ensor getting the green and red mixed up, like, oh, yeah.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
And they just play along with it and yes, before telling you actually, we're not going to operate on you.
That is actually quite an interesting reveal.
Like it's perhaps the one surprising thing that happens in the episode.
It's super, super linear.
But then when they arrive, We discover that the cells are going to require surgery to be replaced.
And, you know, like, I think that does come as a surprise.
Yeah, but it still makes sense with the episode last week where his son was being sent back with the surgeon.
Ah, yes, a space service.
He's expecting a space surgeon, yeah.
Specialising in space medicine.
Not medicine, by the way. space medicine.
Medicine.
Well, they're super posh.
Everyone's posh in space.
Yeah.
So I was going to identify as the B plot, everyone kind of lolling about on the ship sweating and kind of being cross with one another.
But have we drained that well, do you think?
It's not much the way plot for them, is there?
They are just waiting.
Yeah.
I'd also like to call out the fact that I don't feel much jeopardy from that at all from them just sitting around being a bit tired and sweating.
And I do have to put it down to the direction because if you look at other times, Terry Nation has used this, particularly in the 1st Dalek story, the Daleks, that is very effective because of the performances and because of the direction.
Whereas here the scenes are quite flat and it's just kind of, oh, we're a bit tired and someone's turned the heating up.
Well, but also like in the Daleks, they're in the Dalek city and they're under threat, whereas these people are just lolling about at home, you know, like it's really kind of super boring.
It's like taking the day off.
Blake does tell Jenna effectively to take the week off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Go back to your cabin, put it on automatics and have a lie down till we get to 52 minutes in.
We do get one of Avon's greatest lines that, to one of the greatest Avon Villa lines anyway, that, yes, dying, the one talent we all share, even you.
But even so even then they're in they're in quip peril rather than actual.
There's no reason to believe that any of them are really going to die.
This is all about the race between Servolan and Blake to get Aurak, isn't it?
Well, really, yeah.
I mean, they're so, they're well enough for Avon and Villa to go down to the planet and do some shooting and stuff.
Yeah, of their facing speed, though.
He gives, he gives Bill of drugs.
At the end of this whole episode of, oh, we're dying.
We've got no drugs, but we have got these drugs.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's just party drugs though.
Like, I mean, that's not medication, right?
or anything?
He's just taking speed to keep going.
Oh, so jumping, jumping ahead.
The Avon's line at the end was meant to have been.
It's blown my head off.
Dear.
So well, let's leave them.
They're boring.
And um, let's go to...
Yeah, the 3rd of our B plots, which is Servolan and Travis, of course, in a chase for the, what are we looking for?
Aurak.
Forak, and they have a map.
They certainly do.
And it came free with a packet of Wetabix this week.
It's scrawled by the assistant floor manager using a Sharpie on a piece of paper that's lying around, and it is only slightly worse than the other map, which Ensor has left lying around his room sort of handily as well.
Upstairs lab, that way to the tunnels, that way to a big hatch to the transporter.
That's it.
There is no map of the tunnel.
No, the best part of it is, they consult it. have to look at it again later.
Like they haven't memorised that fucking thing.
There's like 3 places on it and then they're consulting it later on.
Oh I think we might be nearly there.
It's unbelievable.
We're in the tunnel that goes up.
And that's it.
Oh, dear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the one, the one particular bit of praise I can heap on the, um, on the server land and Travis subplot, such as it is, is that Jackie Pierce actually gets to show a bit of emotion.
When Violorama very wisely directs the Fibian creature as a series of fleeting close-ups.
And after it's dead, you know, you get a bit of, you get a bit of acting from Jackie there that I don't think is inconsistent with someone we've just seen behind a desk all season.
How do we feel about that scene?
It always takes me by surprise.
Because you don't expect it from her.
Yeah, but I love the way how Servolani she is about it, and I guess I'm imprinting that on it, knowing more about Servolani than anyone watching at the time does.
But that she doesn't scream in terror.
She's furious.
