Story: The Liberator receives a message directed specifically at Blake: the copy of him grown by the Clone Masters is in failing health, and needs his help. Despite Avon’s repeated warnings that this is almost certainly a trap, Blake insists on following the signal to its source, which means gaining an audience with the last survivinging Clone Master who remains after their order was destroyed, which involves a side trip to gather – or steal – the necessary funds to pay for that privilege. Even that task is costly, nearly costing Vila and Avon their lives. Nearly everything about visiting the Clone Master’s new inner sanctum involves being defenseless, which is, of course, when Avon’s warnings are proven to be correct.
Review: Oh, thank goodness, someone actually came up with a good reason to revisit the Clone Masters’ copy of Blake. Introduced in the 1979 Blake’s 7 TV episode Weapon, the Fake Blake has cropped up again and again in fan fiction, often as a way of circumventing the series finale (which was more final than most shows’ series finales). That episode also saw the only appearance of the Clone Masters (who seemed like they were being set up as a Big Deal, narratively speaking, only to disappear from the story thereafter), as well as the only appearance of Rashel, a freed slave who turns the table on virtually everyone in that story, winning her freedom and that of Blake’s copy. And of course, as far as the television series went, that was all we got of that story.
It’s particularly encouraging that Rashel continues, in this book, to display the kind of ballsy, playing-for-all-the-marbles bravery that got her out of the horrible situation she was in in Weapon, which, honestly, was not the greatest of episodes. One of the major strikes against Weapon is that Rashel spent nearly the entire episode being yelled at by a crazed man who insisted that following him around, at least, was better than slavery. (How, exactly, having to follow him around and do his bidding was better – or indeed any different from – slavery, the episode never made clear, either in text or subtext.) This book continues to give her the agency that she didn’t get to show until Weapon needed a quick twist ending. It’s also neat to see Carnell, that episode’s fallen-from-grace psychostrategist, again, but it’s particularly interesting to see him down on his luck.
The Rule Of Death was originally published by Big Finish as an audiobook, read by Glynis “Soolin” Barber no less, but I was very happy to also see it get a print run, something that’s being repeated with Bayban Ascending and will presumably be repeated with Zero Point; each book is a companion piece to a box set of full cast audio dramas, but if The Rule Of Death is any indication, it’s not necessary to take in both side-by-side to understand any part of the story being told. The presentation in print is very nice, but for one typesetting quibble: one space at the beginning of the sentence of a paragraph does not a proper indentation make. There’s almost certainly some “having to fit within a pre-budgeted page count” reason for this, but the part of me that used to lay out the school paper was twitching uncontrollably, wanting to fix this.
As with the audio box set it accompanies, The Rule Of Death is part of Big Finish’s push to keep Blake’s 7 alive as a licensed property alive despite the fact that many of the original TV series’ key cast members have left us. The glory days of reassembling nearly the entire cast for full-up audio dramas are gone; the audio stories we get now are side stories featuring the remaining cast members who are still available. But freed of the obligation of having to assemble a full cast, The Rule Of Death gives us the Liberator crew as we remember them from the second half of season two, in a briskly-paced page-turner. Even if we’re not hearing them in headphones, their voices are captured perfectly. It’s a fitting tribute to, and one more adventure for, absent friends.
Year: October 20, 2022
Author: Trevor Baxendale
Publisher: Big Finish Productions
Pages: 170
