Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 8

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #2 — The Devil Goblins From Neptune by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#1
The Devil Goblins From Neptune
By Keith Topping and Martin Day

The Past Doctor Adventures, then. It ought to go without saying that if you’re doing a book range about the current Doctor then you should also do one about the rest, but you know what? That wasn’t a thing until Virgin did it with the New and Missing Adventures, so pour one out for the MAs. The BBC took their lunch money.

That said, the Missing Adventures never quite figured out what to do with themselves. Replicate the style of a TV script? Too derivative. Get experimental or dark? That’s what the New Adventures are for. They tended to oscillate between these extremes, with only occasional gems like The Empire Of Glass grasping that you can just tell a good story in an era.

I mention the MAs because, well, the comparison is inevitable, but also because there seems to be some crossover here. The Devil Goblins From Neptune (I’ll say it, goofy title) was co-written by Martin Day, who got his start with Virgin’s The Menagerie. (Many of the BBC Books writers cut their teeth with Virgin, which is sort of nice. And it’s good sense, because you don’t want to rely on a procession of first time novelists. You could try established higher-profile writers, but they may not flock to your TV tie-in range – no offence.)

On a character level, too, an argument can be made that Goblins is in keeping with the MAs. It’s set between Seasons Seven and Eight on telly: a sea change occurred there, with Liz Shaw disappearing without a peep and Mike Yates materialising as if we’d always known him. Despite sitting in this gap, Goblins does not have Mike arrive on the scene for the first time – so The Eye Of The Giant might still stand. And despite being the first thing that comes to mind when looking at that continuity gap, this is not The Proverbial Liz Shaw Leaving Story either. (Although there’s an epilogue set eight months after she left UNIT.) Is that a case of simply not writing that story right now, or are they politely letting The Scales Of Injustice stay where it is? I guess we’ll see. (Quick reminder here that Virgin sent Liz on her way twice, the first time in the first Decalog. So it wouldn’t exactly be crime of the century if Topping and Day did it again here. But they didn’t.)

I’m probably being unfair to Goblins by starting off with such a lot of fanwank, because it’s not that kind of book. So let’s get back on track. Season Seven strikes me as a good setting for a Doctor Who novel. The stories were longer than usual in the first place, with plenty of characters and subplots and okay, a generous amount of padding. Crucially it was also a time of change for the Doctor, in that suddenly he was part of a team. Yes, he’s always the most interesting one, but crucially he’s not the only one driving the action. Goblins flies with this, allowing the focus to follow the Doctor, Liz, Mike Yates, the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton and visiting Russian UNIT officer Shuskin as needed. There’s enough going on that you’re always fairly engaged – so it doesn’t have to be the Doctor all the time, and the fact that none of the rest of them truly know or understand him anyway gives the authors license to let him hang back and work in an ensemble. (They arguably push this a bit far by having him slip into a coma twice, but again – plenty going on elsewhere.)

Season Seven was also a murkier, nastier kind of storytelling than viewers were used to. Spearhead From Space hints at bodysnatching paranoia. The Silurians features an out of control plague and a morally grey ending that borders on genocide; The Ambassadors Of Death suggests that people are the real problem. And in Inferno we really push the boat out, with the world turning to outright fascism and then ending in lava and screams. (But it’s not our world, so phew I guess.) The season is a good setting for murky allegiances, violence with consequences and unexpected changes of setting: all grist to the mill for a book running about twice the length of a Target novelisation.

So in Goblins, it’s not just a case of aliens invading London and the Doctor leading the charge against them. Shadowy forces are working against UNIT and we follow their agent: Thomas Bruce, suave American and all round, 24-carat a-hole. The aliens have help from humanity – bad apples, of course – so we occasionally dip into the world of Viscount Rose, a part of the English gentry who reckons Armageddon will work in his favour. (Guess how that works out.) There are hippies more or less on board with this, the “Venus people”, led by Rose’s son Arlo, and we occasionally meet them or people on similar drugs. And of course the goblins of the title are out there killing people, so we occasionally cut away to those events, meeting people ever so briefly before, y’know.