She is furious at this thing, is that she's yelling at Travis, like, Travis, get this thing off me, is her basic tone rather than just, she's not going, help.
She's going, Travis, you idiot.
Why are you not protecting me from this disgusting thing?
And at the end, she just looks disgusted and shaken, and then she gets that moment of, no, Travis, you will follow me, which is like, yeah, I'm not getting top billing if you stay for another year, and how's your uncle?
Because he's still got top billing and the chief baddy in the end credits of it.
She's surprisingly shaken though, and it is a moment of vulnerability that it's not a direction that the character ever goes in again.
And she does recover, but it takes her just a few seconds to recover.
I think it's an astonishingly good choice by Jackie, the way that she plays it because she is properly shaken.
But when Travis starts to express sympathy for her and tries to kind of be the person in charge, that's when she sort of just says, nope, I'm going first.
And I think it's great.
I think it is a great moment.
And maybe we're not going to see anything like that, again, until series three.
I think you're right.
Yeah, I don't think there's certainly no tears again until that season.
I'm not wrong.
But also in an unexpected piece of character development, she's wearing trousers and she's wearing something practical while she's out on a space mission, which it's never really, again.
She's underground in a quarry and she's wearing white.
None of the, none of the mud sticks to her because it wouldn't dare as somewhat...
I think Nathan or Brendan may have said in time in the Rani when it doesn't fix to Kate O'Mara.
It doesn't stick to Jackie either.
Oh dear.
I think that there are some very weird things going on with those tunnels as well.
I just want to say that before the 2 of them get into Ensor's base.
So there's been a Styrofoam fall at some point that Travis has to be...
It's a photophone mine.
It's it's really strikingly.
Like it is as if the people making them have not seen rocks before.
Do you think?
That's very odd. are very odd.
And then, just to go back to our A-plot for a second.
There's that scene later where Blake is trying to pull hunks of Styrofoam foam out of the ceiling, which like...
If only had some kind of advanced energy weapon with which to do that.
Nope.
He's just using his hands, like a fat middle-aged man.
And the thing is, the thing with that is he turns around and says, I'm going to try and bring the roof down.
And then he does all that digging up when there is a pit prop right behind him.
You just think you could have knocked it out.
Yeah.
You know, I think that is what you go for first.
Rather than standing underneath the roof, you want to cave in, pulling this roof, bits and roof down.
It does, I can say, it does give him one of the most patronising minds in the whole of the show where he says, let me do it my way, Callie.
You're a woman.
What do you know?
I'm a man.
I'm to do this kind of thing.
That's right.
I was born to pull rocks from the ceiling. directly above me.
It's a stupid plan, Callie. but I'm a man.
I did read that as him maybe implying he was about to make a noble sacrifice, but it's really, but it's really only implicit.
It's not at all there.
Yeah, it's like, so go ahead in the Holy Grail, sort of running in and ruining that wedding because he's in his idiom.
So Serverland crawls through the big pile of polystyrene rock-like objects, vaguely rock-like objects.
And then we reach the door and suddenly burst in and then Travis disappears at that point.
Stephen Crife is still really furious about that extra even to this day.
Is he?
Yeah.
He says, oh, God, he said, he had a squash injury.
Tennis, right?
I thought it was squash because it was the 70s, you know.
Oh, no, you probably...
Yeah, Torah is tendon, so he couldn't walk. or something. we'd shot all the stuff on location 1st and now we're suddenly in the studio.
And so we have to have a scene of Servoland and Travis's legs talking to one another.
And then we see Travis briefly through a fish tang.
I mean, he could have been in the studio and they could have just only shown us the top half of him.
He could have been leaning on something, unless he was literally in bed, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'm sure he just said, fuck it, I'm staying home.
He has said about it that he had to have immediate surgery and then couldn't walk for 3 months.
It's not just that he wasn't as nimble as usual.
Yeah, yeah.
But I want to see that.
I don't want to see that leather clinging to anyone else's form, but here's after this season, I've got to say, I've become quite a fan.
It's an age thing, isn't it?
He was a middle-aged man last time I watched this.
