Hello and welcome to Maximum Power, the podcast where we don't care if your whole planet turns into a mushroom, because this week we're watching Mission 2 destiny.
I am Pete, and I'm Peter.
I'm Cy, and I'm Simon.
Hooray.
And if you can join, if you join the dots between the 4 of us, you will notice we've only got 2 space names between the 4 of us that we have just shared out this week.
And we have some great space names among the cast of our potential suspects for this episode, maybe Terry Nation is top of the list.
I don't know.
We'll see how it went down with everybody, because this week it's a very, it's a real Agatha Christian space vibe, isn't it?
And I'm doing air quotes around that because we can talk later about, is it really hitting that nail or is it just paying lip service to it?
But yeah, what do people think about this as a, as a different style of like 7 episode?
Well, it really seems to me, like, it was so obvious that Terry was doing his space mystery.
So he had he had 13 episodes to fill and in his original pitch documents and he probably didn't, but this is what I'm imagining.
Episode 7 was earmarked as the space mystery, so he could do that.
And it does give Dudley Simpson, the incidental music composer, an opportunity to roll out his thriller stings, which, let's face it, lend the episode its only atmosphere.
Yeah, he's going deep with the with the dumicello music this week and making everything sound extra dramatic when there's not a lot of dramatics going on on screen.
No, there isn't very much dramatics going on screen, but I still think that at least everyone's taking it terribly seriously and terribly earnestly, and I think that's one of the things it does have going for it, even if it's all a little bit neh.
Yeah, yeah.
And we've got it's got a big cast, and that's not the greatest of plaudits.
There's a lot of people in it.
If you're just here for counting people, there's quite a lot of them.
But they've got a good range of familiar faces from various bits and pieces. that we've seen subsequently and before.
And what do we think about having this idea of Avon?
sort of stepping up and acting, is if he's the central character for most of the episode?
I don't know whether that's going to ever turn out to have legs.
Yeah, I don't think it's really, it's just not in character for me for Avon.
I mean, he says, I really, what is it, what is the line?
I really can't cope without it.
I don't, you know, I need to I need to solve the mystery is what he's saying. and I think, does he?
I mean, I can't see it.
It's just utterly inconsistent with everything else that we know about Avon that he does before or since, where he'd be happy just to steal the stuff and get out of there and leave them to keep going around in circles.
So from that point of view, it is, that's the thing that it probably doesn't sit well with me, even though I love having as much Avon as I can, and of course, the benefit is that we get lots and lots of Avon in this episode.
It's the get out of jail free card that they always use with characters who don't want to get involved.
They always say, oh, but they can't abide a mystery.
And so they have to be, they have to solve what's going on.
I think that's right, Simon, I think, it's slightly out of character for Yvonne at this point in his character development.
I think you'll move more towards that.
And we'll see when he might assume more of a lead role, shall we say, later on in the series that that becomes a bit more of a driving thing.
Um, but I think this episode would have been fairly intolerable with Blake at the helm.
It's an interesting choice to put Avon there for the 2nd half.
They'll do it again in deliverance this season, and I think it's nice that it's him and Kelly, because it sets up that good dynamic between them.
The good thing is, though, there isn't any kind of faux conflict between the regulars that I think they try and manufacture in other episodes.
Like, you know, they may be the occasionally slightly barbed one liner, but they're not.
They're not trying to outdo each other. you know, everyone's not trying to sort of be bitchy at Cali and all vice versa.
So that at least makes it feel a lot more comfortable.
But I sort of can't help feeling that they've come up with the plot or the idea.
And then he just sort of slots characters or slots the regular characters in to perform particular roles without really caring about who those characters are.
Yeah, they're there to be a specific number of people.
You sort of get that vibe quite a bit from it.
Yeah.
I think it's, I think it's always bold to open a story with everybody continually falling asleep uh due to the snow gaps and the lack of atmosphere, the lack of atmosphere on this on this spaceship.
And also, I think it's quite strange that, I'd love to know more about the behind the scenes things, but why, like, about a quarter of the scenes on the spaceship a shot on them in a massive sound stage?
I don't know if they went to Elstree or something, but there's clear cuts.
It's like they go, they walk down a corridor into another corridor that's just much bigger and on film and then go through a door at the end and they're back in the studio.
Is that like?
Was that because they were blocking it with a different episode maybe?
I don't know, you know, they just happened to be at a big studio.
Yes, the film the film video matchup is particularly jarring, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine it's because the fact that, you know, they've got a certain number of studio days or a certain amount of studio time, and they've got a certain amount of film time, and the episode ended up not needing any location work, and so they therefore do a couple of sequences on film.
But you're right, I keep waiting for something in those, you know, filmed corridors in that film room that they're in like the control room which is in charge of the gas.
I'm expecting something there to be a fire or something to burst into flames because that's what you expect when suddenly you've got a sequence on film.
So it's a bit off quitting.
Or a badly choreographed independent Robert's phase. something like that, yes.
But this is it.
I mean, the only thing that actually of dramatic significance that happens on film is when Stuart Fail falls off the top of the filing cabinet, which is a really good moment, but that's the only stunt in the in the episode.
That's the only, only sort of reason I can think that they did, did a film sequence.
But otherwise you've just got the different coloured corridors looking gray with a yellow light or a blue light or a red light depending on where you are in the spaceship.
And we'll come back to that in Blake 7 several times.
They've had to change the light bulb, haven't they?
Well, you know, I think I may be slightly colourblind.
In fact, I think I am, but I thought that those basic spaceship corridor flats were a terrible brown.
In fact, they were mission brown.
They were their 70s made manifest in a dual X paint colour.
And we don't know why this decision was made.
Everyone knows that spaceship corridor should either be metal or black and white, but brown.