A lot of this feels reflective of those long seven parters, particularly the sheer necessity of action scenes. (“Action by HAVOC” appears at the start. Accurate.) Shuskin’s initial mission to recruit the Doctor leads to three failed kidnap attempts, all of which are nominally pointless because she just wants his help but UNIT kept blowing her off, and then actually pointless because the whole “go and investigate happenings in Russia” plot is a massive, insidious red herring. Not that I’m exactly complaining: it’s written with maximum excitement in mind, bullets flying everywhere and the Doctor jauntily eluding danger at all turns. Marvellous. But I know when a certain degree of chain yanking is occurring and – apologies to Thomas Bruce and friends – here be yanks.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this (in all honesty, quite sprawling) plot is the stuff with the Brigadier. Realising that Shuskin’s experiences indicate rot at a high level, he departs for Geneva to see what’s what. (This smartly ensures that the red herring plot doesn’t go to waste.) The Brigadier often seemed a bit of a buffoon on screen, particularly as the years went on, but he flourishes here, responding to dangerous changes of circumstance with intelligence and taking command of soldiers so that any consequences are off their shoulders. I was never entirely sure what the authors were driving at with where this is all going – the “rot” goes very high up and it must be addressed, but that doesn’t obviously reflect anything in Season Eight and beyond, so are other authors going to pick this up? – but each cut away to his one-man spy movie was enjoyable.

There’s also solid character work happening for the rest of the gang. Mike Yates seems to be having crises of confidence, first when he’s placed in charge and then when it’s taken away – again not entirely sure if that ties into anything, but it fleshes him out. Benton gets partially blown up by a stray bomb, but then adorably rushes back to work and tries to infiltrate the Venus People, which goes surprisingly well until the goblins turn up. And Liz, while not making a point of leaving this time, feels like a person in her own right with skills and interests that just don’t naturally align with UNIT. (She much prefers academia.) Her mentor, Bernard Trainor, turns out to be in cahoots with Viscount Rose, although he soon regrets it. Shortly after she finds out (and after he has changed sides again) he dies of a heart attack, and we see a broken Liz: “Why did you have to go now? Why did you have to go when I hate you?” Leaving now or not, the events of the novel certainly feel like they’re going in Liz’s “cons” column for UNIT, not the “pros”. It may not be her leaving story, which is quite bold in itself, but it contributes meaningfully to that event.

That death is one of several examples that feel a little less throwaway than you’d expect in a monster invasion story. There is certainly more violence than you’d see on television or in a Target novelisation – enough that, combined with the spy shenanigans and the loving detail of all the military hardware involved, I wondered if kids would enjoy reading this at all. (Indeed, I didn’t stick with it as a twelve year old.) But most of it feels consequential and felt. Notably, the Brigadier contends with possibly having to take a life for the first time – a thoughtful character beat, albeit one the Doctor would laugh into silence after some of the orders he’s given recently. (Has he really not done it before?) That said, the Doctor calmly engineers the death of an entire species here, reasoning (albeit not happily) that they “have only themselves to blame.” I think it’s sufficient to say I don’t buy that, and if the Doctor had been any higher in the novel’s mix and thus under more conscious scrutiny from the authors I don’t think he would either.

I’ve gone a long time without talking about those goblins, haven’t I? And with some reason: the Waro (not to be confused with any nefarious yellow-clad plumbers) are murderous aliens who hate everything else in the universe because, basically, they’re the worst and that’s all there is to it. Huh. They have no real voice in the novel (though at one point the Doctor mind melds, aka “soul catches” with one) but they do have a vague environmental disaster back story. And honestly, they’re more of a thing that occasionally happens than a character you’d have any cause to think about. They’re the weakest link in the novel, but I suppose you could argue they’re meant to only be a part of it, like the Doctor; they are stitched into the betrayals and confusions that drive the action, but the real interest comes from the big picture. Spurious reasoning, I know, but I enjoyed the book despite finding the threat boring and the eventual action-packed relocation to a certain UFO site in Nevada also, as it happens, spurious.

