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In Flux

Posted in Fiction, History, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , on April 8, 2024| 1 Comment »

It’s been quite a while since I wrote my reviews of series 12 of Doctor Who; I saw series 13 with Lorelei Rivers only a few months after its initial broadcast, but I really wanted to see it again with Grace on DVD before reviewing it, and I only accomplished that a few weeks ago.  Yes, I said “weeks”; I have rather been dreading tackling it, because it ain’t pretty.  Series 13 consists of one six-part story entitled “Flux”, and given its low overall quality I think it best to handle it as I handled “The Trial of a Time Lord” or Torchwood‘s “Miracle Day“, in a single review covering all of its manifold problems.

I started all of my reviews of Series 12 in much the same way as I did every review of a 6th Doctor story:  by saying something good about it, so as to force myself to be as objective as possible.  And while I’ve already blown that in the previous paragraph, I think I can be forgiven considering what I had to work with here; still, it’s a practice that proved its worth when thinking about those other two collections of execrable rubbish, so I’m going to give it a go here.  First, “Flux” isn’t unremittingly bad; two of the episodes (a third of the story) were quite watchable, and I’d go as far as to say chapter 2, “War of the Sontarans”, was actually good if one disregards the Flux-related crap, which isn’t difficult to do.  The concept of the alternate history where Russia is inhabited by Sontarans is weird, but fun, and we’e seen similar historical screw-ups created by time-tampering before.  Chapter 4, “Village of the Angels” had too many problems to be really good, but it was watchable and the flaws wouldn’t have been irremediable if worked over by a decent script editor; it also featured the only really interesting, engaging guest character of the whole 6-part story, the psychic researcher Professor Jericho, who would not have been out of place in a 3rd or 4th Doctor adventure.  That’s certainly appropriate, given that the episode is set in 1967, but also surprising, given Chibnall’s apparent inability to dependably create interesting characters while also serving as showrunner.

The rest of the characters are, as is typical for Chibnall, more like descriptions than personalities.  Many of the cast are probably very competent actors, but even the finest thespian can’t conjure Hamlet out of lackluster dialogue draped carelessly over a checklist.  Dan isn’t a strong or interesting enough new companion to balance out the creepily-codependent Yaz; Vinder and Bel are just collections of lines rather than actual characters we might conceivably care about; the dog-faced boy oscillates between annoying and silly; and none of the villains go beyond “generic baddie in weird makeup” except for Snake Dude, who doesn’t seem to actually have a dramatic function except to complicate the already-convoluted plot even more unnecessarily (but maybe might have something to do with the Mara if Chibnall had the sense to actually connect his stories to the Whovian canon instead of merely sprinkling random references to past characters & events into his script while trying to invalidate the framework in which they were embedded).  And though in the past Doctor Who was known for making even minor characters interesting, in here they might as well have script names like “Dan’s sweetheart”, “psychic woman”, “little girl”, and “old people” for all the development Chibnall gives them.

And then there’s the titular Apocalypse of the Week, the Flux, which manages to be dreadfully boring despite supposedly wiping out half of the universe.  Part of the reason is that Doctor Who has steadily inflated its threats for 60 years, and we’ve already seen “malevolent Time Lord unleashes a chaos wave that destroys much of Creation” way back in 1981’s Logopolis.  Another part is that it doesn’t actually make much sense; Chibnall seems unsure of exactly what it’s doing or how it’s doing it, which is why it can somehow be stopped by a wall of interlinked spaceships built by an advanced-but-not-remotely-godlike alien race we’ve never heard of before despite their supposedly being linked with humanity on some deep level.  And why didn’t the Flux destroy the sun and other planets, when it sure looked like it was doing that in other parts of the universe back in Chapter One?