Now he's almost a twink.
That's...
Rod does describe him as best arse in show.
Though the competition is not firm.
Jacqueline Pierce is going to oust him from that too. her mindset to it.
But it does it does just make it look in that scene as if this actor is just missing all of his marks, doesn't it?
Because the camera's all cuts the way he ought to be and he's not there.
Oh, his, yes, his, his hand.
And bless Via Laura.
When Blake and Kelly take Aurak out into the corridor.
He starts on their feet to pan up to introduce us to the idea that, no, this is a perfectly normal shot that happens in drama.
It's style.
Style.
As rescue jobs go.
It's you can't really say they should have done something differently because what else what on earth else could they have done?
And it is really it's over in minute moments, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, we yeah, we make a big deal of it, but imagine the alternative where he couldn't do the location filming.
Oh, yeah, no, they would have had to have a rewrite.
They should have brought they would have brought Jerry Air in from games to do it, I think.
And everyone in the cast after this point, I don't know if you know this.
Everyone in the cast after this point was banned from sports.
That explains a lot.
They all turned around and they all had broken ankles.
To be honest, I can't imagine Gareth Thomas playing any kind of sport ever.
God, no. from a beer bomb, maybe.
You can't play rugby with your arms flailing around like that.
You'd never hold on to the ball.
It takes 2 to carry Aurak.
But later on, Avon's just sort of waving him around by sort of one thing.
And he's very delicate as well, isn't he?
Well, he's very careful.
I mean, we're pre-canine in here, aren't we?
Canine, all right, comes first?
No, no, came on already, I think, by the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But what I like is they've got 3 people who have got to get to the surface with Aurak, and what we're going to do, Aurak is very heavy, and there's a man who is very, very, very sick and on his last legs.
But I know, let's let him hold Aurak with Callie.
Because that's not going to end badly for him, is it?
Blake has lots of lines and stuff at this point, you know, like he can't.
Oh, that's true.
He's the leading.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
He's got to dig out the Sylvester McCoy title sequence from the roof.
So we get to the surface and Travis has done his usual thing and he has been waiting for Blake all along.
Yes, but just how we get to the surface.
Remember?
How do we?
Cali.
Well, it's easy to Yeah, exactly.
Cali, it turns out the point where she said to Ensor, you just rest here.
I'll go back and check.
She goes back and check.
They come back, oh, he's dead.
Oh, yeah, and there's the staircase.
It was actually just like 2 feet in front of where we were sitting.
He would have died.
I mean, he would have died halfway up the staircase. doesn't really matter.
And it's fine because it was off the screen, so you can't see it.
It's not there before those 3 paces.
It's the Peter Moffat school of goodness me.
The charges.
The death is actually slightly affecting, I think.
I think it is actually pretty good.
And sympathetic telepath actually does seem slightly sympathetic, at least.
Although, she does, she does take it on herself by saying, doesn't she say like, oh, like a few...
A few more minutes and we might have saved you.
If Blake, you hadn't been screwing around with the goddamn roof.
Well, they're not even behind us, Blake.
Yeah, if they just got by 6.5 last week or whatever.
Nobody cares about his poor goldfish.
Yeah, very feeding in the last scene.
The Phibians have probably eaten them.
This is the point where, yeah.
I thought, amphibians.
Oh, a planet of people who tell lies, but no, it's not.
It's amphibians.
Jimmy Nation. come on Something I've just got in my notes at this point, although I don't think it was maybe happened here, but just observing that Serverland is definitely referring using the pronoun they to refer to the Federation, not we or us, and that's that's picking up from her conversation last week.
Uh, she, you know, just emphasising this woman, she's already supreme commander, but she is, she is still wheeling and dealing and trying to outwit the Federation, uh, and get her hands on Aurac to secure her power over it.
She is not doing this for the glory of the Federation at all.
Which is just a nice touch.
And that's why there's only 2 of them there.
They didn't bring a bunch of mutoids even.
I mean, it's like you could probably trust some mutoids because they have to obey, but it just feels like, well, let's just the 2 of us take this little map and go through here and hope hopefully we can get through all these security systems that apparently we can't get through but can.