Why?
Mission...
Yes.
We're at the height of 19 of the winter of 1978 at this point, aren't we?
That's right, the winter of the audience's discontent.
And we've got everyone in very drab costumes as well.
Although they're nicely colour coded.
They're all really bad.
And they haven't quite got to the operatic Blake 7 costumes yet.
So everything is very functional, but dull.
Yeah, they're still doing this.
Well, we're not Star Trek, so we're not wearing bright coloured uniforms.
What shall we wear then?
And they're finding their way.
But yeah, what you picture in your mind's eye as a definitive Blake 7 get up is still a little way ahead, isn't it?
We've not quite got there yet.
Yeah, there's nothing flowing.
There's no drapey bits of stuff to switch around in.
Yes, the swishing the swishing evolves quite naturally as we go further on, I think, doesn't it?
And having mentioned Star Trek there.
Can we just have a moment of appreciation for the fact that the Ortega?
a galaxy class vessel, and every time they say it, it just gave me a laugh.
Yes, the 1970s galaxy class is slightly different, slightly different level, isn't it?
Absolutely.
Now, lest anyone think that because we're poking a little bit of fun at the drab sets and costumes and the fact that nothing very much happens in the studio or on film.
It's not to say that I don't love this episode because I love every episode of Blake 7.
I love it on a genuine, will watch it again and again level.
It's just that this is slightly disappointing.
It feels like no one could really mustered that much enthusiasm.
I think the only person who really is mustering enthusiasm is Paul Darrow, who is seizing every opportunity to be sent to stage here for the 1st time and he has so many great moments, sort of 11 bit.
I love is when he turns around and he smiles where he says, there is, however, a problem.
And this thing, yeah, he's just really enjoying this script because he's right at the centre of it.
I think you can see why he gets more and more to do as the series goes on because he's just magnetic to watch.
When he's on the screen, you're just watching him the whole time.
I just want to sort of take issue with that sort of thought that I don't know whether it's what you were actually saying there, Peter, but about there not being sort of enough effort in it because when I was watching it, again, just now, I was surprised.
I was expecting everyone to be not really caring, as you're kind of suggesting, like it's, everyone's just kind of going through the motions, apart from Paul Darrow, to create an episode and, oh, it's 10 o'clock, time to go home, right?
There something in the can.
Whereas I actually thought, no, they are actually taking care.
The performances are actually all on the same sort of level.
You don't get someone who's completely in a different program compared to the rest of them.
I think Pennant Roberts, despite his usual flaws, doesn't do that bad a job.
I think it's all nicely covered.
There's nice shot choices where, you know, the over the shoulder, usual type of stuff that you get in kind of multi-camera television.
There's no sense for me that they're not caring about what they're making.
I actually think they're all doing a good job.
It's just that the base material that they're working with is somewhat underwhelming and that's what basically drags everything down.
Oh, yes, yes.
I actually, I completely agree with you and I would never accuse TV professionals of not caring what they did or not putting in the effort.
But the word that I used was... enthusiasm. enthusiasm.
It doesn't ever sort of really take off.
It's all curiously muted for me.
Yeah, it doesn't land on our screens in that way, isn't it?
That's the thing.
That's the director or whether it's a roll of the dice and sometimes everything slots into place in gels and other times it just doesn't, no matter how hard everyone was trying.
Yeah.
Yeah, because that's a great cast here, who, um, I've done really good work elsewhere and they've all sort of come together and there's quite distinct characters, but you don't really get a chance to get to know them very well.
So, although we've got lots and lots of red herrings in the mystery.
You've been, it's really going to be one of 3 of them, because it's not going to be nice John Leeson, because he's just smiled and said nice things all the way through, and it's probably not going to be Levitt, although she's cold and lacks affection.
Yeah, what a strange line.
Isn't it just?
But she does have one of my favourite moments in the episode where she runs down a corridor and moderates her run into a very fast walk into a walk as she runs out of corridor.
I love that bit.
I have to rewind that bit a couple of times to watch that because it's a masterclass in.
I'm running out of set, but I've got to be urgent.
Oh, stop.
Nigel Plainer did a fantastic spoof acting masterclass series on, I think, channel 4 in the mid to late 80s, and he did one on science fiction, which was a sort of generic mishmash of Doctor Who and Blake 7 acting tropes, basically, and there was a whole section on corridor acting.
And yet, I think, I think she possibly might have inspired that, perhaps.
In fact, perhaps this entire episode inspired it quite possibly.
I don't think it's ever been released, but if you can track it down on the internet, it's really worth looking.
And yet we have this really large cast, but very helpfully, I found, while doing notes for doing it.
It was like they had future podcasters in mind because they spend their 1st 2 scenes always referring to each other by their names.
It's like, well, Dr. Kendall, what do you think?
I think we should talk to Mandarin.
Mandarin, what do you think?
And that's very helpful when you're taking notes and trying to figure out who's who.
And they're also with a cast in that they don't look like each other.
No one looks like each other too.
That's a good point yeah.
Yeah.
And there's the, my favourite one is the really distinctive gravain, who is the, the guy from Planet the Spiders with the scary lips.
I will always remember that, the chanting, the chanting skin.
That's right.
He could see a blue lice, I think you'll find.
And nimble from Ghost Light, yeah.
He's just got one of those faces that just sticks in your mind.
And it helps, of course, that they've all got those terrible space names.
I mean, it's particularly bad in this episode.
We've mentioned Levitt and Mandarin, but there's also, you know, Grovane, as you said, Sonheim, Pasco.
It's like, where do these 2 syllable names come from?
It's like the Aldi shelf of knockoff pastas products or something that have all got names that are meant to sound a little bit like they ring familiar but not quite enough.