The real answer is, unfortunately, that the Flux is a naked metaphor, an in-universe representation of what Chibnall is trying to do with the Whoniverse: utterly destroy it in order to create his own, new Whoniverse without the slightest regard for anything that came before.  Tecteun is thus revealed as a sort of self-insert character, a deranged control freak who, after failing to remake everything in her own image and likeness via more modestly-megalomaniacal means (Tecteun via her creepy spook “Division”, itself a blatant ripoff of the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and Chibnall via all his Hapless Child monkeyshines), decide to just destroy everything (including, in Chibnall’s case, Gallifrey itself) out of spite.  “The Flux” is thus the culmination of a trend that started with mere spoiling, progressed to outright vandalism, and eventually arrived at wholesale arson of a venerable and beloved mythos.  Was the extended metaphor intentional?  I honestly don’t think Chibnall is that clever, but if it isn’t his subconscious was tattling on him. 

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O.B.I.T.

Posted in Fiction, History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on February 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from O.B.I.T.
–  Byron Lomax (Jeff Corey)

Generally speaking, The Outer Limits was not as devoted to social commentary as its contemporary The Twilight Zone.  This is not a knock; the flavor of the featured tales reminds me very much of Silver Age sci-fi comics like Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, more thrilling than cerebral, and though the technobabble nearly always has holes one could pilot a flying saucer through, the same could be said of The Twilight Zone.  The episodes were for the most part skillfully directed and shot in an elegant film noir-inspired style, enhanced with superbly creepy music and performed by some of the top small-screen talent of the day such as Martin Landau, Robert Culp, David McCallum, Sally Kellerman, Vera Miles, Robert Duvall, William Shatner and many others.  But while the stories rarely fail to entertain (though modern viewers used to CGI may find the clever-but-cheap special effects wanting), they’re generally short monster movies or unchallenging morality plays rather than incisive examinations of the issues of their day.  Of course, there are exceptions, and one of them is O.B.I.T., one of those rare teleplays which are more relevant today then when they were filmed.

The Outer Band Individuated Teletracer (O.B.I.T.) is a top-secret surveillance device which is able to tune in on any individual’s unique biometric signature in order to spy on that person regardless of walls or distance.  It is used to monitor the staff at a vital Defense research installation, and when one of its operators is brutally murdered the U.S. Senate subcommittee which oversees the facility sends one of its members to investigate.  What he discovers is a base plagued by tension, discord, and serious mental health issues, all driven by the administration’s incessant prying into every private life; though the existence of the machine is a closely-guarded secret, it is obvious – and terrifying – to all that the government clearly has some means of surveillance unimpeded by locks or whispers.  Of course, this being The Outer Limits, the machines (which the investigation soon reveals are both numerous and not solely restricted to US  government usage) are an alien device surreptitiously introduced into human society as a tool of conquest.  In the climactic scene, when the disguised alien is revealed, this is what he has to say:

The machines are everywhere! Oh you’ll find them all, you’re a zealous people. And you’ll make a great show of smashing a few of them. But for every one you destroy, hundreds of others will be built. And they will demoralize you, break your spirits, create such rifts and tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them! Oh, you’re a savage, despairing planet, and when we come here to live, you friendless, demoralized flotsam will fall without even a single shot being fired. Senator, enjoy the few years left you. There is no answer. You’re all of the same dark persuasion! You demand – insist – on knowing every private thought and hunger of everyone: Your families, your neighbors, everyone — but yourselves.

When O.B.I.T. was first broadcast in November 1963, the security state was a mere toddler; its tools were largely limited to hidden cameras and microphones, and eminently-corruptible human snitches and busybodies.  I hardly need to point out that this is no longer the case; using biometrics to identify individuals is no longer science fiction, and the number of means the government and large corporations have to track, trace, watch, eavesdrop on, and judge every last one of us would’ve been unbelievable to a TV audience of the Kennedy era.  Millions of people in the developed world, acting individually or collectively, feel completely justified in digging into the affairs of those who have different beliefs from them, in hope of discovering some transgression or mistake that can be used to destroy the victim’s life with the help of faceless, merciless corporations and institutions.  The irreparable rifts and tensions which are the inevitable product of a panopticon are already here, and growing more dangerously-intrusive all the time.  And we didn’t even need malevolent aliens to do it to us.

