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Notes -
I finished watching Blake's Seven earlier today. Spoiler-free rating: 7/10 for the first two seasons, 4/10 for the third and fourth. Spoilers below.
Things I liked:
Blake is really-a-terrorist and really-a-hero. Even Trek DS9, which makes a big deal out of having Kira Nerys the terrorist as First Officer, mostly fails to show her being a heroic terrorist. She does very little terrorism on-screen, and when her background does come into play she generally turns into a psycho killer whose justifications don't hold up. Blake's different; he clearly tries to minimise casualties, but he's willing to accept them, and the Federation is such a horrifying dystopia that he's still clearly in the right.
There's a reasonable amount of real science mixed in. I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to see a pattern of older shows assuming a more technically-inclined audience.
For the first couple of seasons, at least, most episodes fit into the big picture in some way. It's ground-level, but there's clearly a larger plot going on.
Things I disliked:
There are a few basic mistakes that were re-used far too many times, particularly as the series went on, to the point that it's just the idiot ball to have them keep happening. The first is "yelling desperately instead of just pushing the teleporter switch when somebody stops responding". The second is "letting Vila be a single point of failure", most notably by leaving him alone on the ship to operate the teleporter (he's also, IIRC, the only one who ever sold them out for real; the correct response to that one was seen on Firefly). The third is, well...
Servalan. I get that Jacqueline Pearce played her excellently, but seriously, her plot armour is a mile thick. If they wanted to keep her around, they should have had a lot less situations where only idiocy prevents her death. Blake lets Travis go again and again because Travis is a moron who's of negative value to the Federation (the period between the Federation pulling the plug on him and his death should have been shorter, though). Servalan, though, is high-up enough that killing her is actually a big deal, and yet Blake's crew never does it (sometimes for believable reasons, but too often without). And, uh, how many plots are "some fuckwit actually believed Servalan's promises"? There's that old saying regarding worldbuilding, "there wouldn't be stories of deals gone bad if deals always went bad, because if they did, no-one would make deals". Is there literally anyone in the entire series who actually profits from dealing with her? By the end it's clearly well-known that her word is written on water, and yet people keep jumping into the lion's mouth. She should have either been someone actually worthwhile to deal with, or someone who doesn't (need to) make deals. And she should have been either an actual magnificent bitch who never lets the crew get motive/means/opportunity to kill her, or she should have died.
The loss of Blake (and Jenna) basically decapitates the show after season 2, because Blake's the one with an actual goal. Having Avon go nuts for a couple of episodes is one thing; a couple of seasons, quite another.
Season 4 appears to have had a rule of "every named character outside the main cast dies by the end of the episode". What the fuck was going on there? This isn't even a question of in-universe stupidity, it just makes no sense and is so obvious I was basically crossing people off in my head by the end.
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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