Space Grouting Peril

[00:03]

Maximum power Hello and welcome to Maximum Power.

Today we're going to be talking about episode 2 of series A, Space 4.

I'm Colin.

I'm James.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Pete, and I'm Cy.

So, P, what's going on with all this shaving foam coming out of walls?

I've been doing some grouting recently around my own house, and let me tell you, it is a real perilous thing to get involved in, and space grouting, clearly, is even worse and even more dangerous.

Uh, who, who, I, I think, yeah, I, in fact, this episode, I'm surprised I didn't call it the space grouting peril because you're, you're really in trouble.

I'm leafing ahead, but the way that the guy when there's the hole in the wall.

It's like, oh, no, there's a hole in space.

I'll put my hand over it I've seen it.

I've seen alien resurrection. all the way through.

[01:06]

It's hand or a tea tray, isn't it?

That's what you need.

Doctor Who has taught us a tea tray.

I was thinking shoe would actually have been much better than palm of hand.

That scene is so affecting though.

Like when I watched it as a child, like, you know, sure, they're shaping foam pouring out the walls.

But the, just that sort of kind of animal guttural kind of like sound of fear that he starts making as, as he realises what's happening.

You just think he's hot, James.

Well, yes.

And it's a shame that he's dead, not a regular cast member.

So where are we?

So we picked up this week straight, like immediately from last week, only Pennant Roberts is shooting it.

But like Blake's still in the chair.

Um, he's still looking out the window.

And now we just have another sort of strange wheel spinning episode, which, you know, does introduce a thing.

[02:09]

Well, yeah, no, it introduces a bunch of stuff that's super important, I think. it is odd, isn't it?

Yeah, it's, it's, basically set in 2 rooms and an, an, an, an, an access corridor, an, an, after having shown us this world.

Now they're just, they're trapped in this, uh, it's a bottle episode, I suppose.

Am I getting my tropes the right way round?

No, that's something else.

But you know what I mean?

It's a bus under siege.

But they're the ones doing the sieging.

Although I must say, I've had easy jet flights with far less polite crew and far less elbow room than this lot of supposedly hardened felons are getting.

They've got lovely big chairs And it was harder to distract the guard.

Yes, well, yeah.

So that is a very uncomfortable line, isn't it?

Like, oh, and Mr. Raker.

There is a woman on board.

Try and be discreet.

It's horrible.

Mr. Raker, try not to rape the rape the convict.

No, no, he's not saying that.

He's saying, just do it. discreetly.

Yes, rape them quietly.

[03:09]

So horrific.

It is.

And up to that point, they've just been 3 chaps. piloting this spaceship.

All right, it's full of prisoners and we know that there's injustice and everything.

But it's all, captain, ready for locked off, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they're not actually, they're not doing evil acting.

And then she says, oh, yeah, but there's a woman, so try not to get caught raping her.

And it's like, well, it's just, again, you can see why they moved it back 45 minutes in the, in the, in the, in the schedules from, from 6, 6, 15.

I think it was originally, wasn't it?

If the paedophilia wasn't bad enough, like raping, raping female convicts.

And the captain is so useless.

He's so, uh, I mean, it is, it is Jack from Howard's Way in his mermaid boatyard flying through the galaxy.

But he has absolutely just any control.

He's like, oh, no, Mr. Raker, can you just stop sacrificing and shooting people and stuff?

It's going in my report, but would you mind awfully not doing that?

He's so...

Yeah, it's the paperwork.

[04:10]

He doesn't want the paperwork.

That's the chilling thing.

He doesn't, he does no moral, no morality, no moral objection to, to this, or the idea that if you work in this totalitarian regime, it will grind you down and you will lose any morality.

Yeah, this is the Federation actually in action, isn't it?

It's world-wary, bored people getting away with what they can because they can.

I do think that the show wants to centre Leyland, though, as a kind of good man.

And there is a way in which he and Blake have some kind of mutual respect.

And like I wouldn't dismiss that line, which I think is a little bit of a triumph for him. where Raker actually says, you know, I'm going to make it clear that you told me to do whatever I thought was necessary.

And so this is your fault and you're going down with me.

And he says, everything that both of us said is going into our report.

[05:12]

And so it does look like he's prepared to take responsibility for what Reka did, but that he is going to make sure that Reka is punished as well.

And like all of that's on a subtextual level.

But I do think that because you've got what's his face, whoever it is playing.

Have we seen him before?

Isn't Doctor Who?

Oh, you mean the commander?

Glen Owen, yeah.

Oh, of course, he is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he's also, you know, Howard's Way, guys.