Mandarians and Sondheim sound very like Mondrian, Sondheim, don't they?
So maybe he was originally thinking, oh, I'll just name them all after artists and then, oh, I can't think of any more.
That's fine Yeah, the 2 of them could have gotten together and written a musical.
Maybe that's what they did on the long spaceship flight nights, yeah.
I mean, all of those characters.
I mean, I don't mind them.
It's actually quite good to enter this situation where you've got a large cast, as we said, and they've got an interesting dynamic with each other.
It's slightly sabotaged by the fact that they're all slightly one note.
They've all got their one character note.
So one of them and his name escapes me, but he's kind of like the curly haired guy who's with Sarah.
His one character notice clearly snarly anger, because that's all he gets to do.
And I do quite like it, though.
In a stagey way, it appeals to me.
It's interesting you mentioned stagey there because I was thinking, my God, it feels like the whole thing is a stage play that they're filmed.
Yeah, and then edited down quite brutally because although it isn't an episode that flies along in terms of pacing, in terms of structure.
Suddenly stuff will happen really, really quickly.
And like you said, you know, we meet the characters with these one.
I'm the friendly one.
I'm the untrust worthy one, because they just don't have time to actually show us all of that.
So obviously they've got to just spell it out nice and quickly for the murder mystery angle to kick in.
I asked on Twitter for people to nominate episodes of other science fiction series that have done this and the answers come back pretty much all of them.
Yeah, Buck Rogers and Battle Star Galactica both got mentions and of course Doctor Who's got several under its belt, particularly robots of death, if we're talking in Chris Boucher involvement.
And the Doctor Who fan and Agatha Christie expert, Dr. Mark Eldridge on Twitter, chipped in very pointedly to point out that often they say they're doing Agatha Christie in space.
And what they're really just doing is an episode that ends with someone doing the Poirot reveals all in front of the fireplace scene.
And that if you really want to do Agatha Christie, the clues should all be there and it should be about playing a game, the viewer, to follow, to follow those clues.
But I think this does a reasonable, reasonable job of it, but we are, we're presented with red herrings and things like that, aren't we, as we go along?
It's not just the den, a cut to the denimon.
It does do all those things where like guy with a beard, I keep I keep thinking them in terms of not their names, but their colours.
So the guy in clean with the beard, where he's in, whatever he is, he turns around and he says, I knew you'd be here and you know, you cut.
It all that sort of, um, rubbish.
If you imagine put it that way.
Simon, I think it might be helpful if you think of guy in the green with the beard as Buick from Doctor Who's Warriors of the Deep.
No, he's not Buick.
Oh is he not?
Right, that's solid, you are colourblind.
Sonheim.
Greenbeard is from Les Mis, the recent movie.
I remember, I got that.
I recognised him from that and had to go Google.
Oh wow.
Well, to redeem my lack of telling the characters apart there.
There is sorrow and her terrible screaming, and she's played by i Claudius's Beth Morris.
Who is she in I Claudius?
Drusilla.
Oh, wow.
She a big dealer.
Much better than I Claudius.
Yes.
After IMDb searching all these people, all the cast.
I think in future episodes, I'm going to start taking a proper tally of who's done the most episodes of Doctors, Casualty, and Doctor Who, and we can have some kind of Matrix to find the definitive BBC 1970s, 80s cast based on what they've subsequently gone on to do, because some of them have got a heck of a lot of those.
Doctors is a daytime soap here that's filmed just up the road from me here in Birmingham, and they have a constant churn of characters and pretty much any British actor who has been in anything in the last 40 years, has at least had one role in it.
I mean, including several of these as well, spinning it out.
But Dr. Kendall, the one who's sort of the main one that Avon spends most time talking to.
He did 76 episodes of the Midsomer Murders after this as a doctor.
So he's getting his doctor, Dr. Roll.
Obviously, the mystery was off on him.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, almost concurrent with this episode.
He was playing Drax.
Yes.
In Factor, which would have been a possibly a little earlier in the year, but not far off.
Yeah, oh, that went right over my head.
Of course it's him.
I mean, that wasn't his real accent.
Accent, Doctor.
I thought he was a Cogney.
Core Blimey.
No, obviously he was cast in Blake 7 and they said, no, no, we all do Rada here, love.
Of course, yes.
They all had cockney accents, really, when the cameras weren't rolling.
That's the only exploration.ation.
What do we think of what the actual mission to destiny that our other 5 heroes actually go off on?
It pads the episode out.
There's some jeopardy, there's meteorites, there's all sorts going on, isn't there?
But it's basically just the plot to get them away from the ship where everything is happening and I love the bit where the box that's holding the neurotope gets shaken so much in the meteorite storm that it, oh, it opens to reveal that the neurotope is not there.
And then they've got to go back and it gives Villa a moment of, oh, we've got to go back.
My stomach.
That should have come.
Where was Dudley Simpson with a comedy bassoon kind of whack, whack, whack?
With that whole thing is actually the biggest hole, I think, in the plot, and that's the biggest part where, you know, Terry Nation or Chris Boucher.
Whoever it is, is in charge of it. really hasn't thought it through properly because for a start, okay, they go back.
They choose to go back and they must, they must therefore go back through the asteroid storm, one imagines, or they take, you know, 6 a week or however it month, long it was to go around the long way.
The other thing is, once they get back to the ship, which is still going around in circles and this other ship is coming to meet them, to hijack them or whatever, it's like, so then they all get taken away, and so they all go to destiny on the liberator.
It's like, well, why didn't they just do that the 1st time around?
That's the thing that's so ridiculous.
Yes, that struck me as well, Simon.
It's quite a big thing because you are aware of the fact that they've made a thing of having to go through the storm and it's taken them X number of hours.
So when they turn around and go back, the time frame doesn't work because they get back to the ship much more quickly than they got away from it.
