Story: The authors guide us through a fairly scholarly episode-by-episode analysis of the BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7 (1978-1981), examining the evolution of scripts, challenges encountered in the production process, and the copious subtext bestowed upon the show’s 52 episodes by the cast. Special attention is given to the show’s relevance to sociopolitical issues contemporary with the original broadcast dates, and re-examining those themes in a more current context.
Review: When I was in my senior year of high school, I had a lovely English/lit teacher who took us through a selection of terribly influential – and, for an American public school, terribly subversive and dark – 20th century literature: “1984”, “Lord Of The Flies”, “Brave New World”, Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”…great stuff. And yet, God love her, she almost blew the whole thing by overanalyzing everything. I’m not saying that no author has ever referenced the Holy Trinity by invoking the number three in literature, but I’d argue that nobody bothered to deliberately reference that as often as my teacher talked about it.
It’s the same level of detail that Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore bring to their episode-by-episode analysis of the BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7 – and my reminiscences of high school lit aren’t completely out of left field, as 1984 and Brave New World can legitimately be cited as influences on the series. The book opens with an insightful look into the state of British television, and science fiction, and the specific circumstances into which Blake’s 7 was born. There’s an overview of each season, primarily from a pre-production and casting standpoint. There’s quite a bit of information in these sections that I hadn’t heard before: a young actress named Marina Sirtis auditioned for Cally in the casting calls for the first season (now that’s funny; I had already heard about her coming back later to audition for the part of Dayna). The character of Tarrant was originally envisioned as a one-season regular who would betray Avon and the Liberator crew at the end of the third season. As many fans have speculated, Soolin inherited her dialogue from Cally early in the fourth season, since Jan Chappell left on fairly short notice. And “Commissioner Sleer,” Servalan’s alias in the fourth season, was originally intended to be a new character and the alias element was grafted onto the character at the last minute (much to actress Jacqueline Pearce’s displeasure).
The analysis focuses on many things – relationships, the characters’ backstories, and the gradually unfolding sociopolitical picture of the Federation as an empire first in decline, and finally in shambles. It’s interesting as the authors walk us through their theory of why the Federation under Servalan/Sleer’s thumb in season 4 may not even be the Federation as we knew it before, but a marginalized faction that may be almost as much of a criminal element as Avon and his crew. They also usurp some long-standing notions about characters both major and minor, with perhaps the most fascinating and shocking assertion being that Gan’s limited implant doesn’t stop him from committing murder, it stops him from committing violent sex crimes. This really uproots every fundamental perception of Gan as a gentle giant and paints a sinister picture of him as perhaps the darkest criminal of the lot. And the authors’ reasoning, drawing from observations of his behavior and even stitching together sundry inconsistencies, is sound. As I read this book and wrote this review, I was waiting for my season 1 DVD set to arrive, so it’ll certainly be interesting rewatching the series with this new information in mind.
So does it fall down anywhere? Yes. The authors seem to spend an inordinate amount of time defending the series against charges of what the back cover blurb refers to as “overly middle-class casting,” and that defense consists of a lot of analysis of accents and beard stubble. I have to confess, while I usually have little problem crossing the cultural divide in comprehending something written primarily for a British audience, this is one case where I have to admit I’m a bit baffled. Obviously the authors felt it was important enough to focus that much energy on, so I’m not debating its relevance to the subject matter, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we’re obsesssing over received pronunciation (something I had to look up from other sources to aid my comprehension of the material, as I hadn’t heard the term before and wasn’t sure I was accurately gathering its meaning from its usage and context here) when there are so many other things to talk about. And it never seems to come up that, hey, these characters are being played by actors, and actors sometimes affect different accents based on their own interpretations and instructions from the director. Yet in other places, this discussion of class distinction is interesting, especially when discussing the casting of Dayna.
One other problem I had with the book is in the afterword, which discusses the influence Blake’s 7 has had in science fiction television, British and otherwise. Here, the authors are perhaps overenthusiastic. They credit Blake’s 7 with everything from the idea of a telepath on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation to almost every character in Farscape. (The example paralleling Cally to Deanna Troi set off a red light for me; it’s generally well-known that Roddenberry’s inspiration for Troi was, in fact, an original Star Trek episode, The Empath, aired in 1968 – nearly a decade before Blake.) They cite Babylon 5, whose creator has made public his appreciation of Blake’s 7, and point out that both series share themes of the fall from freedom to fascism, charismatic leadership, and the thin line between freedom fighters and terrorists – at least here, there’s little doubt, because B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has put it on the record. What I didn’t know was that Joss Whedon has also apparently professed an admiration for the series, though I’m not sure it’s fair to cite Blake as an antecedent of Buffy and Angel (indeed, the authors don’t really say what cues those series have taken from Blake, just that there is an influence). When it comes to Farscape and Lexx, however, I can see some influence – a ship full of escaped criminals in both cases, the fact that 790 is a portable computer requiring others to carry him around (a la Orac), and parallels between Lexx’s personality and function and that of Zen aboard the Liberator. The influences on Farscape cited by the authors are numerous, paralleling Travis and Scorpius, Vila and Rygel, Gan and D’argo, and Grayza and Servalan, although the connections are extremely tenuous in some cases, extending no deeper than costume similarities. But, as much as I love Blake’s 7, to suggest that any and all serialized science fiction that has followed was influenced by it is a bit unlikely. Even the authors seem like they should know better, as they attribute the serialization of latter-day Deep Space Nine to the influence of Babylon 5, not Blake’s 7 (I’ve always had that suspicion myself). Blake’s 7 didn’t invent serial SF. Radio, comics and pulp novels did that. Even claiming Blake’s 7 as a seminal influence in bringing that concept to TV is questionable when Doctor Who had been doing it for 14 years before Blake premiered.
If there’s a single jaw-dropping drawback to the book, it’s in the discussion of audio dramas and spinoff novels. This could’ve been an area of great interest, since author Alan Stevens himself was involved with some of the best Blake audio fiction – and yet he refuses to elaborate on those very works with the same depth of analysis he directs at other people’s works. He doesn’t really explain why in the introduction to this appendix covering spin-off properties, either. I can see him wanting to maintain impartiality in his coverage, but he also would’ve been in a very unique position to discuss the making of these projects, and I’m very disappointed that he didn’t.
That failing aside, “Liberation” is deep, thoughtful, and it occasionally seems a little bit too interested in trying to detect sexual undercurrents to the stories and their character interactions, but at the very least, it’s an interesting read, one which may turn your perceptions of Blake’s 7 on their ear. For a veteran fan such as myself, something that makes it all surprising and new again is worth reading.
Year: 2003
Author: Alan Stevens, Fiona Moore
Publisher: Telos
Pages: 250 pages