Yeah, 78 episodes of Howard.

But, you know, like he has a certain sort of gravitas and I do think that that lends him an air of moral authority.

And I do think that the show does want us to see.

The show isn't quite committed to what the Federation is like. and like last episode.

Varron would have been surprised to learn what the Federation is like.

He doesn't know.

You know, he thinks that he's going to be able to to take it to the president to get Blake off.

[06:14]

You know, he thinks he's discovered a conspiracy.

Uh, he doesn't realise that this is what his world is like.

And so he thinks that there's sort of legitimate authorities that he can appeal to for the sake of justice.

And it's the same here, where Glen Owens character is sort of a good guy and rake is a bad guy, and we haven't yet settled on the idea that the federation is all just sort of universally evil.

Yeah.

No, it's not the empire from Star Wars yet.

No, I mean, it will be.

I mean, the signs is clearly there. signs are clearly there, but it's not.

But yeah, we could just be experiencing a lot of bad apples.

I know, I mean, Arctics, you know, like he's not a bad guy.

And we, we, Yeah, we hear him speaking Norman Tipton from Underworld.

We hear him wearing a smock in underworld.

We, you know, we hear him talking about his plans for the future and things, and they all just sort of seem terribly normal.

He's not going to the sort of evil academy to learn how to kind of stick, you know, slivers of bamboo under prisoner's fingernails.

[07:20]

He's just a pilot who's doing his job.

And that's where we are here.

There's kind of shades of gray, aren't there?

in the Federation at this point.

And these are just people doing their jobs.

They're on the awful run of transporting prisoners for months and months and months.

They're being exiled a long way from Earth.

It's not a great job.

It's really dull.

It's quite boring.

They're on the greyest spaceship in the whole world. shades of gray all over, yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just the day-to-day grind.

They aren't turning up as Nazis in Nazi uniforms and going with Nazis, we're going to shoot you and then being fought off.

There's more, I mean, that wouldn't last just to be functional.

That wouldn't last for 50 minutes of drama.

They've got to be people who have got, yeah, elements of not being utterly, uh, evil to make it, to make it last.

I think it's not quite clear directorially how much time has passed in in world.

[08:23]

No.

Like, it seems like everything happens within the space of a couple of days.

There's an indeterminate amount of time between them getting to, like, you know, like escaping, getting recaptured, then being used to board the liberator and then leading into Sigmus Alpha.

Like there's a whole, there's 3 months between the end of episode 2 and episode three.

Yeah, it's very odd.

It's not made at all clear, and you get the scene of Blake and Jenna and Avon all locked in their flight chairs after they've had the prison break and everything else.

And I think you're supposed to think that months have passed at times, but have they just spent 3 months sat on those chairs?

I hope they had box sets on the in-flight entertainment.

In, in, you know, in modern television, in this sort of show, you would showtime passing, you would go, you'd have them in those chairs and then you'd, you'd have like a card saying 3 months later.

[09:35]

It would be told in a much more overt way, I guess.

Whereas here it's just kind of frustratingly wild.

Yeah, I mean, I guess they're saying, I guess it doesn't, maybe it just doesn't occur to them that it's a particularly important thing to land with us with.

I don't know.

Yeah.

But this, I love the way that the 2nd that you've got Villa, Jenna, Avon and Blake talk having their 1st conversation, they just immediately gel.

The Villa's joking, but he's got the inside gossip, you know, they say that they chuck them all out the window.

Jenna's got the pilot skills, uh, and Avon is sort of merciless, but has these aptitude and Blake's doing all the planning.

And it's like immediately that the 4 of them are, are, have got that potential of being a unit.

And Gan is also, Gan is also there.

Yeah, there's...

One of my favourite things in this episode is where Villa does the whole sort of, you know, magic trick slide of hand thing to distract the guard whilst everybody else is kind of plotting in the background, and then they just kind of take control of the room.

[10:41]

And clearly he's had time to develop a relationship with that guard.

You know, it's another one of your things, Villa.

Like they clearly have known one another for a while.

Yeah, and Blake's obviously found his way into the hatches and knows his way around and where he can get to.

So they've been practising this for quite some time.

It's just you don't see a gap.

I think it's because they they kind of open on the same shot of Blake in the chair effectively. don't you?

There's no there's no kind of the ship going by loads of planets or anything because there's no budget for that anymore.

There's no budget for the space battle either. just a bunch of...

You just hear it and shake the set a bit. shake the camera a bit.

Shake the giant red thermos.

They do have a nice range of Tupperware on this show.

I coveted that Tupperware as a child.