And it could have easily been fixed at the scripting stage by having them initially go the long way round to avoid the asteroid storm or whatever it was. discovered the new tote was missing, then have to take the dangerous shortcut back, which would have added in a little bit of tension, but alas, no.
Oh, yeah.
That is like, damn.
But it still doesn't make any sense, but it still doesn't make any sense that not one of the destiny people goes on the liberation to take to sort of chaperone the the nutrotrope, or whatever it's called, to destiny.
That's also odd.
And there's no, there's not even an excuse as to why they don't.
Even the idea that there's a murderer on board and so you can't, none of you can possibly come with us.
Not even that said, like, there are so many easy things they could have said to explain that.
Yeah, and I don't quite get why Blake turns to Avon and Kelly says, well, we're going to leave you here with these murderers, so I'd better take all your weapons with me.
It does lead to the brilliant comedy moment where Callie turns around and said, you can consider us hostages if you like.
And then Avon just turns around to her and says, oh, what's a very good idea, Callie.
Yeah, you get a nice shot of Gareth Thomas, I think, at that point, reacting to what Avon said, knowing that he probably didn't hear what Callie said, but had probably figured out what she said based on Avon's reply.
That was that was a really nice little moment of the cast really jelling over these things.
It's not a it's not an episode that doesn't ever get there.
It has these really nice moments.
It does, and especially the Avon Cali dynamic.
I think it's the 1st instance of a really quotable Blake 7 line where Kelly says to Avon, a man who trusts can never be betrayed, and Avon turns around, which is a great line in itself.
And Avon turns around and says life expectancy must be fairly short amongst your people, which is classic Blake 7 interaction.
And I think it might be the 1st really quotable example.
And it's such an Avon line, isn't it, as well?
They all just really still slot into their own places when they get the chance.
Yeah.
And Avon and Kelly are a really great partnership.
They work so well together.
You can see there's quite a bond between Paul Darrow and Jan Chappell already by this point.
It's something that will be played out in quite a lot of episodes going forward.
They're paired together sort of fairly often, not as often, obviously, as Avon and Villa, but I really like their relationship.
Another thing with Avon in his autobiography, which I know I've mentioned on previous episodes, but it is so good.
You've got to give it, listen to him reading it.
Paul Darrow starts talking about how he knew that the series was going well when he started getting lots of particularly affectionate fan mail, particularly from divorcees, divorce ladies in their early 40s, who were particularly keen on the rougher side of my character.
And my God, you see it here, where he punches that woman.
And then says, get her out of here.
I rather enjoyed that.
It's a moment which hasn't aged well, but it's just meant to make Avon look badass in that, you know, he will hit a woman as soon as he will hit a man, but it's, unfortunately, the 1st in a series of moments where Avon has no problem manhandling women more so than men, thinking of characters like Lorina in Star one, Pella in power, and of course, Servolan in aftermath where he thinks really nothing of, well, you know, kissing them and throwing them to the floor.
Basically low-level S&M tropes, isn't it?
Because he's not, you know, he's not breaking people's noses.
Yeah, at least in the case of Sarah, though, she is a murderer, so it does, it is sort of okay for him to, you know, overpower her in that way, really.
It's not pushover, is it?
She's actually she's winning the fight at one point. which doesn't exactly make it.
I'm not saying that makes it a feminist triumph by any measure at all, to be clear.
But yeah, it's not written as a walkover.
Yeah, the moment is actually saved a little bit by Paul Darrow's delivery because he doesn't overtly relish it.
He throws away the line that he really rather enjoyed that.
Yeah, almost as if Avon's just saying it to try and diffuse the situation or something as a, it's not, it's not made as a threat, but it could easily have been played that way instead.
So would it have been better if it had been Callie who had done that and done that confrontation?
perhaps?
I mean, this is the eternal question of Blake 7, I think.
Where the female characters are all extremely strong and well drawn, especially for a series of the era and well played, they are not often given a chunk of the action, which sort of goes to a male character instead, and you think, wow, that would have been so interesting if one of the female characters had played. that part.
And I think you've just presented one there, where if Callie had been involved in that confrontation overpowering Sarah, it would have been really quite interesting and it would have removed that unfortunate.
Well, it's not really subtext, is it?
That unfortunate text of what Avon says.
Yeah, and remember, Kelly is supposed to be hard as nails still at this point.
An ex-freedom fighter who's been on Sorian Major for all this time fighting.
She could easily have done that.
Yeah, it's just like in this era of adventure, in this decade, on the decade that followed it, making an adventure era.
They just still hadn't got that.
They'd have these ideas for creating these brilliant kick-ass female characters.
And then 2 weeks later they're writing them as the girl.
It's everywhere around the time, isn't it?
But you still see, you see it being subverted here and there, and then it becomes more common to just always subvert that later on.
Yeah, because there are moments sort of through this script where Cali is put in danger.
So there's the whole bit where she's creeping round the hold.
Sondheim creeps up on her and things like that where she's obviously put as the woman in distress and treated sort of that way.
In a way that Avon wouldn't have been if he'd been doing those scenes.
But she gets a really good line in that, in that interaction with Sondheim, there's a bit, I haven't written down with her.
She gets to be one step ahead of him.
I mean, he's written to be a bit of an idiot anyway, but still got that, that narrative drive of being, she's outwitting him.
She's saying stuff to her and she's already a step ahead of him.
Yes, but even though she's kind of being threatened by him and sort of others, she's not, she's not playing the kind of, you know, the weak female role.
She is standing up for herself.
She's, she doesn't even seem particularly frightened.
Like she, she, so, from that point of view, I think she does have that, she does have that strong character element.
I mean, she may not be physically hitting people and overwhelming people like that, but at least she is not being the damsel in distress.