And, you know, you feel like they'd bring a few more people with them.
And that one may raise the stake a little bit.
You could, I don't know, have a bunch of mutoid on the planet's surface at the end, um, or with guns as well.
Yeah.
And you could have some cybermen and a yeti.
And a Ruston robot.
Hey, hang on.
What have I just done?
Yeah, no, they can barely, barely think up things for the people they already have.
Yeah, no idea.
It's a good thing I don't write.
I wrote right there.
What we have to remember is they've done 13 weeks now and there's bugger all left in the budget.
So you put your contracted regulars.
You can have one guest star, one crappy monster, and that's it.
That's your lot.
Yeah.
I guess this is why I meant, I think, did I mention before, the movie Silent Running comes to mind with a lot of these Blake 7 episodes about there's this one reasonably affordable, quite familiar faced character actor who everyone goes and meets and sees them at their end of the world outpost.
And yeah, it's not exactly, it's not the same gister or story of silent running, but that's that setup of that one person holding out with their one, whatever it is, the last plant in the universe or the best computer in the universe or the last collection of jazz records in the universe.
Terry Nation's like, I can do infinite variations on this.
Chris Fouch is like infinites.
No, we're done with that now, Terry.
Thank you.
I'll write some next year.
Yeah, they give it a good go.
I mean, they're still doing it in series 4.
BD, whatever.
A question I have.
I don't remember when I 1st saw these.
Actually, I tell a lie.
I 1st saw this episode after I knew what Aurak was.
Does anyone remember when they were watching it on 1st broadcast?
Did you think Aurak might possibly be a plant?
Because when he's talking to Aurak, you can't see the flashing lights.
You just see a light in the middle of the plants.
So you thought it was like a, like, Megloss or something?
Well, I didn't think that, but I wondered, is the script leading us to believe this?
It does lead us to believe it's a person, except that it's clearly Derek Farr's voice, isn't it?
Because, you know, they call each other Derek Farr's character calls him old friend and stuff like that.
Like, yeah, no, I never... might have thought it was a goldfish.
The camera implies that.
Yeah, no, I knew what all right was before I saw this too, so I can't comment.
No, it was interesting because we asked Mark this, who was watching Blake 7 for the very 1st time last week.
Well, he was sort of thinking about it in terry nation terms and he was thinking, what would anyone pay a 100000000 for in Terry Nation World?
And he thought it was a virus of some kind that they could use against the Federation.
It's a good game.
Also, it was wrong.
Also, though, Terry Nation World sounds like a theme park.
Oh, I'd like to visit.
But I've come out with radiation sickness.
Not accidentally step into the acid sea and my foot would dissolve.
And then they'd just be sort of curiously jaded people who'd kind of lost their faith in everything and they'd be kind of like letting you onto the roller coaster or whatever and, you know, like I think the whole thing would just be a little bit kind of uninvolving, probably.
I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't trust that roller coaster.
Something's bound.
The fight or work that should have gone in beforehand wouldn't have worked. crawling with monsters.
Get that line, don't we?
It's crawling with reptiles, that ter nation line. places are always crawling with Daleks in Doctor Who 2 and something.
Something is crawling with amphibians or...
Yeah, that's right.
Those tunnels are crawling with phibians.
That's it.
Two quid, please.
The old the old ladies who sell you the fairy floss ship you to the security forces while you're eating it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's not fun, not fun at all.
So I think that we do get the best exchange in this sort of final confrontation that happens on the surface of the planet Aristo, where our 2 B plots, dovetail, 2 of our 3 beef plots, dovetail, sort of suddenly at the end.
Well, every plot sends 2 representatives. very, I think it's very fair.
Yeah.
And it is that absolutely superb.
Oh, yeah, all 3 of the plots, don't they, don't they?
That's beautiful.
Six people. symmetry.
Delightful.
It's Aristotelian, really, if you think about it.
Aristotle.
There we go.
There we go, ladies and gentlemen.