They do not need a red alert light bulb.

Just having a Tupperware has gone flying.

That's all they had to do.

[11:41]

That's all they had to do to make this a bit more believable.

And like, I love space fold, don't get me wrong.

Like this, like I really enjoy this episode.

The character moments are fantastic.

The tension in some of those scenes is just really quite palpable.

But there's this sort of feeling that it's just kind of a bit loose and it could have been tightened up.

All they had to do was start with a kind of previously on kind of shot.

And then just and then just go 3 months later.

And that would explain away the fact... not very British TV though, is it?

It's not really a thing, is it?

Well, not then.

Yeah, no, exactly.

But they could have done what they do in Sickness Alpha and have Leyland do his ship log and say, we've got this prisoner on the ship.

We're 2 months into the voyage.

Off we go.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

This episode is our 1st glimpse of some of the seven.

[12:46]

We meet 2 characters for the very 1st time this week.

And um, do they make an impression straight away.

What is the point of Gan?

I'm sorry.

It's like having bungle with you.

It's like he calls it, he calls Villa Villa for a while.

He's supposed to be this big sort of hard man.

He's sort of like, you know, we only need the hand and it's like pointless character, I think.

It's just, whereas there is another character who's better introduced, but let's, you guys go on about.

So you're talking about Nova, obviously, who's one of the sevens?

Avon's paladromic counterpart.

I never noticed.

I'm not good with the English.

And he's terribly pretty.

Is he an evil guard or something?

No, he's a guard in a Doctor Who story.

Yeah, he's a Ruton in the invasion of time.

Sorry.

[13:48]

Varden, thank you.

Yeah, and he's, yeah, he's a guard in the sun makers, and he's one of the slipper team in Face of Evil.

Oh, look, he got a lot of work.

And he's beautiful.

He's pretty.

The way he gets this, he gets that fantastic line.

It's like, I've not done that. haven't done anything yet.

I'll go into the dangerous little crevice on the outside.

That's the point where you think, yeah.

So he's in this episode and then we get Arco next episode and they are clearly kind of vestiges of a show where they could afford to have 7 regulars.

Is that?

definitely.

Yeah, it feels that way.

Everything is setting up Nova as a practical, happy.

He's gonna Yeah, he's the one who's going to get into trouble because he's so infusiastic.

You can see where this is going.

And then they kill him.

Yeah, I, I, some are coming at it.

I hadn't occurred to me that he might have, because I, because I, when you watch it and you know that he's not one of the 7, but he's being treated as if he is, you immediately think, oh, okay, I know what's in for you.

[14:57]

It's like in the 1st episode, um, the 15, by the 15 minute point, every single person that Blake's spoken to so far is dead.

And like, in a way, it's surprising that in this episode, as many of them survivors do.

Are they the only, I'm jumping ahead.

Are they the only survivors at the end of the episode, the central cast?

Um, they don't take any of the other prisoners with them, do they?

Well, Arco.

Our code is still there.

No, but Arco's not in this episode.

He only turns up next week.

Oh, it feels like he's there.

You know, because that's because I watched the beginning.

Am I wrong?

I could be wrong.

I don't think he's in the same.

No, he's definitely wrong.

He's introduced next episode as someone who was actually there.

I kind of love that.

I kind of love that about this show because it does take such a long time to set up the regular cars, that you have characters like Nova at Arco, who you think could be part of that seven.

And then... contrast with the Golden Girls.

That 1st episode.

[16:00]

In the 1st episode of The Golden Girls, there's the 4 of them, and they're all just already lived together, and there's also this 5th one who is, who's not near the golden Nora girl.

They've got a gay Mexican, sassy chef, who's just got, who's just got pilot character only written.

Does he goes and repairs the inside of a wall when it's sort of breached and...

Yeah.

And it's just, yeah, Sophia was having none of it.

But they ditched him because they decided Sofia could have all the sassy lines.

Sorry, I'm diverting.

In terms of launching a series, you either hit the ground running and then do flashbacks and that's what the Golden Girls did.

I was going to actually say the reason for me waffling about this is they do flashbacks of how they all met further down the line. which could you could have started Blake 7 that way.

But we don't.

It's like, no, it's really going to build it up as we go along.

And that is part of it is unique.

It's, well, I don't know, it's unique, but part of its unusual charm that, yeah, it takes so long till you find out who the 7 are.

Really, spoilers, it's the end of the series, isn't it?

[17:00]

End of series 8.

Yeah, I wasn't going to use the Golden Girls.

I was going to use a science fiction program called The Expanse, which does something very similar with one of the characters as well, that, you know, they're there for quite a while. you think it's part of the crew.