Yes, I was thinking that exact, that exact term, Simon, damsel in distress, and I can't, I can only think actually of one instance in the whole of Blake 7, where Cali is put in that situation of being kind of the helpless female, and that's in volcano in series C, where she's kind of like kidnapped by a bunch of men and teleported down to a planet and kept hostage with her, with tape over her mouth and all that kind of thing.
So she very much is the perils of Pauline character there.
But other than that, she always maintains that strength and that, that sort of quiet agency that she has.
It's never taken away from her.
Jenna, in this one, doesn't get all that much to do, but there's a wonderful bit where we cut back to the liberator and she sat there with a little, she says, her and Gana sat there pressing buttons on things and reading out numbers to each other.
And I swear they're doing Sudoku.
But they're just killing the time, waiting for some scripts to come along with them to actually get on with.
Do you know there is a background story to that, where Chris Belcher recognised the fact that Jenner had had a strong start in the series, so she gets quite good roles in the 1st couple of episodes, and then the focus switches to Cali.
So for 3 episodes now, Kelly has been foregrounded, and Jenna has been backgrounded, and that was going to continue in the week after next with Project Avalon, where Cali was going to be the character who went with Blake and met Avalon because they were going to have resistance ties.
But they recognised that Kelly had been foregrounded too much, and so they shifted the emphasis back to Jenna and actually swapped over the character roles.
I actually like how those Sudoki scenes, you're talking about with, you know, Jenna and Gani, because there's, as I said, sort of earlier, there's no catty dialogue.
There's no kind of bitching to each other.
It feels like the characters, not the actors, per se, but the characters aren't professionally getting on with what they need to get on with.
And the whole thing feels sort of comparatively underplay.
Nothing's cheesy about the performances.
Yeah, yeah.
Then there is a deliberate attempt to make the deliberator feel like a place where some people are having to live, isn't it?
They're not just there waiting for their next point of the plot to happen.
They are kicking around, occupying themselves, having a sleep often in the case of villa, and suddenly woken up, which makes trying to make it more of a living space.
Yeah, and the characters can have professional disagreements and do.
There's often conflict over what they're going to do or what the next step should be.
But you get the impression that Avon is meant to be the fly and the ointment.
And everyone else gets on pretty well.
They're quite smiley at times in this episode, I've noticed, I noticed, just in the little, yeah, in the introducing teams.
They clearly don't want it, the viewers, to just think these people are miserable and hate being together, despite them being the band of unlikely rebels.
They're working in smiles, which gets ramped up, which are other ridiculous levels in subsequent episodes. at some point it have endings like a sitcom of everybody having a good old chuckle.
But in this, they're just, yeah, they're putting things in so that we know that these people aren't just putting up with each other because they've got...
But the whole flavour of the episode's like that.
Like, the way all the regulars are written, they're into relationships with each other are all much friendlier, then I think we see in a lot of other episodes.
And I do find that sometimes they take often, actually, I feel that they take it too far with trying to create this pretend conflict between some of the characters.
And for me, I always feel it's a little bit forced and often it's just to try and trade an argument, so one of them is goes off here or goes off there or whatever.
I just find that it doesn't ring true to me.
And that's why I, I'm sort of, I feel really comfortable watching their interactions in this episode.
It's actually one of the one of the things I really like about this episode.
I think it might be one of the things that the series loses a little bit when Terry Nation stops writing every episode because when you have those 2 voices, You have Terry Nation writing and you have Chris Boucher script editing.
The characters are fairly consistent from episode to episode, and fairly homogeneous, and I think that more fake disagreements creep in a little bit later with maybe some other characters.
But at this stage, there is an idea that they're all just living and getting along together.
Yeah, so they've all been thrown together, haven't they?
And there's a real feeling now that there's friendships between them.
And I think we've pointed out in previous episodes, there are relationships that are different between each character.
It's not just them related to Blake and this is the central relationship.
Gan and Jenna, as we've said, obviously have after time squads, have bonded a little and are working together to pilot the ship and things like that.
Obviously, we've got the Avon Villa relationship that is burgeoning and now we've got the Avon and Cali one coming together.
So there's sort of nice little dynamics between the crew that are gradually sort of building up, and I think we see that through the rest of the season.
And it is one of the wonderful things about this series, one of the things that makes me love it, is that I can imagine any 2 hand a scene between any 2 characters and roughly how that will feel.
Yeah, that's a mark of how well the characters are defined at this stage.
And how well the actors are performing those characters because you feel like they know what they're doing.
Yeah, they've all got really clear personas and it's something that they're not fighting against the scripts at all.
They're all really in some other series.
There might be occasions where characters are written to have conflict.
I'm thinking of Doctor Who season 22 era where you've got the Doctor and Perry written to be constantly bickering and yet the actors are desperately trying to put warmth into it that isn't actually there in the dialogue by smiling and hugging and stuff a little bit.
Whereas it's not like that at all here, here, where they're being prickly, it's because there's some really good prickly stuff to do, but then they're seeing the use of each other and getting on as a sort of team.
Yeah naturally.
Yeah, and I think Peter's right that this is something that's lost when you start bringing in other writers to the series because obviously they latch onto certain characters and certain relationships and write for that relationship, but don't necessarily give the rest of the cast, the material to deal with at the same time in the way that Terry Nation is trying to do through much of series A. Yeah, we're really lucky with it to have had this unusual. really unusual, I think, wasn't it, for a British series to entirely be written by one person, entirely mostly written by one person.
To be credited to my...
To be true, that's the way to do it, yeah.
Si, when you, Si, you said earlier that when they're on the liberator, they have to put up with Jeopardy Meteorites and all sorts.