Terry Nation.
Job of determinism, bingo strikes again.
It's the, I was aiming for his headline.
I think it might be the best episode of the best line of series A. It's incarnatively great.
It's got to be Chris Boucher, hasn't it?
Oh, of course.
Oh yeah. without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
Yeah.
So terrific.
Oh dear.
And Paul Caro delivers it perfectly.
With just the amount of the right amount of relish.
Yeah, it's absolutely spectacular.
And I guess one of the things about it that's so great is that he was being praised, you know, he was being praised, you know, good shot, and it looked, we think it's great.
It's visually a great thing to watch the hand blow up and then to have him kind of, you know, make fun of himself, essentially, or say the line is his own expense.
I think is wonderful.
And it reveals something about Avon's character. character revealing.
He would kill Travis if he could shoot straight.
And that's something that's kind of worth knowing.
All that's missing is for Avon to, it's for Villa to say, but you can't kill them.
They're the breakout character successes of the season.
That's it.
Secretly, Villa knows that it's a TV program.
And so he's actually thinking all of those things all the time.
I love the way the blown up hand is actually bigger.
Well, it blew up, Colin.
It's in the description.
And why at the end?
Why doesn't Travis just kill Serverland?
Because he's in a lot of trouble.
That's rabbit. absolutely adore his forlorn look after she says that line.
It's wonderful.
It's so funny.
You're in so much trouble, you're going to come back as someone different next week.
And you're going to be mopping out the space toilets for the next on our space station.
I actually want to give some props to Stephen for the, his very, very final uh, scene, his very final thing where he smiles.
You know, she walks off, he smiles to himself.
He drops the hand which just sort of falls into shot, sort of blown up, and then he sort of walks off, and he's a little bit unreadable, I think.
I think it's very good.
And I think we will probably miss him next year.
Yeah, spoilers.
Absolutely.
He's he's been superb throughout the series.
Yeah, yeah, it really has. yeah.
Superb is definitely the word.
The word.
The word.
Sorry.
Getting ahead of myself.
No, no, I really, I really like him.
And obviously Big Finish now diversifying their Blake 7 due to... not being dead.
Yes.
But I think it's a great indication of how good he is in that one of those new ranges, he's the sort of really the lead from the series, who's still in that, the Avalon series.
Ah, he, you know, he's, I know Sally Nevette's in the 1st one, but he's in both of them so far.
Do you think we'll get a big finished story about how he turned into Brian Groucher?
Yeah, I think that's coming in the clone masters set because they've got both of them.
I was joking.
No, no, they've got both Travis's in the past with a story together.
Oh my god.
Like seven and two, Travis.
I'm looking forward to the science of same on boxing.
You're laughing.
Really, you don't know if I'm joking.
Yeah.
I'd buy it.
I'd buy it, it would sit on my phone and I would never, ever listen to it. what I do.
Now we all go back to the liberator and suddenly they realise, hang on, we've got 5 minutes left.
It's so leisurely, isn't it?
And they're so dumb as well.
All right, what is a cliffhanger?
I've never heard the term.
And you know how if you're accidentally casting something to the big telly and you suddenly really, I wanted to be on the big telly, so you start turning off everything on your computer and the telly just keeps playing it anyway?
if someone's walked in the room.
That is actually Chris.
Tell some more.
No, I hadn't watched all.
No.
I haven't watched Orphan 55 for a fortnight and I told my partner I was cutting back.
But just turning off the casting device does not make the premonition that's on your screen, stop appearing.
Well, that was it.
It was like, oh, we've switched it off now.
And everyone's sort of happy.
Oh, well, that's fine.
That's all act done.
Villa says.
And then they go, but wait a second.
We've forgotten one thing.
He still made the prediction.
Like, I just, I don't know, like who, what these people are.
You know...
It's it's very strange.
Yeah, they're fascinated by the notion of a talking computer as they sit in front of their massive talking.
Their big talking computer.
It's like, and to be, and marks observe, you know, calculation that Aurac was most likely to be some kind of space play, it was very sensible because, I mean, literally the last thing you would expect it to expect or act to be, really, is another supercomputer, a super rural computer.