There's no, there's no, it's not like the expanse 7 or anything like that, but suddenly, when I was watching it, I just thought, I never really thought, well, they're going to set him up as, um, someone's going to be on, on the crew or how many is 7 or anything like that.

I never sort of analyse it that way.

But there's someone else we should really probably spend a bit of time on.

And it's the, um, uh, the guy, what's his name again?

Avon.

What do people think of Avon?

He hits the ground absolutely running.

He's perfect from the get go.

He is so good.

And like, when people talk about this show, they, you know, like I even's character changes because, you know, Paul Darrow just gets sort of camper and sort of more... performative and stuff, but he is here fully formed.

[18:05]

And there is one speech, when the whole sort of highest fails.

And we're, you know, they're seated in the chairs and and they're sort of strapped together and he gives a speech summing up how shit the heist was.

And, you know, and then your men, you know, blunder around fighting someone to surrender to.

And it's so beautifully delivered in a absolutely fully formed, even way.

I reckon it's the best moment of the episode.

It's, it's properly hilariously funny maybe for the 1st time in Blake 7.

Like it's just a very, very funny speech delivered by someone who delivers funny speech as well.

And, you know, it makes fun of what's been going on.

It's it's even making fun of Blake and his sort of plans and aspirations.

It's brilliant.

I think that's the point at which he cements himself as the lead character of this show.

Yeah, yeah.

With one line.

Like, Blake Blake is a peripheral character for a lot of the 1st 2 seasons, he's there.

[19:09]

He's an idealist.

He doesn't, he doesn't really have a driving sort of idea apart from, oh, I want to fight against the Federation.

Like, he doesn't really have a character.

He's just, he's just this thing.

Yeah, I think because I think we get a pretty good indication of how their relationship is going to go towards the end of the episode where I think Avon says wealth is the only reality.

Um, and Avon, uh, Blake is like, obviously sort of now gearing up for more justice.

But there's a brilliant line from Avon where he just sums it all up, again, similar to the one that we've learned, where he says, an Army of 5, Blake, 5 plus him. wants be a thinner.

And the whole series then is just set up completely, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

And, um, in fact, and going back to the moment where, um, where Lovely Nova, um, pluckily volunteers.

And, and, uh, Villa is like, is, is, you know, clowning a bit about having a terrible condition and Jenna says, yes, cowardice or words for that effect.

[20:14]

But then you get to see, and Villa sort of slinks away from it. edges away from having been the one put in peril.

And it is actually saying, you know, that's actually how to stay alive in this series.

It's like, Yeah.

Yeah.

And the one other person who joins, character, facet, aspect, 35 minutes in, we finally meet this big old ship that ends up being called the liberator.

And what an entrance.

Oh, and that 1st shot is just gorgeous with the great big Dudley Simpson title music fanfare, and you know this is something special and this ship just looks beautiful glowing there in space.

I love that bit.

And how much bigger it is than the London.

It completely dwarfs it.

And they've used the good model for that shot.

Like later on, they'll decide to use the shit model.

Well, because there are 3 there are 3 models.

There's the hero model, the big fuck off, like, we've spent half the season's budget, um, and got Roger Murray Leach to do this, um, to this amazing model.

[21:22]

And then there are the 2 ton of tiny ones that they kind of use.

Because the other one is too, because the other one's too fucking heavy. that what it is?

No one was such sharp on manoeuvring it.

I have to hire an extra scene shifter to lift it up.

Well, they haven't worked out that you could just move the camera.

It's an emotionally controlled camera.

I read somewhere that at the start of the series.

They spent lots of money on really high spec, high, um, quality, model shots of the really good liberator, but then the subsequently other directors working on their own episodes didn't want to use model shots that someone else had done because they wanted to stamp their own.

No, I wanted it going right to left, not left to right or whatever.

And so they would end up using filming.

I might want to use these good camera shots.

I'll use my shit ones.

Yeah, exactly.

They wanted to they didn't want to reuse other people's work. when it's like, but it's better.

That's the point.

We do get a lot of the shots used time and again because they are so fabulous.

[22:27]

But we'll come to that as we go on, really.

So what do people think about the, the way the liberator is kind of discovered, the way they board the ship?

Because I was kind of like, I really like the way it's mostly audio for the 1st couple of times.

It's a little bit kind of, um, you know, alien, uh, where aliens type where it's all sort of done on the radio.

But then when they get inside this year, it's like there's a big kind of gray floaty egg type thing that's confusing their minds and it doesn't kind of work for me.