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The Buffyverse, Part Three

Posted in Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on June 8, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The three things I find most appealing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel all fit into characteristics of the way my brain works.  I’ve mentioned before that for me, human interaction is the most satisfying part of my journey through life, so it should be no surprise that I quickly lose interest in shows without the kind of interesting, well-developed fictional characters the Buffyverse has in abundance.  Last week, I thoroughly explained why strong, consistent world-building is important to me, and of course Buffy has that as well.  The third thing I value in shows is cleverness and ability to surprise, and guess what?  Buffy has that, too.

See, it’s like this: my brain moves extremely fast, so that if the plot of a show is at all predictable, I will see any twists coming long, long before the big reveal.  And because I have an excellent memory, I immediately recognize derivative story elements and tired tropes practically as soon as they appear.  Now, it’s OK if I figure out the twists halfway through, or if it only happens on occasion.  But if I can predict the ending nearly every time, five or ten minutes after the opening credits, I’m probably going to get bored with it.  But with Buffy, it was exactly the opposite; the show kept me guessing the majority of the time, despite the fact that it usually “played fair” rather than pulling some sort of unprecedented necrobabble out of a hat to hand-wave the writers out of some dungeon they’ve written themselves into, as so many dark fantasy shows are wont to do.  But that’s not the half of it; the Buffy writers were not only willing to turn tropes inside-out and upside-down, but also to shamelessly steal them from other genres or defenestrate conventions.  Vampires could be boring, airheaded, or lovesick; demons could be easygoing nerds or flamboyant lounge singers; an evil wizard could be a corny square; villains could be likable and goodies despicable.  One episode was a bona fide musical (the result of a powerful demon’s influence), but rather than just being a throwaway bit of fun it actually contained serious character development and important foreshadowing.  And in more than one season, the finale resulted in more destruction than is even the norm in the superhero genre.

And then there’s the wit.  The dialogue in most episodes doesn’t merely sparkle, it snaps, crackles, and pops.  There is often humor in even the darkest, most serious episodes, and ofttimes that humor is of Saharan dryness and Hitchcockian blackness; at other times it was practically farce, and yet it all fit together smoothly and comfortably to create a consistent and recognizable style which, though less striking in Angel, suffuses both shows.  I found myself laughing out loud on a regular basis, and there aren’t even many comedy series that can dependably evoke that from me.

All in all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a rare gem, and Angel a worthy spinoff which, while it doesn’t match its parent series, certainly doesn’t disgrace it.  I highly recommend these shows not just to those who think a horror comedy superhero soap opera sounds right up their alley, but also for anyone who enjoys tight, clever writing, compelling characters, and series which aren’t so impressed with themselves that they forget the point of television shows is, first and foremost, to entertain.

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The Buffyverse, Part Two

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on June 1, 2023| 3 Comments »

Another aspect of the Buffyverse which pleased me very much was Joss Whedon and Company’s world-building.  If I’m to suspend disbelief in the more fantastical elements of a fantasy or sci-fi scenario, it’s very important that all of the mundane elements be internally consistent.  My own role-playing game worlds are meticulously laid out, with a cosmology, past and future history, set of metaphysical laws, etc; even if the players never encounter some aspect of the game universe, it nonetheless fits into a consistent and predictable pattern.  I have no patience for lazy writers who dismiss criticism of their inconsistencies and slipshod world-building with, “Well, if you can accept the existence of fire-breathing dragons…”  because that’s the opposite of true; the more fantastical a world, the more important it is that it doesn’t contradict itself if an audience is to accept it.  The dragons, warp engines, magic spells, and technobabble have to follow some set of rules or else the story degenerates into random foolishness.  And IMHO one of the most important aspects of that structure is chronology; “Once upon a time” is fine for standalone stories, but if a fictional hero is to have a series of adventures, they must have a firm chronology or the whole thing begins to dissolve into chaos.