And I just had a, I noted that down because I thought, I wouldn't be surprised if that was all the script said, but Chris Voucher can't.
They fly off those Jeopardy meteorites and all sorts.
And Chris Boucher filled out the rest.
Yeah, you could fill these scenes in Chris.
That's fine I'd just do the mystery on the ship.
Exactly, yeah.
And the mysterious number. written in blood, which sounds like it's taken from a Sherlock Holmes or something, I don't know if it really is.
And it, well, I was thinking he was just going to turn the, turn the number around upside down at the end and go, my God, it spells out boobies.
That was not what it did.
That is the coddest part of the plot. plot, this frigging number.
I mean, really, really?
And you'd think actually that Sarah would be able to see her name spelt out as, you know, 54124 and try and kind of secrete a way that that thing or wash it or accidentally wash it and go, oh, I'm terribly sorry.
I thought this was finished.
I'm just washing it down.
You know what I mean?
It's like, oh, come on.
I think the success of the episode may hinge on whether you buy that central conceit, the Sarah equals 54.
What is it?
54124.
Yeah.
I do buy it.
I think it's quite clever.
And if you ever want to...
It's very famous 5 sort of thing, you know?
If you ever if you ever steal the credit card of a really hardcore Blake 7 fan, you know exactly what pin.
Actually, my pin number is numerical narcissus from power.
Well, colour me surprised.
I don't think it's the majority view that the 54124 works very well, even though I think it does.
But it's interesting that Avon is the one who 1st sees it and reads it out, and therefore he is the one who you would expect to be quite on top of these things and see them, who delays the mystery being solved by 0 35 minutes.
Yeah, because the mystery is solved by it's just suddenly occurring to him that something he didn't notice half an hour ago was there all the time.
That's the resolution, isn't it?
Yes, in some respects, yes, there is an extra thing that's missing.
There needed to be some just something else there to flesh it out a little bit more.
It's all a little bit too straightforward.
Yeah, and that's the thing where, of course, if this was the only script that it's a script writer, bracket writers had had to write that month, they would have had time to go over it and put some more stuff in, but the rate that they were powering to make this series.
It's understandable that occasionally one one's going to go out where, yeah, it would have benefitted from having more time, but then we wouldn't have had as many episodes of Blake said.
It's that kind of thing where you can look at it like we were talking about with the asteroid storm and it being a bit of a plot hole earlier on.
Well, you think maybe if they had a little bit more time or one more draft, then possibly Avon might have identified that as 54124, Callie may not have seen it early in the piece.
It might have just been Blake and Avon.
Callie might have then seen it towards the end, and Avon says, what you make of this?
and she turns to him and says, that doesn't say that.
And he looks at her, and so you've actually got that thing of characters discovering things rather than random realisations.
You're script editing whatever series I eventually get commissioned to write because I want those kind of insights up front.
That would be a more interesting way of doing it.
I agree, rather than just a character, i.e. Avon, just proclaiming it at the end in that, as you said, Poirot, you know, drawing room, reveal sequence where it's like, ta-da, you missed this and this and what about that?
and there we go.
And aren't I clever?
It's all a bit silly.
Yeah, and they've just thrown so many red herrings at us all the way through, haven't they?
So, like, we've got Mandriam looking guilty, so often, we've got the red herring of, oh, perhaps there's a stowaway, which is such a Terry Nation idea.
We've got Sonheim creeping up on Cali very oddly looking like he's about to strangle her and all these bits where just think, no, you're just doing this just to pad it out a bit more.
These aren't actual clues.
Is anyone actually fooled by this?
And then I think, well, actually, when I 1st watched it, I was sure it was, I was sure it was Mandarin who was behind it also.
So I fell for it completely.
So, but I was a very stupid child.
There's one thing that I'm very glad that they didn't do, is that when the, you know, Blake, et cetera, come and wake everybody up.
Then all suspicious of Blake, et cetera, of, well, what did you do?
You killed the pilot, and you did this, and you've stolen this, such, and we can't trust you, and that they sort of trust Blake, et cetera, straight away.
That's that's actually something we were saved, I think.
Yes, the standard.
All these problems began when you turned up.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, it's all, yeah.
Oh, it's like the Doctor Who thing of the doctor turning up and being accused of murder for 5 episodes or whatever before someone thinks, oh, no, actually he's a nice man.
That's fine, or a nice woman.
Although, bring Doctor Who into it for just a moment, if I may.
Apart from the cast, is that opening sequence is so Doctor Who.
It just so Doctor Who of that era.
You know, this opening sequence where there's a lone person in a control room who gets killed or the thing blows up and then crashed the spaceship in the planet or whatever it is.
It's not actually something you see in Blake 7 again, really, is it?
It's actually a really vicious murder as well.
There's blood all over the place and he's really hit on the head.
It's really great. the hammer.
That's what makes it adults, you know.
So it's not doctor.
I had a...
And the fact that Avon and Kelly look at each other every so often.
And we've got room for some wonderful Terry Nation, Terry Nationalisms, like, I mean, the main threat that these people have got is a space plague of fungus consuming their planet, turning it into a mushroom, as Avon wonderfully says.
And what's this new isotope?
What do we call this new isotope?
It's a it's neutrotope.
That's what it is That even though I've watched it sort of many times, every time you mention about the fact that, you know, destiny is going to turn into a mushroom or whatever it is, I go, is it?
Oh, is that what the hell they're trying to do?
I completely forget all the time that that's the important thing.
It just completely passes me back.
All I know is they're just going to get this thing to destiny.
I don't really care what it is or why.
I just know that that's okay.
Simon, I think you've struck the creative process right there.
And the ending is really abrupt and it's like, Blake, it's like, oh, yeah, I just had to bomb and kill them all.
Off we go.
It's fostered, isn't it?