And we get the last ever.
I can't do it.
You go, I know, I can't.
That's the one.
He's cheaper than David Jackson.
He's the best player, is that it?
I mean, they do ski to Tottenham to voice him.
It's fine.
He's already on the contract.
He'll just do another one Yeah, yeah.
So he's cheap, essentially.
Computers turns out sort of particularly cheap.
And like, I mean, we don't get him to do anything.
Do you know what I mean?
Like they don't ask him how old Betty White is or how many films Adam Sandler has made or like anything, you know, like how many days will it be until I die?
All the things that you would ask Siri when you get a new sort of thing.
Nothing.
How much longer does my contract last?
But come to think of it, the particularly astounding thing, sort of in universe, is, you know, Aurex says, I can take data and prognosticate the future.
And Blake doesn't immediately say, how do I defeat the Federation?
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, just, oh yeah, show us. that never goes anywhere.
Like, he never tells the future again, does he?
And it's in his name, isn't it?
Yeah, oracle.
Yeah, yeah.
But he never does that again.
They kind of decide that that's not what they're going to go with or something.
Yeah, and I guess for plot reasons it would just be, it would make scripting.
But it's the epitome of one of those cliffhangers that isn't real.
It's the thing where you can just, you can snip out, snip it out, and doesn't really affect what happens in the rest.
I'm hesitating here because I'm about to start using grammar to describe the 1st episode of the next series as the rest of this story and I don't know if that's right.
It's sort of it is, isn't it?
Is it passing next year?
Well, I mean, it does start with another one of their brilliant previously on Blake 7 scenes where they're always sitting around in that room talking to one another for a long period of time.
And isn't it like, we just saw the ship blew up.
Yes, we just saw the ship blow up.
Play the footage of the ship blowing up again.
Yep, that's the ship blowing up.
Kids at home want to see that.
They love that click.
That's true.
That's true.
There's yet there's yet more mishmash of some really good brand new shots of the liberator in this story.
It looks really, it looks very silvery in some of these shots, particularly when it's in front of the blue planet.
And then back to the 2D cartoon of the yellow version coming back with the balls again.
That's strange.
Yeah.
Either would be fine, but the 3D ones are much better.
It's, I mean, this is a very low effort cliffhanger, isn't it?
Yeah, it's really tagged on.
They've kind of gone, literally, yeah, we have got 5 minutes and it doesn't really succeed in anything.
It just sort of goes, and they do, okay, how do we make this more interesting?
I know, let's snap Zoom onto Gareth Thomas's face.
It's still doesn't.
Oh, Sally calls out Blake, which I think does add to the tension.
I was trying to watch it with the perspective of like a 10 year old watching in 1978.
I reckon it works.
Well, I wonder if a kid would have been confused as to whether the ship really blew up or not.
Well, and I think that's intentional insofar as anything that inept can be said to have reflected its intention in any way.
But that's the thing.
I don't think they're actually intending for that ambiguity to be there.
Right.
But I think that ambiguity comes into it.
And you know what?
If you were a parent and your kid was watching this and you didn't like that your kid was watching this.
This would be the perfect excuse to say, oh, well, that show's over now.
And even when the radio times comes out next December.
You just hide it from him. hide it.
Yeah, you just hide it.
Whatever night Blake Seven's on was the Wednesday.
Oh, it was a Tuesday.
Thank you.
Kid wants to stay up on Tuesday.
No, there's nothing on the television.
Go wash your face. teeth, bed, off you go.
I'm going to watch Paul Darrow says mum.
Sorry, I'm just got a crush on Paul Darrow.
I think that's kind of a good point in the, were there really such a thing as end of season cliffhangers around this time?
I mean, Doctor Who wasn't really doing end of season, cliffhangers.
No, even US, so Star Trek wasn't on and Star Trek didn't really end with season cliffhangers until season 3 of Next Generation.
So it's actually pretty, I mean, when you get to stuff like episodes like Terminal and so on, it has some of the best cliffhangers in TV.