Comic books have traditionally been extraordinarily bad at a lot of these things, which is one reason I lost patience with the genre in my early teens.  But despite the fact that Buffy and Angel are superheroes and both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel rely heavily (sometimes even blatantly) on the tropes of the genre, they never fall into the trap of hand-waving some inconsistency away with “It’s magic”.  The vampires, demons and other magic beings follow a predictable set of rules, and often when I thought I had caught a goof-up it actually turned out to be an intentional plot device (such as a clue that some powerful force was interfering with the rules).  And while the chronology of corporate comic book worlds has approximately the cohesion of wet toilet paper, creating a world where nobody ages and the past changes at a writer’s whim, the chronology of the Buffyverse is tight, logical, and natural.  People age and change; major events become part of the big picture rather than being conveniently forgotten when the end credits roll, and time passes at the same rate as it does in the external universe.

As both a writer and a 40+ year DM, it’s obvious to me that a lot of thinking went into designing the Buffyverse.  Though we in the audience learned about the metaphysics and esoteric history of Buffy’s world gradually, often via overt exposition but more often by being shown, it’s pretty obvious that Whedon and his writers had already developed these structures long before they were revealed to us, in many cases before the show even became a reality.  While casual viewers of a show may not notice inconsistencies or gaps, or care if they do notice, I don’t have that luxury.  My analytical brain can’t help noticing them, and my OCD focuses on them even when I’d rather not.  This isn’t to say I can’t enjoy a show whose universe-building is sloppy and whose canon contradicts itself repeatedly with the passing seasons; Star Trek was still occasionally inconsistent well into its second season, and Doctor Who is so consistently inconsistent that I regularly need to do stuff like this to get my brain to accept it.  But it’s really nice when I don’t need to do it, and can relax into the experience knowing that the creators aren’t trying to pull a fast one on me or writing themselves into corners and then smashing through the narrative walls with a sledgehammer to get themselves out.

I’m not done yet!  There’s still more Buffy goodness coming next week.

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The Buffyverse, Part One

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , on May 25, 2023| 1 Comment »

Until recently, I had never seen the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series.  Frank showed me the movie on video (IMDB says it came out in 1992? I thought it was earlier.) and though I found it amusing, it didn’t move me to watch the TV show when it appeared in the late ’90s.  But somewhere along the line Grace had picked up the first season on DVD, so late last year we decided to watch that with the understanding that if I liked it, I’d buy the rest of the series.  Well, I did like it; in fact, I liked it a great deal.  Now, you might think that it was a foregone conclusion that I’d like a horror-superhero soap opera, but poor implementation can ruin even the coolest concept; fortunately, the implementation was anything but poor.  I found the series clever, witty, funny, touching, thought-provoking and even inspirational, so I’ve been meaning to share a few thoughts on it ever since we finished its spinoff Angel a couple of months ago.

First and foremost, the thing that hooked me was the series’ wealth of dynamic, well-developed characters.  It’s hard for me to really appreciate a show with flat, static characters, but the ones in Buffy kept engaging and surprising me.  This isn’t to say I liked them all, or that I always liked the ones I did like; what I mean is, even characters I liked very much, such as Willow and Giles, would sometimes make decisions which annoyed or even angered me.  But that’s what makes a character interesting: if I don’t believe in the character, I mean accept them as “real” in the part of my brain which assesses verisimilitude, then I start losing interest in them, the situations they’re involved with, and everything else.  But the writers of these shows (both Buffy and Angel) clearly share my views on the importance of well-defined characters, even when those characters were villains.  Again, it wasn’t 100%; the primary villain of the 5th season, “Glory”, failed to capture my interest in any way.  But the 3rd season’s villain, the Mayor, was an amazingly complex personality; instead of a stock power-seeking evil wizard, we were shown a man who, though as awful as any of the other main villains of the series, was both a complete square and capable of genuine affection, to the point where it proved the weapon which allowed Buffy to defeat him in the end.

