Blake's 7 #28: Powerplay

"Would you rather be a load of spare parts down there?" "Or one spare part up here?"

IN THIS ONE... Is Tarrant friend or foe? Avon and Dayna Die Hard the Liberator while Vila and Avon are tricked into making a contribution to a high-tech society.

REVIEW: Avon, Vila and Cally are each in their own story threads, threads that will lead to their each returning to the Liberator and the new status quo. It's the Avon story that manages to capture the imagination best, as he and Dayna get all the best lines and pull have to navigate the ship's interior to get away (and wrest control of the ship) from Federation soldiers that have hijacked it and need Avon's voice print to give Zen commands. We're seeing a lot more of the ship this season (the escape pods, crawl spaces, and... a bedroom?! - and that's required of this kind of plot. Meanwhile, one of the Feds is killing the others off, and though we don't see their faces, it's pretty clear it has to be Del Tarrant (Avon comes to the wrong conclusion, but he doesn't have as much visual information as we do). As it turns out, Tarrant is smuggler/mercenary on the Federation's Most Wanted list AND has a curly mop of hair, so he's going to be our Blake replacement. Except more personable, it seems. The closed-lipped, ambiguous leader role goes to Avon, of course, and Dayna even calls him out on things he used to hold against Blake. But they have a better relationship, I think, even if if it's mostly centered around gallows humor. I could do with more convincing fights, but between the mystery, the action, and the cracking dialog, the A-plot is a winner.

I'm less entranced by the "sci-fi plot of the week", but its mystery is well-played too and it's ultimately pretty solid. Vila finds himself on a forest planet that's divided into Primitives (return to nature types) and Hi-Techs (lean on technology types), the latter hunting the former to force them to make a "contribution". When they find Vila in the woods, he quickly follows them to what he thinks will be some kind of spa, clearly, though I do wonder if a lazy loaf like Vila would be that excited about "contributing". Pretty faces go a long way, I guess. The audience is primed for a slavery story, and catching up to Cally, aboard a hospital ship and heading for that same planet (as we discover later), that sense is reinforced. Primitives or outsiders, they are all meant to "contribute", and in both story threads, the "civilized" folk are cagey enough to raise your hackles up. But the twist inside the twist is that they actually harvest your organs! Unfortunately, by the time we learn this, it's just about time for the episode to end, and Vila and Cally, reunited on the planet, are teleported away before they are humanely euthanized. This frontier world doesn't get its comeuppance, actually quite the opposite as it is promised aid by what's left of the Federation.

Which brings us to Servalan and my main problem with the episode. The hospital ship's last rescue is the new President of the Federation, picked up on a planet that looks nothing like the one she was stranded on in the last episode. A special effects annoyance, but no worse than that turd of a spaceship model. She crosses paths with Cally and their scenes together don't seem to have gotten the usual touch-up by Boucher. Servalan is just very serious and has none of her usual unctuous wit. Even Cally is a little stayed. And while it's fun to see Servalan being denied access to the captain and treated like a nobody by this neutral planet, they don't really take it to its ultimate end. She gets to the planet, insists on seeing a high official, makes promises off-screen, and is out of trouble. I don't know how to rewrite the script to make this work exactly, but I feel like she needed more indignities piled on. Her presence feels like a waste, really.

NOT MY FEDERATION: The Delta Quadrant's Vidiians are organ collectors.

BUT MIGHT BE MY EMPIRE: Michael Sheard (Klegg) and John Hollis (Lom) were both in The Empire Strikes Back.

WHO?: A planet shared by upper-case Primitives and "Hi-Techs", both descendants of an Earth mission, was presented in The Face of Evil. Sheard was also a frequent Doctor Who guest-stars, appearing in five roles over three decades, most memorably Lawrence Scarman in Pyramids of Mars and the Headmaster in Remembrance of the Daleks. Hollis, for his part, was Sondergaard in The Mutants. The big brute Mall is played by Michael Crane, who was a similar character in The Monster of Peladon. Primi Townsend (the Hi-Tech Zee) was Mula in The Pirate Planet. The Receptionist is played by Helen Blatch who was the computer's voice in The Deadly Assassin and Fabian in The Twin Dilemma. The rather terrible fights were arranged by Max Faulkner, who Doctor Who producer Barry Letts called the best actor of the Action by HAVOC stunt team and who therefore got featured a number of times as UNIT soldiers and guards (as well as the Outsider Nesbin in The Invasion of Time).

REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - Good Avon plot, fair sci-fi B-plot, and we're properly introduced to Tarrant.