In amongst all this is the Doctor, occasionally protesting about wanting to get off Earth, as is his way. I think he protests too much. In a passage that for once does give way to the ol’ fanwank a little, he catches up with Trainor about recent UNIT exploits, and the pair briefly discuss Ian Chesterton, whom the Doctor has met up with offscreen. (!) The sheer domesticity of this leapt off the page at me – the idea that he and Ian occupy the same world now as casual acquaintances. (Ian has a son with Barbara, FYI.) Shortly afterwards the Doctor resumes his membership at the swanky, rather dubious Progressive Men’s Club, in that way that seems quintessential to this Doctor. Later there is a somewhat on-the-nose reference to UNIT being “like a family,” and there are enough hints that the Doctor has settled into it without even noticing, which provides another nicely subtle bridge between the two seasons and a pleasing snapshot of this time and place, in what is otherwise a sprawling, bloodthirsty, giddily globetrotting and sometimes oddly thoughtful ride of a novel.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #1 — The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#1
The Eight Doctors
By Terrance Dicks

He’s back! And it’s about… nothing.

So, you’ve got the Doctor Who license. (Not you, Virgin Publishing. Sorry.) What do you do with it? Well, you could do worse than copy the previous guy’s homework. Timewyrm: Genesys was given to a well respected/well liked/well established/well-in Who author (delete where appropriate) and it opens with one of our characters getting amnesia. This is a handy device for explaining the basic tenets of Doctor Who to any uninitiated readers. (It’s nonetheless a rather odd choice, because the vast majority of readers picking up Timewrym: Genesys were already fans who knew this stuff back to front. But I understand the impulse.)

Fast forward six years and enter The Eight Doctors, which also comes from a familiar-named author and does amnesia for what appears to be the same reason – except this time it’s the entire book. And this time it’s an odd choice for a couple of reasons.

The Eighth Doctor’s only previous adventure on screen made heavy use of amnesia, so it seems silly to do that again right away. (We can perhaps infer that Terrance Dicks wasn’t enamoured with the TV Movie or its ownership of plot beats based on the Doctor’s subtle interpretation of it here: “It had been a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events.” I mean, he’s not wrong.)

Still, “amnesia” doesn’t dictate how you actually write the character or the memory loss – that’s up to you. Dicks in this instance opts to have the Doctor more or less loaded up with his memories already (right away he has his name, ability to pilot the TARDIS and Venusia aikido), he’s just unfamiliar with, or unable to get at them. This is at least a bit different to the TV Movie, but it puts The Eight Doctors in a weird middle ground where the Doctor Who-ey elements are sort of new to it (and to us, the hypothetical new readers), but they are also presented as if you should already know what they are. This gives us weird stop-start prose like “This, although he didn’t realise it, was the old, traditional TARDIS control room” followed later that page by “What was this place? Clearly it was some kind of control room. But what was it supposed to control?” Is it an unknown or isn’t it? It doesn’t quite work if you tell us what it is and then have the Doctor go, “Huh?” All of which begs the same question as the Timewyrm: Genesys opening: who is The Eight Doctors for?

I’m getting ahead of myself, so to recap: directly after the events of the TV Movie (which doesn’t strictly rule out The Dying Days, every cloud eh) the Doctor finds a backup trap from the Master which triggers memory loss all over again. Along comes the helpful booming voice of Rassilon, whose Five Doctors visage lovingly graces the back cover, to tell him to cheer up and “trust the TARDIS”, which then deposits him in Totters Yard for reasons we’ll get to. It’s here we take a slight detour and introduce what will become the new companion.

This is new stuff, bread and butter for those hypothetical new readers. Hooray. How does it fare? Well, in record time we learn that Sam Jones is of school age, a vegetarian, a runner and a gymnast. (If she had time to breathe she’d probably list her favourite bands as well.) We find her running away from a local drug gang, angry at her for informing to the cops, which also tells us she has strong morals. But we still need her to be a companion, so she needs rescuing, which is where a suddenly-appearing police box (and some quickly recalled aikido) comes in. The police turn up, everyone except the Doctor scarpers and the wrong idea is had about his involvement in local drug deals. Cue a bit of silliness in a police station, while Sam is gently interrogated by her teachers.