Yes, did anyone else have a real problem with that?
When he reached that charge and says, you know, he's put it on the hatch and he's murdered for all he knows, dozens of people, and these are petty criminals, like a Jenner and Avon, who he's hooked up with.
And when he says he's does it.
He does it with a smile.
He's like, 0 yeah, I just killed them all.
He's a psychopath.
That'll teach the rascals.
You're terrible. all bad.
But what I love about that sequence too, is that there's, you know, the other spaceship on the on the monitor in the on the liberator, he's like one pixel away from connecting at one point before they all escape from from the other ship.
And then, you know, there's still one pixel away, but they're all just relaxing on the sofas and looking at the thing.
It's like, it's, it's such a jump, like they don't, the scene doesn't, that sequence doesn't start with them kind of all rushing in from the teleport room.
You know, they're just there relaxing quietly, watching the screen.
Is that the most people we've ever had on the Liberator flight deck?
It is so far, isn't it?
And I think it might be, but the whole series.
I counted a dozen.
I can't think of a dozen in another area.
Wow, no.
We can't afford a dozen by the end of series C.
Absolutely.
Barely afford the set.
But we've not seen all of the Liberator yet.
Have we, or have we now?
Are there more rooms to be discovered?
can't remember Yeah, they've got their space bedrooms to be revealed yet.
We haven't seen those.
Oh, okay.
The medical unit?
Have we seen that?
Space Medical unit, yep.
Which we will see, because extensively. in a couple of weeks time, because once I got my head around, the idea that actually the big round green bit of the liberator isn't the engine, and like I spent 5 years of my life flying my toy around backwards.
I don't know why I never got that wrong.
It just looked like the, to me, I had it the other way around.
I'm doing it now.
I'm flying it backwards in my mind's eye.
The idea that the bridge of the liberator doesn't completely occupy the big green round bit.
That's what I thought when I was a kid, when it cut back because that room seemed so big and so high.
So I had the scale completely off because actually they're in one of the pointy bit in the middle going forward, I guess.
So did you think it was flying backwards or did you think that they were just in the bridge and it was flying forwards and the bridge happened to be at the back?
I thought that they'd made mistakes when filming it on TV and that actually...
The pointy bits were rocket engines propelling for the ground green bit forward.
Now, is there not an actual reason for this?
Is that not true?
that Roger Murray Leach, who designed the wonderful Liberator set, designed the Liberator itself, and he wasn't a model maker.
He was a designer, and so there was a little bit of kind of demarkation dispute going on there.
And they assumed it was going to be flown green bit 1st until he stepped in, said, no, no, it's actually the other way around.
Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Because I thought the pointy bits were rocket engines when I was a kid.
Yeah, yeah.
Isn't one of the covers of the original BBC video compilations.
I think it's the 1st one, the beginning, has got the marvellous shot of the liberator, but with fire coming out behind the 3 turrets, like those are the engines.
I had that.
That is probably what there we go.
I'm going to blame it on that and say that's what imprinted this idea.
And it's a bit like, in that respect, it's shape wise.
It's similar to the enterprise with a 3rd Nacell, as they call them in Star Trek, pushing pushing the round a bit forward rather than the round bit actually being the end.
Yeah, speaking of those kinds of mistakes, I think maybe the original cover of the novelisation of Project Avalon committed the cardinal sin of having an illustration of Blake holding his liberator gun, but clearly they didn't have a very clear reference photo or they didn't have any reference photos at all.
But he was holding it and it had the plastic rod bit coming out of the end, but then he was holding it and it had a handle and trigger on the bottom and you just think, what is that?
To make it look like a problem.
Correct.
They were worried that people looking at the video would think it was about somebody just going around with a Geiger counter or something.
Exactly.
Or a haircut.
But I do like in this episode that Callie gets to plug something else into her battery pack and has the big liberator-s gun style torch.
I really like that Oh yeah, yeah.
A little bit of accessories.
Yeah, this would all be marked.
If they were making this now, it would all be so marketable, wouldn't it?
Cali with accessory pack.
It's really nice, isn't it?
And I like that they do reuse similar props, and so you'll have the bombs, which I think they use in cyclocate destroy, and which appear in the series all throughout.
Like in Star one, they use the same props, but those little bombs with the timers on them.
And then they reuse them in series D in Headhunter when they blow up the bridge across the thing.
And so you think, wow, Villa had time to secrete those on his person when he leaves the liberator in terminal.
Or maybe they're just standard tech in this century and that's what your bombs look like.
And when you go and buy your bombs from the bomb market, that's how they come.
That could absolutely be the case.
Generic off the shelf bombs.
They just put different stickers on them.
So, does anyone have anything that we've anything we've missed in this in this packed episode, which just turned out to have prompted a lot more chat than I thought it would, which I'm really pleased about because it's, yeah, although it's not one that gets praised to the rafters.
There's still there's still a lot of fun moments in it, isn't there?
Yeah, you know, I've always really liked it.
And I don't know whether this is sort of nostalgia for when we finally got the video range with 2 episodes per take because I'd seen all of the compilation videos before this.
This was one of the new episodes that I was seeing for the 1st time.
And I think there's a whole series of what feel like new episodes in series A and series B that I come back to and think, I really like that because it's not one of the ones that I knew before.
And which is a very silly reason for liking it, but I've always just having a lot of warmth for this episode.
It's not one of the best, but just giving the Avon and Cali relationship and attention, which is one that I've always really, really enjoyed watching.
I think that elevates it slightly for me above the average.
It's an episode which I'm not overly fond of, but all things being relative.
It's Blake 7 and so I still adore it.
I think, as I said earlier, it's curiously muted.
It never quite takes flight.
But there are many things to appreciate about it.