And it's like, oh, okay, you can have the ship.

The people with guns, you know, who went in twice before you, um, obviously couldn't handle it, but you know, Blake could.

I kind of love that because it's kind of, the ship is judging them and then looks at them and goes, actually, you know, you have some sort of purpose, that purpose might be overthrowing the evil, like the evil, the evil empire, like, that's a really nice way of putting it.

[23:29]

I like, I don't know whether they explore that enough in the show, especially when they actually bring in, you know, the stuff in series 2 around where the ship came from.

But I kind of love that.

So it does explicitly come up next in next week's episode where the ship itself seems to suggest the name Liberator to Jenner.

But in this episode, it seems to be that Blake knows that his family is dead because both like Blake and Jenner we see and even like all seem to have relatives appear to them.

I think Ivan says it's his brother, it's Jenna's mother, it's Blake's, I don't know, what does Blake say?

I can't even remember, but he knows that they're dead.

And so in a way, what the Federation has done to him. you know, is the reason that he ends up with this shit.

I mean, there's, there's something sort of charming and a little bit kind of adolescent about a setup where, you know, our heroes stumble across a ship which is faster than any other ship and can teleport, which no other ship can do and has better guns than anyone else and like a big wardrobe.

[24:49]

Yeah, we could call it a DXS mashing up, which I always pronounce badly.

But ultimately, that is what this show is about.

It's like, yeah, it's like the Golden Girls can't actually have afforded a house that big.

Sorry to keep that.

Sorry, these parallels are really sending out to me this time, right?

That's the episode.

But I just think it looks so the ship just looks so beautiful.

That flight deck is just wow.

And it's so shiny and new and not broken.

It doesn't have a lot of sort of muddy footprints up the walls.

I think, which becomes a sort of feature of it later.

And I haven't blown it up yet later.

Yeah, it's either, so it's all hanging together beautifully.

I'm just with Jenna where she just comes in and gasps and just says, it's beautiful.

Yeah, and she's been established, you know, as a as a hard, hard-edged person.

Obviously, the writers may not persevere with that.

But for, but seeing how, you know, that she's a pilot and she loves all this stuff and for her to, her to react so emotionally to it is, is just really, and in the way, and it takes you with her as the audience, because they've come from this ultra dram ultra gray world of 1978, England, and, and, and it's saying we are going to take you somewhere better than this.

[26:05]

There's quite a lot set up earlier in the episode where Jenna knows about different kinds of spaceships.

She knows what spaceship they're on.

She knows how to pilot it.

So you get her judgement on this new ship that's unlike anything else and you're with her.

She knows her stuff.

I just wish they kept the, um, the shaving foam on her hand because in that scene earlier on where she's like, oh, this is all the, the self-sealing stuff, um, and it, and it hardens, it hardens in seconds.

So let me just hold it up for another sort of 20 seconds.

Oh no, I can't have my hand.

So she's immediately gone to the, the, the liberated Lou to uh, to wash it off.

She's clearly somehow managed to negotiate despite her prisoner status.

She's been given a full, full personal grooming kit.

I mean, she looks meticulous.

However many, over many months they were on the London four.

She has not let her standards slip at all.

Yeah, her hair always looks magnificent.

[27:06]

Well, one thing we haven't covered yet is, um, what do we think she said to Raker?

Yes, this was my very next question.

And it's something about getting hard, isn't it?

Like there was some, like, this is this is for the ladies and gentlemen who don't know quite where we're at in the episode.

This is where he has again, he's doing his thing.

I mean, obviously it's coached in, it's dressed as it's a drama series.

He's going to get her.

It's not more explicit than that, but we know what it means, but and she goes and whispers something in his ear that he's horrified by.

But we can't read her lips, can we?

We can't, it's, uh, no.

I think she found out he's a Doctor Who fan and she whispered, looms are cannon.

And he just couldn't, he couldn't stick it. a new series fan.

He looks the type.

So you think I was being kind of, you know, prurient when I said something about getting hard, but the dialogue is, you know, Raker says, you know, I'll make you very comfortable or, you know, something like that.

[28:08]

And, uh, Jenna, Jenna has this thing where she's amused by people who threaten her and it's wonderful.

She has this sort of little way her mouth sort of curls and stuff.

And Raker says, why make it hard on yourself?

And then she hilariously says, why indeed?

And then she goes in for the whisper.

Do you know what I mean?

And so she's clearly meant to be kind of impugning his manhood, which is why he slaps her.

But yeah, we aren't ever going to sort of have her properly whispering that.

Oh, no, no.

There's a whole big finish audio.