It’s not great stuff, honestly, but I do appreciate the expediency of Sam’s introduction and the information it gets across. We’ve had similar and/or worse companion intros on television since 2005. Everything about the criminals (“You remember why they call him Machete Charlie?”) and the cops (“I DON’T GIVE A BRASS MONKEY’S”) is, to put it charitably, more your Terrance Dicks of Mean Streets than of Exodus, but if you bear in mind that some people have this idea about Doctor Who being intended for children then it reads harmlessly enough. (I’m less fond of Sam’s teachers: the male one is good enough at his job to figure Sam needs to talk to someone, but he nevertheless palms her off onto a female colleague with “Maybe you can get her to talk about it, Vicky – you know, girly talk.” Just as night follows day, Vicky calls him a “chauvinistic oaf”, like this is some blazing piece of feminism and not just Who’s On First for pipe-smoking sexists. The whole exchange is reheated from the 70s and it clunks like anything.) But anywho, that’s enough about Sam. The Doctor escapes from police custody and retreats in the TARDIS (sans Sam), which sets a course for the multi-Doctor shenanigans of the title.

And, sorry, this is where the wheels really come off.

The TARDIS/Rassilon/the Doctor’s subconscious or whatever has a plan to beat the amnesia: go and visit his past selves, do a bit of telepathy and absorb their memories. If you think about this for more than a second it falls apart: why not just visit his most recent incarnation and get the memories all in one go? But hey, it’s an excuse to go on a jolly Time Lord’s outing. Again though, it’s how you do it, and as with the amnesia the choices are rather muddled.

We find the First Doctor during his first on-screen adventure. Again, the amnesia prose can’t keep straight what our Doctor remembers: “The old man was angry. The old man was him” is followed by “He could understand [the old man’s passions] as if they were his own. And then he realised – they were his own.” He marches up to the First Doctor, bold as brass, during the near-miss with the wounded caveman and the rock. As well as regaining memories up to this point, he uses the opportunity to wag a finger at his predecessor for contemplating murder.

I hate this, because the scene as televised doesn’t leave room for an intervention. There already is one, with Ian stepping in to stop him. So, why add this talking-to on top? It might be there to give the new Doctor a grounding in his own morals, but those already seemed fully developed when he met Sam, and castigated her enemies for selling drugs to kids. You can argue it’s adding fuel to the First Doctor’s fire, but then that takes away from Ian and the role of the companion in general – however there’s no actual sign that the First Doctor has changed his mind afterwards. The new Doctor yells at him and then the Ian thing plays out just the same anyway! So what’s it for? It’s a towering redundancy, a sort of have-your-cake-and-throw-it-away. Odd, odd choice.

And that’s not even the worst bit. Here’s how the First Doctor reacts to the new arrival: “Good grief! Seven regenerations… I am the First Doctor, and you are the Eighth! … You must find your other selves, all six of them. They’ll restore the gaps in your memory, just as I have — though only up to the time in their lives that you meet them, of course.” Even apart from how agonisingly clumsy it is to offer up the book’s entire plot like this, how incongruous does this Doctor, the one least encumbered by continuity (because most of it didn’t exist yet) sound as he casually refers to himself as The First Doctor, and tosses away his own future regenerations like he’s swapping notes with a fellow trainspotter? It doesn’t speak to the character or do anything to show why we should be interested in seeing him again. And there’s nothing momentous about this meeting, despite how bananas it would have been in that moment and how much of an occasion it ought to be for us – indeed, it’s the premise of the book. The whole encounter is over in two pages. If a random fan had submitted a first pass at this scene, it might have read the same way.

Anyway. Hope you’re comfy. One down, six to go.