Some of the series’ villains even became heroes, or at least supporting non-villains; the vengeance demon Anya, who started out as a serious menace, later lost her powers and became an interesting member of the Scooby Gang, and though I never stopped disliking the goofy Andrew, I can’t say he wasn’t interesting.  And then there was Spike, a character I was determined not to like who had already mostly won me over by the end of the first season in which he appeared; I suspect he won the writers over in the same way, because his return and his slowly-expanding role in the series, from secondary villain to full hero, felt so organic I can’t quite believe it was planned that way from the start.  His genuine human emotions made the character stand out from among the other vampires, including Angel, despite not having the benefit & burden of a soul.  The credit for this memorable character goes not only to the writers, but to an absolutely masterful performance by actor James Marsters (later the villain Captain John Hart on Torchwood), who handily stole practically every scene he was in.

But even the Buffyverse’s formulae were sometimes turned upside-down and backwards, and heroes could also become villains.  Angel, Willow, and Cordelia all became villains in various story arcs, while Faith and the aforementioned Anya went back and forth as their twisty paths led them, and even Wesley, who started out as a naive klutz, eventually became a very effective, then a very dark character (though never truly a villain) before his painful redemption.  There is essentially no such thing as a static characters in these shows; even one-season characters and nasty villains often developed over time.  But of all the characters in both Buffy and Angel, the one whose growth was most compelling to me was Cordelia.  Even when she was a shallow high-school “mean girl” I loved watching her brilliant bitchiness, her attempts to pretend she was stupider than she actually was, and her core of decency working to turn her into a force for good despite her very vocal protests.  By the latter seasons of Angel, she had changed so much the writers had to sneak in a plot complication where everyone was regressed to their 16-year-old personalities and memories, so audience members who had forgotten could be forcefully reminded of just how far the character had come.

I have a great deal more to say, but it’s so much I’m going to divide it up over several weeks.

 

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Blake’s 6

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on March 10, 2022| 3 Comments »

This is the conclusion of my series on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part appeared the last week of January, and four other installments on the series’ characters and writing followed in successive weeks.

Blake’s 7 was controversial from the very first episode, which featured an unusually-realistic depiction of how totalitarian states deal with dissent; self-appointed Moral Climate Monitor Mary Whitehouse practically had a cow over it.  And the creators didn’t stop there; for four seasons the show’s creators took risks and violated expectations in a way few broadcast TV shows ever dared.  Major characters were depicted in harsh daylight or even killed off, and that included the titular character at the end of season 2; the last episode of season 3, originally planned to be the last, left the remaining crew stranded on a remote planet when their beloved ship, the Liberator, was destroyed.  And when a BBC executive decided to order one more season, the creators seem to have viewed the surprise renewal as permission to color even further outside of the lines, depicting the heroes’ flaws much more clearly and ending the final episode with a bloodbath.  But two episodes earlier than that, “Orbit” had already thrown caution to the winds to produce one of the most realistic and adult episodes of series television ever aired by broadcast.  It was written by Robert Holmes, who is my all-time favorite Doctor Who writer thanks to his gift for characterization.  The basic plot was borrowed from “The Cold Equations“, one of the greatest sci-fi short stories of all time; Holmes, however, does not merely adapt the already-powerful tale, but instead uses it as a vehicle for portraying not one but two abusive relationships.

The story concerns a renegade scientist named Egrorian, who proposes a deal in which he will give his new super-weapon to Avon and Company in exchange for their supercomputer Orac.  The eccentric, narcissistic, treacherous Egrorian has a very elderly assistant named Pinder; the way Egrorian psychologically dominates and physically abuses him is already uncomfortable before we discover the truth: Pinder is only 28, and was prematurely aged due to radiation in an experiment where he was used as a gunea pig. He was a child prodigy who has been in hiding with Egrorian for ten years, and the homoerotic overtones of their interaction, combined with the abuse and Pinder’s being a teenager at the beginning of their relationship, paint a very dark and nasty picture indeed; I suspect the only way it got past the censors was simply that they were too puritanical to grasp what was going on.  But even that pales in comparison with what happens later:  Egrorian has sabotaged the shuttle on which Avon and Vila will return to their ship by hiding a microscopic quantity of super-dense neutronium on board, making the ship too heavy to achieve orbit with the available fuel.  And when they run out of other  things to dump, Avon goes looking for Vila, whose body mass is just over the critical amount they must shed.  Now, Avon does figure out the problem and  jettisons the neutronium instead; however, that does not change the fact that until he does, he is stalking around the ship with a gun, fully intending to murder his crewmate, who only escapes a grisly fate by hiding.  It would be difficult to count the number of unofficial rules of 20th-century broadcast TV drama this story broke; even in a series which had regularly broken rules for four seasons, it was nothing short of shocking.