On that line.

A box set.

Actual Jenna, at least at this point, is a lot more glam than Jenna in my recollections, where I do, I do, I remember her being having more of a sort of rocky Susie Quattro look, but she's much more glam here, at least, than that.

There is something incredible about her, I think.

[29:09]

I think she's really, really great.

And she does it without kind of showboating and stuff the way some of the others do.

And it is, I think, just her sort of general amusement at anyone who's mean to her.

And she keeps it going right to the end.

I mean, think about her with Bruce Purchasing in, um, the keeper.

Yes, I was going to call it the Tents of Goth or something.

Yeah, the keeper.

And, you know, again, she spends the entire episode just low-level amused and all of this sort of shouty nonsense that's going on.

Yeah, and she gets to be, It's like Blake's the idealist.

Avon's the cynic, and Jenna is the reason, like when the 2 of them are having a stubborn, narrow-minded declarations of what should or should not be done, she then comes along and says, well, I think maybe, and sort of weighs up the 2 of them.

Which at this point is a really useful role for her to have in the dynamic.

I think it works very well that it's the 3 of them are getting sent over, like we don't get villa, we don't get Gan, and we get the kind of grown-ups in a way, and the sort of central cast, all of whom have sort of quite different outlooks on things, all of whom appreciate different things about the ship.

[30:21]

Yeah, and there definitely are. of them has their own type of line.

You know, you could, there's not many lines that you could just give to a different member of the crew because they're, they do all come from their own point of view. uh full respect to uh Terry Nation and uh Chris Boucher for that.

See, I'm just, I'm just here for a, the way that Paul Darrow handles a car aerial.

Yes, he's very determined.

Thrusting it into a computer.

Does that work?

Should I be doing that, Colin?

Slotting it into that hole?

Avon does give the guy he's assaulting a most amazing bitch slap at one point.

I'll try and make a gif out of that because I think it will come in very handy.

The way he sort of flies out of that sort of like this service hatch thing, it just kind of jumps out and just beats the living shit out of this guy.

It's fantastic.

I think too, because he is set up as their kind of, he's the nerdy guy who does the computer things in the heist.

Like you can see, you know, perhaps we imagined that they're going to be heisting as sort of fair amounts in the future.

[31:29]

And so he's clearly set up and given a role.

And so I think in context, it is actually surprising that he does sort of get up and start smacking that guy around.

Yeah, it's really scrappy and vicious as fights go.

I mean, he claps over his ears and all sorts is quite nasty.

It's quite visceral, isn't it?

Yeah.

There's another, there's a good sort of death scene at the end.

I think, I don't want to, what you guys think of the special effects on this, where Raker is ejected from the ship.

It feels like quite a complex shot.

He's on wires and you've got, he's very obviously on wires.

Because you can see them.

And you've got the model shop.

And then Dudley Simpson does like a sad trombone.

I mean, I was cheering.

I think everyone watching it would be cheering.

He falls out the greatest show in the galaxy, car park tent, which looks like the, you know, not a very, um, not a very secure, uh, nice corridor.

[32:35]

But I really like those scenes.

I like that that set and it feels like it's really flimsy and you're walking through space and you could fall out of this at any time because it's cheap and nasty because it's an old ship.

Prison ship yeah.

The way the ships are separating, like he's kind of being pulled out and his fingernails are dragging along the top of the tube.

No, no, like it's a great way for that character to die.

He deserves to be sucked off into space.

I think Shriek of the Week.

Shriek of the Week is going to be a thing now.

My nomination is definitely Nova for his horrible, terrifying little gasp as you realise it.

As he realises the squirky foam grouting incident is not going to lead to his contract being renewed.

I don't know.

I think I'm the guard Krell gives a really good death scream as well when he's on the liberated flight.

You can hear it.

There's a really good one there.

[33:36]

This could be a Twitter poll.

Over to you, our listeners.

So yeah, I think it's a terrific episode.

I think, as we were saying before, part part 2 of four, perhaps, you know, and then there's a few more, and then we get our little reboot.

But I think it's it's probably most successful in introducing Avon with some really sort of sharp dialogue.

Like, oh, I relied on other people.

And, you know, you know, um, wealth is the is the only reality.

And you're not quite sure.

And he's more, he's not just the sort of shy villa kind of thief guy.

He is not going to do very much.

He also going to kick the shit out of someone and then hack a computer.

And we also start to see these little bits of, you know, how him and Blake are gonna get along or not. in terms of pragmatists versus realist and Jenna sort of going, oh, for fuck's sake.

Men, put your dicks away.