The Second Doctor fares much the same: found during The War Games, surrounded by soldiers displaced in time, our Doctor regains some memories, gains a few Doctor Who trivia points and wags his finger/offers encouragement about contacting the Time Lords for help, which will get his younger self exiled. As a section there’s a bit more to it at least – The War Games has more going on generally than An Unearthly Child did, plus Terry co-wrote this one so he’s probably more engaged – but again it’s an intervention that doesn’t really contribute to the outcome; again, if it does contribute then some agency is removed from the original story; and again, it’s all so blandly functional that he could be asking an old colleague for train times.

Around this point it becomes more of a short story collection, but Terrance at least starts putting some action into it. We find the next few Doctors in the moments after a TV story: The Sea Devils, State Of Decay and (aptly/confusingly) The Five Doctors. The Doctor helps the Third Doctor find, lose, find, then lose the Master again, at one point revisiting Devil’s End. It’s all a bit redundant, but quite jolly apart from the Third Doctor trying to steal his successor’s TARDIS at gunpoint. You can generally tell Dicks is more engaged here as it was “his” era, but I’m not sure I give that a pass. Similarly he wrote State Of Decay, and this isn’t even his first prose sequel to it, so the next bit is fairly generous as well: the Fourth Doctor runs afoul of vampires, but luckily the new Doctor a) murders a bunch of them and b) provides a life saving blood transfusion, which is a Bill & Ted paradox but no one seems to mind. Then, following up another story he wrote, the Fifth Doctor’s attempt at relaxation is interrupted by the Raston Warrior Robot and some Sontarans. A clever multi-Doctor ruse helps confuse and defeat the robot, and then the new Doctor engineers the deaths of all the Sontarans as an escape plan. It’s around here that I can’t help looking at this blood-spattered new incarnation and wonder if he has lost his memory since earlier in this book, when he told the First Doctor that the ends didn’t justify the means. (It’s also worth noting that the Eye Of Orion is now once and for all ruined as a relaxation spot, what with the robot being left on guard there. Whoops.)

As we meet number 6, still in the throes of The Trial Of A Time Lord, the action shifts to put the Eighth Doctor more at the centre. This makes sense – he ought to draw the focus at some point, it’s his book series – but you could be forgiven for wishing it was executed differently. Initially working with and passionately defending the Sixth Doctor, he is soon exposing corruption on Gallifrey and organising a revolution, all while repeating the plot points of Trial. It’s worth noting that all of this is our second version of Gallifrey in this novel – the other one came to a head in the Fifth Doctor’s segment, as a seditious Time Lord tried to kill two Doctors using the Time Scoop – and the book does threaten to snap under the weight of Time Lord continuity. (You can’t even say it’s worth it for finally getting to the meaty bit of the book, because although the Eighth Doctor draws the focus for a while, this still isn’t really the main plot of the novel. Because there isn’t one.) For good measure, needling the Sixth Doctor for being a bit of a fatty isn’t very nice, but then again there’s a reference earlier on to the Fourth Doctor secretly wishing Romana was more subservient like his old companions, and there’s the Third Doctor’s whole attempted hijacking bit. For a book supposedly delighting in the company of eight Doctors, few of them come out of it well.

Finally we arrive at the Doctor he might as well have visited in the first place: we find the Seventh one so depressed he’s considering medical intervention. (This is certainly a take, and maybe it’s a comment on the often gloomy New Adventures – although a reference to the Doctor’s parents sort of de-canonises those, eek – but I hope not as he mellowed towards the end of the series.) A death-defying trip to Metebelis III cures his ennui, with a little help from the new Doctor who shrinks a giant spider to death and my dude, would you give the killing a rest? Snuck in here as well is some bonus continuity for the Master – the third-and-a-bit version included in The Eight Doctors, god help you if you don’t know his entire timeline – as we helpfully explain how he pulled off the whole “death snake” thing in the TV Movie. It doesn’t really fit, but I guess Terry figured hey, since I’m here.