Those under 40, whose televisual landcape has always included antiheroes, flawed or even criminal protagonists, and morally and factually ambiguous situations, can scarcely grasp how absolutely new, amazing, and even scandalous Blake’s 7 was, and its last season, in which the full humanity of the characters (with all that entails) was laid bare, was like nothing ever before seen on television.  And in its willingness to blow up audience expectations and transgress sharply-drawn boundaries of its time, like nothing since either.

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Blake’s 5

Posted in Tyranny, tagged , , on March 4, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part appeared the last week of January, and three installments on the series’ characters followed in successive weeks.

It’s always interesting to me to think about a creator’s influences; what sci-fi or fantasy books, shows and movies did they find interesting, and how did that affect their own creations?  After the first season of Blake’s 7, the influence of its creator, Terry Nation, seemed to wane while that of script editor Chris Boucher waxed.  Boucher was clearly influenced by Dune, not so much for its specific desert-world setting (though that definitely appears in other Boucher stories such as his Doctor Who serial “The Robots of Death”) as for its portrayal of future colonial societies which have grown away from Earth as they developed, some to the point of even forgetting about their origins (as Leela’s people did in Boucher’s Doctor Who serial “The Face of Evil”).  In the “Blake” universe, there hasn’t quite been enough time for that; by the stated times in several episodes (especially the Robert Holmes-penned “Killer”), the main action seems to take place in the 29th century.  However, in other episodes we meet societies such as that from which crew member Cally came, which seem to have gone though or fallen into a dark age, but were at a much higher level of technology in the past; Boucher’s own “City at the Edge of the World” (a title which I’m sure deeply annoyed Harlan Ellison) entirely revolved around this concept, and the idea infuses a number of other episodes to a greater or lesser degree.  Even the third-season background of Servalan trying to rebuild the splintered Terran Federation after the invasion from Andromeda (which Nation apparently originally conceived of as a war with the Daleks) has its roots in both actual history (“Make The Empire Great Again!” is not a new idea) and the Dune universe, and the entire series’ theme of independent colonies forcibly subdued by a central government with pretenses to some kind of legitimacy in turn influenced later shows like Firefly.  Boucher also definitely seems to have been influenced by Star Trek, and I don’t just mean in titles such as the aforementioned “City at the Edge of the World”; the plot of “Death-Watch”, for example, bears a striking resemblance to that of the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”, though both the particulars and the resolution were very different. That’s not a complaint, BTB; one of the great things about sci-fi IMHO is the way that creators are directly influenced by each other, and openly admit it.  For example, J, Michael Straczynski (whom I believe to have himself been influenced by Blake’s 7) borrowed his Babylon 5 psionic system from the writer Alfred Bester, and acknowledged that by naming a villain (played by an actor borrowed from Star Trek) after him.

Look for more about the series’ writing next week.

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Blake’s 4

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , on February 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  This is the third essay on the series’ characters; the first appeared two weeks ago, and the second last week.

One of the things I love about British television is that even the minor characters, those who appear in only one or a handful of episodes, are often well-developed.  While even Star Trek, a US series with above-average characterization, tended to make the crewmen fated to die interchageable “redshirts”, British shows like Doctor Who and The Avengers were notable for making us really care about characters before ruthlessly disposing of them.  Blake’s 7 doesn’t usually go quite that far; in fact, it’s often rather uneven in the character department.  While some characters (such as Servalan and Avon) are incredibly well-developed, others are ignored so shamefully actors actually left the series over it.  There’s no pattern to it that I can discern; while even some computers have well-developed (if caricatured) personalities (such as the pompous and temperamental ORAC and the painfully-obsequious “Slave” in Season 4), even some of the main human characters are frustratingly underdeveloped.