I think what's really interesting about it is that it's kind of too failures in a row.

[34:42]

And normally in a sort of procedural show, you have the regulars presented with a problem and then they use their sort of ingenuity or talents or whatever to solve it.

And here, you know, we've had that fake out last week, we had no way of knowing that that Varron was going to be killed.

You know, it looked like it was going to be a race against time and maybe Blake gets saved.

Here, I think we've got good reason to believe that the heist is going to work, that this is going to be a show about some prisoners who take over a prison ship and then, you know, get their revenge on the evil federation and that doesn't happen.

And so it ends in failure with them kind of leaving with their tail between their legs.

And in a way, like maybe the bravest and most interesting thing about Blake 7 is that it doesn't do that.

It rarely, it rarely has them solve a problem.

[35:44]

Sometimes they arrive and cause a problem.

Sometimes they arrive and, and you know, they get what they want.

But the show absolutely lets them fail at what they're trying to do.

And here we're 2 in a row, I think.

I mean, they are exceptionally good at visiting quarries.

I mean, that's the one we know every time.

Not yet.

Could you say that they're actually failing upwards?

Well, I mean, they fail into the ship.

Do you know what I mean?

And that's the show, the premise of the show, but that's, we don't know that it's going to do that.

And I think as viewers, we're waiting for the thing to succeed.

Yeah, and their heist really doesn't come off.

It ends up in a lot of deaths that are almost needless and because Blake is a good guy.

He stops people being killed, where Avon is just there saying, no, just wait.

They're expendable, but we can live.

It's really actually properly good, isn't it?

Like it's cheesy and sort of super cliched in a way, but goodness me, they sell it.

[36:49]

And, you know, the idea that because we're only just learning about Blake and what he's going to do, and so having him just say, yep, I'm throwing this away because they're killing the prisoners, and then having Raker be told that Blake has surrendered, and then he kills one last prisoner to just, as a kind of fuck you.

Like, I can do what I want.

Like, he's doing it not in order.

Do you know what I mean?

It's not to quell a riot.

It's just that he can do this.

It feels like it.

But I, I, I kind of like to think that that is how Blake was captured.

You know, he was cornered, he could have escaped.

He could have continued his rebellion, but he had to stop and save a puppy.

No, but Travis threatened Travis threatened his people.

He went, no, I'm not going to let my people die.

I'm going to, like, I'm going to do the right thing and save some people.

And then Travis killed them all anyway.

Yeah.

I mean, if Avon had been, if it was called Avon 7 and the leader was more of a bastard, they would actually have had a stronger chance of bringing the Federation down probably, but it would have been a less interesting series.

[37:56]

But this is something that we come back to again with Blake, just in a bit of foreshadowing, in the web.

Very, very obviously, we have the same argument between Avon and and Blake, again, restating that Blake is on the side of life and what he thinks is right, and Avon's cynical and is not and is out for himself and saying, we need to get this and get out, and this is the way to do it as quickly, and as unmessly as... looking forward to seeing whether we notice a point when it becomes clear that Terry Nation is now writing for Paul Darrow, uh, and the, et cetera, and the cast as opposed to these fictional creatures that he's just got only existing his head up to this point.

Do fans agree on a, on a point where that happens?

Well, I mean, the point that I was making earlier is that I think that here arrives in this episode in that Boucher speech, and it's clearly by Boucher, and so much of Avon's character, that central moral thing is a little bit empty, you know, do we let people die or do we, I mean, because I even just wants to go and get rich?

[39:06]

Like, it's not clear that there's a, a robust moral dilemma here.

Like Avon's a bad guy.

He just wants to get rich and and Blake wants in some way to do good. you know, and to make people's lives better to liberate them, I guess.

So what I even, I think, is, is that attitude?

You know, there's just this sort of perfect marriage between Boucher's dialogue and Darrow's delivery, that creates Avon.

So I, you know, like I was super surprised because I'd always believed the kind of fan wisdom that even does take a while to cook, that that what we get here isn't what we end up with.

But I think it absolutely is.

So, you know, like Terry's written these episodes of series A, you know, like on a series of foolscap pages and then sort of eventually menus and napkins and bus tickets, you know, by the end of the season.

Does it just say Avon says something witty and cynical?

[40:08]

You can do that, Chris. can't you?

Come on.

So I don't think it's ever really that planned.

And I think that TV in this era too.

And Doctor Who's the same, where the regular characters are super peremptorily sketched, but what we get instead is just sort of incredible performances where the actors inhabited and kind of create those characters themselves.

Definitely.