I do quite like the dynamics.
And I really like, and I've been liking and revisiting series A, as we were talking about earlier, the ensemble nature of it.
I think at this point, Every character, and this got to be Terry Nation, is still playing a key role.
So even though, for instance, in the web, Blake and Avon are foregrounded when they go down to the planet.
All of the things which happen on the Liberator, everyone gets a good chunk of dialogue and incident and things to play.
And the same, it's the same in this episode, even though Jenna and Villa and Gann are stuck on the Liberator.
When we cut back, they've got interesting dialogue to share.
They're all sort of doing things.
No one is really background and I really appreciate that.
Yeah, I think it goes back to what someone said before, I think, Peter, it was you.
It just needed a few more drafts.
The episode is kind of undercooked and it's undercooked from a writing point of view.
I I think, you know, as I said before, they've taken the utmost seriousness when they've made it.
You know, there's no stupid over the top performances, and the regulars are all doing really well, and the guest cast aren't chewing the scenery or anything.
Now, maybe it's a little bit too earnest at times, but nevertheless, that I think is probably better than the alternative.
I just think the thing that's wrong with it, and I don't think this makes it terrible.
It just makes it not particularly good, is that it's a slightly cod plot, and if there are just too many cliches in there that, you know, the Agatha Christian space thing.
It's like, they've taken a cliche and then just extrapolated a whole lot of cliches from that.
And then to me, it's like, you know, we did Timescore.
The other episode I've been on so far, it's another example of a sort of series A episode which is experimenting with the style that the series might take and they never, they never come back to this and I, and I think they, they don't come back to the reason.
Who did you offend when the episodes are being handed outside?
Who did you offend when the episodes are being handed out?
I enjoy it because I mean, I didn't come.
It's like sometimes there's an advantage.
I think you sort of intimated that yourselves that I've sort of come to some of these episodes without the received wisdom of whether it's supposed to be good or supposed to be bad and when everyone says it or people said, oh, you know, mission to destiny's terrible.
It one of the worst.
They went, well, it's not brilliant, but it's not that bad, you know?
And that's, I suppose, my, my, I mean, I, I, for instance, still prefer it to Jill, for instance, which I find quite dull and uninteresting in comparison.
So, you know, there I've said it.
I'm doing a shocked reaction shot right now.
But as I said, you know, this is, you can, we can judge these as individual things, but also this is, this is part seven.
We've met these characters.
We already invested in these characters.
So even if they only get to do little bits, it's extra bits on top of what we've already seen them do rather than just a one off play standing on its own.
If these are all characters that we would we'd never seen before, it would be really strange, but because we're picking them up and going forward, it has got some momentum to it, just not just not quite as much as episodes around it has.
Yeah, and I think Terry Nation is still pushing what this show can do and what it can be.
And it's not just the Federation of Chasing Blake or Blokes going to blow up a base.
There's still other interesting stories around the whole universe almost that you can tell with this series.
And it doesn't have to be just one thing.
It's showing that there's flexibility in the format that's built in.
And that's a really good thing.
Yeah, for a series that is coming from one creative vision.
It's already had a remarkable range of different styles of episode over the weeks that we've had.
Chris Boucher will actually say that about his own scripts later on.
He said he loved working on Blake 7 because every episode gave him a chance to do his version of something.
And so you'll have Death Watch in series C, which was his version of a Western.
You'll have uh, rumours of death, also in SiriC, uh, which was his version of sort of a romantic tragedy.
And I think there's something in that.
The format does stretch quite a long way.
Hmm.
But it's another example too, of like time scored, is that it is an episode which is taking itself completely seriously.
There's no, there's none of the camp which starts to not take over the series, but gets ramped up.
And that's why we love it and that's why I love Blake 7.
But this is a very dry episode and I think that's why it's, it's not loved.
Yeah, it's quite sober, isn't it?
Yeah, sober.
There you go.
Yes.
Can I just in closing, make a little celebration of the 1st Blake 7 blooper?
Oh, of course.
So it's where they realise that the gas is coming through and Blake turns around to the controls and turns off the air con and little plastic switch falls off with a very noticeable clatter on the ground, and he soldiers on, but Jan Chappel, who's also in the scene, reacts as she always does in these situations by looking at the floor, looking off camera to the AD for a moment, then realising, oh, we really are just going to go on and falling back into character.
So, what's that again now?
Yeah, that is definitely one time.
She will become famous for doing this.
There's another episode in which her teleport bracelet falls off and she just looks at it and then looks off camera and goes, oh, okay, we're just going to go on and there's another time where she tries to put on a teleport bracelet, yanks at it for a few moments, realises it's one of the non-opening ones, and then slides it over her wrist with a very distinct eye roll.
Yeah, she's so painfully thin.
She can do that.
Yeah, you know, kudos to her because, you know, she expected that maybe we're going to do a retake.
No we're not. okay let's go on.
Yeah.
Blank 7 has bloopers.
It has bloopers, but it doesn't actually have many outtakes.
They all made it into the finished product.
Well yeah.
And if it is 5 to 10.
You've just got to crack on, haven't you?
absolutely.
Okay, well, thank you very much, everybody, for your contributions.
Thank you for listening at home or wherever you have been listening.
It's been a blast as always.
Do come back and join us next time where we will be going into the episode.
Duel is Simon's excoriating opinion of it going to be held up by the panel for that.
I suspect not.
You will have to wait and see.
We might end up reviewing you, Simon.
How dare?
So we will, but we will all, we will meet again in whatever combination of the 7 or however many of us there actually is, and we hope you'll be joining us again next time.
It's till then it's a goodbye from me.
And it's goodbye from me, Peter. and it's goodbye from me.
And it's goodbye from me.
Switching to Manny.
Maximum power on all drives.