And at last we pick up with Sam and send her and the Eighth Doctor on their own adventures. An attempt is made for this to seem like a fresh take on “companion enters the TARDIS,” with Sam assessing more or less all the weird stuff happening around her on the spot and taking it in her stride because she’s from a more savvy age: the 90s. I’m not that charitable, however: in the context of this book, where monumental events are rendered as bullet points, it just reads like we’re getting it done faster. It’s also a bit flat having the companion shrug it off like this. The companion is the reader. There should be some amazement.

So, what does The Eight Doctors try to achieve? As an adventure featuring that titular gaggle of Theta-Sigmas it’s rather lacking, bumping them into each other with no greater ceremony (or critically, banter) than whatever old Doctor it is going “Not you again!” As a celebration of those events, well it really isn’t one, more just acknowledging that those events occurred, often in an exhausting list. At best, it advertises that there are different Doctor Who continuities, which is genuinely very canny when you’re launching two book ranges to explore them. Business concerns aside though, it’s a rough restart for printed Doctor Who fiction, jumping from the depth of the New Adventures into essentially Dimensions In Time without the soap opera.

As a first adventure for a new Doctor, forget it. Although he eventually takes the lead, the closest he has to a distinct personality here is an ease with killing. (This isn’t entirely the author’s fault – there isn’t room to make a definitive statement about a new Doctor – but I did find the violence a bit off.) The best you can do is write it off as a rough sketch written to order and look forward to people actually writing this stuff for real. But in order for that to make sense, you do need to forget that this was the launch title, intended to hook readers.

Who, then, is The Eight Doctors for? Well, here’s a twist ending: me. Aged 12, when this was first published, I loved The Eight Doctors. In the Wilderness Years Doctor Who mostly existed as non-fiction books and videos released in a random sequence, almost as haphazard and intangible as the TARDIS itself. A book that devotes swathes of time to reciting canon was an all-I-could-eat treat for younger me, who couldn’t claim to have watched any of this when it aired and knew it only as second hand legends. (I hadn’t read that many books either, which probably helped rose-tint this particular opus.) I can only assume that other fans in that exact situation also had a good time with it, and for that at least, well done Terry — there is an audience for this. But that still leaves everyone else with a shopping list that can barely claim to have come to life where a novel should be.

4/10

Blake's 7: Series Four

Right. It's the end. Here we go...

***

1. Rescue
By Chris Boucher

So here we are again, another series having ended with a massive change to the status quo. After a death-or-glory war threatened to destroy the Federation, Series Three never quite figured out what to do next. Now Series Four finds the Liberator destroyed. Where do we go now? And can we hitch a lift?

Rescue picks up almost immediately with Avon and Dayna investigating the ship Servalan left behind. As you might have guessed, it’s booby trapped. Meanwhile the others are still escaping the underground laboratories of Terminal - hang on, if Avon and Dayna are out then what’s the hold up? - only a little too slowly. The place explodes and Cally is killed.

You’re probably imagining something exciting there. Lol, no. We hear a voice, there is a bang, and in a subsequent scene Avon confirms her death. That’s it. No send off for Jan Chappell, and no one even mourns. Look, Cally was at best a character with potential that was never fully realised - what’s the point of a psychic who can’t read minds? But she had some genuinely strong episodes last series and she was at least more interesting than Jenna, so it’s a shame to toss her away just as offhandedly. Presumably they couldn’t get the actor back so they were stuck - again. And obviously the fourth series came as a surprise to everyone, and they were a hair’s breadth from ending on Terminal, so why would all the actors be available? But knowing all that doesn’t suddenly make this satisfying.

Anyway, wouldn’t you know it, a ship arrives. And this one works. The cheery pilot (Dorian) is looking for salvage, but Avon and co are more interested in commandeering his vessel, which coincidentally has a teleport facility and lots of guns, so it would do nicely. (What a stroke of luck!) This whole sequence of events is a bit jarring. Dorian’s nice enough and he might even help them. He actually saves a few of their lives on the planet. So why all the shouting and gun-pointing? As the planet breaks up (sure, why not) the fancifully-named Scorpio departs. It’s preprogrammed to go to Dorian’s home world, which for some reason sets them all on edge. I guess they’re having a bad day?