I mean, Chris Bouncher has sort of been on the record to say there's not a single line of Avons that I didn't have a Passover and tighten up or throw in a film quote for Paul Darrow to to latch onto.

And I think he's, Chris Boucher is actually paying attention to the characters all the way through.

That line that line of someone to surrender to has a ring of being a quote from a film.

It's just so...

Along with Villas, I got confused.

Although the only thing that did just stand out to be at the start when he got taken down while playing the ultimate heist for 5000000 credits, there's like 5 million.

[41:16]

I mean, I don't know what inflation is, and credits aren't real anyway, but 5000000 doesn't seem like all that much for him to have gone down for.

But serious CRD has become 500000000 great.

Yeah, yeah.

I think they're worth a Bitcoin, so it is quite a lot of money.

That is after that is after the Federation's basically collapsed after the Dalek invasion.

Yeah.

I wouldn't be surprised if it did become 500 million.

Oh, no, I think it becomes West Germany then and there's out of control inflation and one Bitcoin for...

The Weimar, the Weimar, Federation.

Or like inflation was in 1977.

I suspect that'll be getting mentioned a few times as we progress. by the time.

Basically, by the time you reach the 2nd half of your series, the money that you've got is worth about 70% what it was worth when you started filming the 1st episode, isn't it?

With the inflation rate then.

Yeah, yeah.

But like between the beginning of the episode, the end of the episode, you've suddenly lost like nine-tenths of your budget.

Hello, horror fang rock.

[42:18]

So, this episode ends with Blake's 1st big speech, his, with a ship like this, and a full crew, then we really can start fighting back.

Yeah.

They know they've got good music to come in at the end of that as well, don't they?

I wonder if the cast have heard the theme music.

Oh, that's the point.

I wonder if the cast have already heard the theme music at this point.

Because in Doctor Who, even in the 70s, they were still definitely in the 60s.

The theme music was actually played before they all started acting in the studio.

I generally film the title sequence with the overlay while they're doing the recording somewhere in studio D or wherever they are.

So maybe they'd have maybe they'd have seen it and heard it.

Yeah, it's like hold the shot until you hear Dudley trombone. in that last line in key with the theme music, please, Gareth.

Screams in the key of Blake.

Still, to this day, these episodes seem to me to be quite fresh because Parson made seen 20 times and other parts of them, I've maybe seen 5 or 6 times and it just seems like they're new.

[43:31]

Like they're like they're special edition extras because they didn't, I didn't watch it episodically.

Like the episode ends with a still not quite knowing what's going to happen next.

And I really kind of enjoy that.

I like the fact that we haven't, like he does talk about fighting back, but he does have that sort of talk about the crew.

And so maybe if we've got our wits about us and we've seen, you know, Villa, for instance, who is in the last episode in this episode.

So I guess we're kind of expecting him to end up in the show.

So I guess it does hint at the fact that he's going to go and rescue them 1st and then fight back.

But still it's unknown, isn't it?

I think they, at the end of the episode, they do say, no, I think it would have been good if they had just said, okay, we've got this kick-ass ship.

Uh, there's the 3 of us.

What do you want to do now?

And then the Dudley Simpson trombone to come in instead of them to go, I'll tell you what, why don't we go and pick up all those fucking people we met on a ship?

[44:40]

And everyone's like, okay, fair enough.

You know, not let's go to the planet of something and find a bunch of, you know, bounty hunters we can use.

It's like, no, let's, let's, let's go and have a look for some prisoners, you know?

And so you've got to give Blake his big hero moment and his big close-up at the end of the episode, though, haven't you?

And a bit, I'm establishing, this is my show, and this is where we're going, and this is what we're going to do. and I'm in charge. in charge, Darrow.

Like, I mean, I love silk and silk itself up because of that.

I guess what happens is that the ship christens itself the liberator through Jenna, and that's the 1st thing they do.

They're not going to go and liberate Earth in episode three.

So you have to give them a little liberation moment in episode three.

Um, and and that's it.

And it is to some degree successful.

I mean, the 2 well, the one. 5 interesting people who were on the London get rescued.

So, uh, mission accomplished.

[45:42]

A lot of them probably are murderous bustards as well.

Not literally, it's a series about every single person who was in prison escaped and took over the world.

That would be slightly different.

That would be kind, yeah.

Although I'd watch the shit out of that, I can tell you what.

But enough about intergalactic.

That's it for Space Four.

Thank you very much for joining us.

We'll be back next week with Cygnus Alpha.

Thank you very much for listening and good night.

Good night.

Good night.

Good night. goodbye from me.

Switching to Manny.

Maximum power on all drives.