The uneven treatment is as hard to predict as it is to get used to.  For example, just as we were beginning to see the depths of the original crew member Gan, the loyal but deeply-troubled strongman, he was killed off while saving the others from a collapsing tunnel.  The villain Travis, on the other hand, overstayed his welcome so badly my opinion of most of the episodes in which he appeared is considerably reduced because of his presence; the rather odd decision to replace his actor when the first one left the series, rather than just eliminating the character, only exacerbated his irksomeness.  The only thing I liked about him was that he and Blake knew each other so well they could predict each others’ actions, which made for an interesting arch-enemies dynamic; other than that he was less a villain one “loved to hate” like Servalan, and more one simply hated, full stop.

But despite these problems, Blake’s 7 still had its share of interesting guest characters, some notable for being well-developed and well-played, while others were memorable for other reasons.  Since most of the characters in the show (including the heroes) are villains to one degree or another, most of the guest stars naturally play villains.  The good ones were played by actors such as Brian Blessed and John Abineri, whose work I’ve previously noted and enjoyed in other shows, including Doctor Who; the others included none other than 6th Doctor Colin Baker, demonstrating his patented brand of scenery-chewing (now with more artificial ham flavor!) which once again made me wonder why anyone thought giving him a starring role in anything would be a good idea.  His performance (in the episode “City at the Edge of the World”) was thrown into even sharper relief by that of his primary adversary in the tale, played by none other than Valentine “Black Guardian” Dyall, in a rare non-villainous role (though he did do the voice of God in the hilarious Bedazzled from 1967).  Incidentally, that episode provides a segue into the next topic I wish to discuss, but you’ll have to wait two weeks this time; look for the next installment on March 4th.

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Blake’s 3

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , on February 10, 2022| 5 Comments »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part was published two weeks ago today, and the second a week later.

If you read any of my Doctor Who megathread or its reprint on this blog, you already know that for me, characters are key in my enjoyment of a TV series.  If the characters are interesting and well-developed, I can overlook some fairly silly story elements and a lot of terrible special effects.  But if they aren’t, I will lose interest pretty quickly regardless of a show’s other virtues.  It’s one of the main reasons I esteem both Doctor Who and (classic & middle-period) Star Trek so highly: both are very character-driven.  And Blake’s 7 has well-developed characters, in spades.  This doesn’t mean I actually like all of them, but most of them are very interesting.  Take the title character, for example; I definitely do not like him because he’s arrogant, egotistical, pigheaded, and duplicitous.  There’s no way I’d follow Blake on a road trip to Disneyland, much less a serious of dangerous missions against insurmountable odds.  But unlike a lot of other shows which give us dislikeable characters and then pretend everyone likes them, this show fully admits Blake is a dick, and that people mostly follow him because he’s a symbol of resistance against their incredibly evil, oppressive government (and presumably, was a better leader, strategist, and person before the Federation subjected him to the brainwashing which we are clearly shown he has not fully overcome).  Even after he leaves the show at the end of the second season, Blake’s symbolic presence continues to be so strongly felt that it doesn’t even seem particularly odd that his name remains attached to both the show and the team, despite his being missing and presumed dead.

The character who trusts Blake least is Avon, a sour-faced tech wizard without any scruples against embezzling from the wealthy, who yet displays a rather strict personal code of ethics which includes honest statement of his motives, keeping promises, and even defending those menaced by bullies and tyrants.  He’s the character I enjoyed watching most, and would probably like best as a client, in part because of his wicked, arid sense of humor, which some may have noted is not entirely dissimilar to mine.  The complexity of Avon’s character rivals that of Servalan, so it’s not surprising that the two develop a powerful love/hate relationship in which neither allows his or her admiration and lust for the other to get in the way of their frequent attempts to kill each other.  After the loss of Blake, Avon at first seems reluctant to assume command of the team until eventually forced to by the arrival of Tarrant, a narcissistic hot-shot pilot who waltzes onto the ship and immediately starts ordering everyone else around.  Tarrant was clearly intended as a replacement for Blake, but I like him even less because, while Blake had the redeeming feature of at least being anti-authoritarian, Tarrant’s whole demeanor has the reek of cop about it.  If I were among the crew of the Liberator, I’d have moved into Avon’s camp by the end of the first adventure involving Tarrant, because at least Avon doesn’t assume everyone owes him obedience.