When they arrive, Dorian and his partner Soolin are reasonable hosts, although they respond in kind to having guns pointed at them. But it seems like they might reach some kind of arrangement. To be honest, the episode starts treading water here. (Apart from some really good model work when Scorpio lands. Gerry Anderson would approve!) And then Chris Boucher remembers he’s Chris Boucher, and it all gets a bit weird.

Dorian has an evil plan, you see. He’s got this secret lair underground with a strange monster lurking in it, and when he goes down there he suddenly becomes really old. (Only not every time, for some reason.) And this Dorian guy, yeah, catchy name that, it turns out this Dorian looks younger than he is. Eh? Do-ri-an? Nudge nudge? And eventually he tries to turn Avon, Tarrant, Dayna and even Soolin into a gestalt (see, monster) that will age instead of him, and absorb his... sins, I guess.

Well, it’s very original, isn’t it? Where does he get his ideas from?

It’s not like there’s anything wrong with doing a spin on Dorian Gray, but it would help if it didn’t seem completely out of left field. There’s just bugger all in the first half of the episode to tell us Dorian is anything other than a cheeky salvage guy. Why has he gone to all this trouble to round up this specific group of people? Why do I have so much trouble buying that Soolin wouldn’t have noticed anything strange going on here? And why does the episode grind to a halt the second they (easily) dispatch Dorian, pausing only for a shit joke from Vila? The whole thing feels uncomfortably like Chris Boucher wrote the crew away from Terminal and then, job done, made up the rest as he went along, hurriedly rewriting the salvage guy so he meant to pick them up all along. A horror pastiche fills the minutes as well as anything else I suppose, but this is a particularly cheap and silly one. (The monster is literally a Doctor Who Sea Devil, painted black.)

A sloppy crew reshuffle, a new ship only marginally less convenient than the Liberator, and a random B-plot from the horror bargain bin. It’s not much of a mission statement, is it? Also, you can keep the more-professional-yet-somehow-more-boring starting credits, thank you very much. And the laughable lounge music remix of the end credits. What were they thinking?

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! “Mummy, daddy, why are you crying? And where’s Cally?”

WHO’S WHO: Does the Sea Devil count?

BLAKE’S... 5. Bye, Cally.

2. Power
By Ben Steed

Shit a brick, it’s Ben Steed again. What are the odds that he’ll make it a full 50 minutes without writing women as subservient to men? He might as well be trolling us at this point, because his latest includes a literal battle of the sexes. CAN YOU GUESS WHO WINS.

Still trapped on Dorian’s planet, our heroes are frustratingly stuck on the other side of a door to their new spaceship. The door is rigged to set off a nuclear explosive within 48 hours unless it’s unlocked properly - and the person with the combination died in the last episode. Meanwhile, Avon has taken a stroll on the planet to get some crystals (he’s always after crystals or rocks - dude missed his calling as a mineralogist), and he runs into a tribe of Saxon-type men, because god forbid anyone living on another planet ever look like they live on another planet. To be fair though, it’s later established that they were an advanced society who reset to barbarism after of a war. (This is such a well-worn Doctor Who trope that I barely noticed the story doesn’t actually do anything with it.)

Somehow a conflict has arisen between two tribes that are, wait for it, men vs women. And the women are dying out. The female “Seskas” at least have telekinesis on their side, mainly thanks to Dorian whose illustrious back story continues to be rewritten and embellished by the minute. The leader of the male “Hommiks” is suitably unpleasant, but he also gets some fun dialogue (when he fails to remember some traditional fighting talk) and is apparently in love with his wife - no, really, they get on and everything, he just pretends to knock her about. She refuses to be a Seska and is sad when a fight to the death ends his life. Meanwhile another Seska, Pella, wants the Scorpio for herself. She has a few run-ins with Avon, who at one point reminds her that men are always stronger than women (which he concedes isn’t exactly fair) and in the end, successfully kills her in a duel. Like Doctor Who at the end of an inevitable massacre, he muses that battles of the sexes never end well.

