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Notes -
Servalan starts off genuinely intelligent (and Jacqueline Pearce's casting was wonderful because physically she's this big-eyed waif type whom you would not expect to be the ice-cold ruthless manipulator who survives everything), but of course over the course of the series she gets over-powered.
Mainly by the cast being idiots - though Avon has always been not as smart as he thinks he is - Tarrant, though, definitely was not thinking with his brain when he was stranded with her.
I love that the SFX are done on the cheap, because this is the Beeb, and the title sequence is done in cross-stitch(!) and one of the space ships is a hair dryer cut in half and glued back together.
The ending is fantastic. It's really, really a shock when you see it the first time because you're hoping that there will be the heroic ending of the plucky, scrappy underdogs winning over the villainous tyrannical regime (like every American movie and show does). It's as if Star Wars ended with the Emperor having killed off the entire Resistance, and he got Luke to do it.
I think the "killing off everyone" was maybe (I don't know this for sure) to knock on the head any calls for a renewal of the show (the BBC has tended to look down on SF shows that get popular, see Doctor Who, as being Not Serious Broadcasting or Worthy Artistic Productions), plus it's very much in the downbeat, cynical British tradition (the plucky, scrappy rebels have been reduced by attrition and by previous successful Federation campaigns to a disorganised, fragmented bunch on the run trying to rebuild and being driven from every base they find, and in the end the organisation of power and resources in the Federation, as well as internal treachery, in-fighting, and loss of direction*, is just too much for them. The Bad Guys win because this is how the world works, and this was before George R.R. Martin tried the same thing in A Song of Ice and Fire to turn all the traditional tropes on their head).
*We see this when Blake disappears. Avon is "to hell with principles, I wanna be rich" but even there, their attempts to be space pirates go hilariously wrong (the fourth season episode Gold is wonderful with double-cross over double-cross).
I was fairly confident a full heroic ending wasn't in the cards by that point; one episode wasn't enough for a real finale and no groundwork had been laid. I wasn't expecting the actual ending; I wasn't really expecting an ending at all, because I figured the show had sucked for two seasons and gotten cancelled (I had long since said the eight deadly words).
Also, if they wanted to shock me, they probably shouldn't have had the slow-motion.
I will say that shaggy-dogs are unusual for a reason, particularly when they leave a lot of Chekhov's Guns unfired (remember the Federation agent in "The Way Back" who orchestrated the massacre and killed Blake's lawyer? Because I do). I will also say that I find the best twist reveals to not be those that are shocking, but those the audience works out approximately five seconds prior.
I don't love the SFX being lousy. I don't care about graphics as long as I can understand what's going on (for a videogame example: Civ2 and X-Com are good enough; Dwarf Fortress pre-graphics and NetHack are not), so I just didn't really care about them one way or the other (which is why I never mentioned them).
The problem with showing this is that, well, eight deadly words. I cared about Blake/Jenna/Avon/Gan/Cally, not Vila/Orac/Tarrant/Dayna/Soolin, and above any of those I cared about Plot. Stuff actually happens in seasons 1 and 2; episodes fit into a broader picture. Most of the season 3 and 4 episodes have no broader impact.
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