So, well, they're trying.
Well, I mean, terminal's not a cliffhanger, but Star one definitely is.
Absolutely is.
And so good that Star Trek, the Next Generation nicked it wholesale.
Yeah, it's amazingly good, I think.
But this is not, really.
But it is, but this is a sign that the series has already been recommissioned, hasn't it?
And, and, uh, we, the BBC have got a hit on their hands and it will be back next year because it will.
It is.
I think it got recommissioned a few weeks before the end of filming for series one.
I've got it in my head. not in my notes.
I'm just that's a vague impression I have.
But this was definitely not the usual BBC thing of we will make one year of this program and then it will end.
Oh, all right, we'll do one more.
It was a going concern as they end it.
So they're not doing it with a view to getting them back.
What will bring the punters back next year, quick.
Yeah.
Terry.
That's a good point, Pete, because, you know, here am I saying, you know, a 10 year old at home might have been confused and believed his favourite show was gone.
But on the other hand, they would have been a continuity announcement straight away to say Blake 7 will return in the new year.
So, yeah.
And now some others do have them.
You've triggered 2 things with me of watching 2 very similar series, up to Blake 7, Tenko, and Cagney and Lacey, both of which every year ended with a continuous answer just saying, and that was the last episode.
Now. as far as their crib sheet says, it's just the end of the series.
And the Constitution House doesn't care, there would be no selling to you, that it was ever coming back again, unless you wrote a letter to BBC.
Maybe for Blake 7 they did.
But and also, particularly Cagney Lacy, it did tend to get axed every year and then brought back due to letter writing campaign.
One of my favourite...
Don't we hate it when that happens?
My favourite example of that is the end of season 2 of Twin Peaks, where I was obsessed with it, and my sister and I were watching it, and the announcer says, that was the very, very, very, very final ever, ever episode of Twin Peaks that will ever, ever be.
Little did they know, 27 years later, they would make season three. brilliant.
But yeah, that's the thing, context, looking back at this stuff from decades later.
It's doing a different job, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I just want to chip in with my thing that's started to obsess me to an unhealthy level, which is the way the way that the camera pans over the Starfield and the end credits being different every week.
Oh, this week, the credits start rolling and the camera's zooming in and I'm like, they're going too fast.
They're going too fast.
They going to run out, zooming and zooming and zooming.
And it gets to the end of the cast and it just stops.
After all the production crew, it's just a stationary, fully zoomed in picture of some stars because the whoever was cranking that handle, it was nearly 10 o'clock or whatever and it's time to go home. crank, crank, crank.
Oh shit, we're running out of stars.
That seemed quite fitting again to the series in a way.
And I remember on mission to destiny, they realise they've zoomed in way too quickly.
And so they start going to the right and then they start going to the left, but they realise, oh, no, we can't go over there.
Oh, wait, maybe we can zoom in a bit more now.
Wuthering Heights is still number one.
That's the other thing to say.
So you could imagine these graceful stars whizzing past to the sounds of Kate Bush out on the heath and how's that for a zeitgeist?
I fully expect to make that into a GIF for...
I'll see what I can do I said earlier that this is the last episode of Blake 7 that Rod's seen and he refuses to watch the rest.
And during the credits of this, he said to me, I thought there were more series.
And I said, no, there are.
That's just a cliffhanger.
And I said, do you want to watch series B?
And he said, no.
They're all dead and that's how I want to remember them.
Because he thinks they are all incredibly stupid people except for Avon.
Well, so I think that that's all we have time for this week.
And will we be back next week for a retrospective of some kind, Brendan?
Yes, yes, and with retrospective next week, and I'm very honoured to have been asked to do the hosting duties for that.
And so there's going to be a bunch of us on there and I'm going to be subjecting you all to horrific arousing and informative questions about series A slash one slash alpha of Blake 7.
Brilliant.
I can't wait.
Well.
Well, in that case, we will see you then.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night from me.
Switching to manual.
Maximum power on all drives.
Maximum power.