The only other original character to survive until the series finale is the cowardly master thief Vila, who never met a lock he couldn’t open.  Vila is refreshingly honest about his shortcomings; while most cowardly characters attempt to hide their yellow streak from others, Vila is the first to make the Goldsmithian argument that “He who fights and runs away/May live to fight another day”.  Not that it’s likely Vila ever read Goldsmith; while he’s clearly exceptionally intelligent, he’s certainly no intellectual.  But that doesn’t mean he’s a flat or static character; his descent over the course of the series from a man who perhaps likes his drink a bit too much, to an alcoholic whose drinking becomes an actual source of danger to his shipmates, is both subtle and gradual, and by the time we see him openly gulping down the booze onscreen, we realize it has been going on less obviously for more than a season.

Look for much more about the series’ characters, characterization and writing next week.

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Blake’s 2

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on February 3, 2022| 2 Comments »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part was published a week ago today.

One of the things I found most notable about the series was its treatment of women.  In the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about what was then still called “women’s lib”, and futuristic societies were generally depicted as more sexually egalitarian.  But while even Star Trek wasn’t ready to depict women in the highest positions of authority (such as starship command or supervillain status), and action chicks were generally superhuman in some way (eg, Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman), Blake’s 7 casually depicted female characters kicking butt, working as ship captains or judges, and even holding high military posts.  While US shows of the period felt they had to shout and gesticulate about how emancipated their female characters were (Star Trek: The Next Generation is one prime example), Blake’s 7 just presented it as the way things were, with little if any explicit comment on the subject.  And while most US & UK shows still have a tendency to de-sex powerful female characters, Supreme Commander (later President) Servelan was both very powerful and very feminine, showing off a different fashionable outfit in every episode while implementing plans so evil and shockingly-indifferent to human life they would’ve impressed The Master or Darth Vader.  We’re told Servalan comes from a very powerful and connected family, and the implication seems to be that her sexuality played a major role in her ascension to the purple; Jacqueline Pearce portrayed her perfectly as a totally spoiled, amoral, narcissistic psychopath who has always gotten her way and intends to keep it that way.  I really enjoy watching the character; it’s rare that a TV show dares to depict a character so utterly and unrepentantly vile, greedy, treacherous, degenerate, and morally grotesque without making them into a complete caricature.  One episode in particular really displayed her in full; in the third-season episode Children of Auron she uses persuasion and threat to convince those in charge of a cloning facility on a distant and long-independent colony world to produce a batch of clones using her genetic blueprint, so that she will have an army of her own children.  After she is tricked into destroying the entire brood, she weeps for her lost children, because Servalan is so narcissistic she could only truly love herself, and clones are as close to that as she can get.  Thereafter, she only ever wears black, apparently in mourning.

Other female characters in the show tend to also be well-rounded, though there were a few episodes in the second season where the male writers seemed unsure of what to do with the two female crew members and so mostly left them babysitting the ship, a development which caused Sally Knyvette (Jenna) to leave the series at the end of that season.  The telepathic Cally stayed on for another season, but like Next Generation‘s Deana Troi most writers seemed to see her more as a plot device than a person.  Jenna’s replacement, the teenaged mistress-of-all-arms Dayna, is the best of the non-original characters, but Cally’s replacement Soolin never develops much beyond her description, “female gunslinger”.

Meanwhile, in the real world, two episodes (one each in seasons C and D) were written by Tanith Lee, a clever and creative writer who draws heavily on fairy-tale imagery and motifs and rarely disappoints; her second episode, “Sand”, is one of the best in the entire series and provides even more character development for Servalan, who admits to have actually loved another human once, at 18, before “power became my lover”.

Look for much more about the series’ characters, characterization and writing next week.

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