Charitable hat on: for all that this one goes on and on about sex (so to speak), and it does so even more than Ben Steed’s other episodes, it is probably the least offensive about it. Avon’s “Men Are Better” line can fuck off to infinity, of course, it doesn’t really suit that cold but ultimately quite objective character, but elsewhere the story doesn’t actively demoralise women. The leader of the Hommiks is more actually-a-nice-guy than rapist-you-can’t-help-but-like. The episode doesn’t approve of the fighting either.

But, but, but - why the fighting in the first place? Yes, the leader of the Hommiks and his wife Nina were apparently happy, but it’s a fair assumption that isn’t the same deal the rest of the Seskas were looking at. These are barbarians. Is Avon’s point, in the end, that we shouldn’t fight or that women shouldn’t fight?

It would be great, wouldn’t it, if after several episodes of snarling misogyny Ben Steed turned out to be trying, albeit cack-handedly, to demonise this stuff. But he’s the one that keeps going back to it, in a series that otherwise includes women in its main cast, including one as the ruler of the galaxy. Sorry, but I’ll need more evidence than this to think he’s finally in therapy. Besides, if you endlessly write the same misogynist conflict, the law of averages may eventually make it look like you meant well.

After all that stuff with the two tribes, whatever that meant, and a showdown with Pella, Avon finally has the Scorpio. (Or is it just “Scorpio”? That sounds worse, so probably yeah.) It has a fancy teleporter, which looks better than the last one, and the computer is less pompous than Zen. (Avon seems happy about this, but Orac is the insufferable one and he’s still around.) I’ve no idea what Avon or the rest of them want to achieve using the Scorpio, but then why change the habit of a lifetime? All I can hope for are some decent episodes.

Just before the ghastly end credits (I’ll try to stop mentioning it but jesus, it sounds like a game show now), Soolin pops up from wherever she was hiding to join the crew. I suppose it would have been too much to hope for Mr Definitely A Secret Feminist to actually do something to establish her character. Imagine my surprise that in the world of Ben Steed, this apparently formidable lady gunslinger spends the whole thing in a cupboard.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! The usual clumsy fight choreography means the fights-to-the-death wouldn’t upset a toddler. A man gets randomly show in the chest with a crossbow, I guess.

WHO’S WHO: Dicken Ashworth, high mucky-muck of the Hommicks, would meet Paul Darrow again in a worse place than a fight to the death: he was in Timelash. Also you can spot Pat Gorman here under a fake beard and wig.

BLAKE’S... 7 again, with Soolin and Slave.

3. Traitor
By Robert Holmes

Why, it’s Robert Hoooolmes! Who better to help Blake’s 7 settle (once again) into a new normal. The gang have a spaceship (it’s definitely just “Scorpio”, no “the”), so now what?

Avon notices that the Federation seems to be making great strides at the old conquering lark, and investigates the planet Helotrix. A rebel force is being slowly whittled away by a group of obsequious, evilly-dressed guys who calmly eat dinner and play chess (ooh, clever) whilst having them dispatched. They’re good at “altering” people, aka brainwashing. We spend a fair bit of time with this lot and the rebels. Some of it’s quite pleasant - the casual dinner banter of villains, the for once very impressive “alien” location - but sorry to say, it gets dull fast. The rebels talk about rebel stuff. The baddies plan baddie stuff. What’s new? Why should we specifically care about this conflict, or these people?

Add to this, the plot seems to rumble along quite happily without the Liberator. (Oops, force of habit. But on that subject, isn’t Scorpio cramped and boring to look at?) Avon and co. evade some spaceships we don’t see. Tarrant and Dayna go to the surface to give the rebels a hand. They meet, among others, a terminally ill guy who plans to blow up his mysterious boss at the first opportunity. More or less interesting I guess, but again it doesn’t need the regulars in order to happen, so um. Good luck with that mate?

Turns out his boss is Servalan, who isn’t dead and oh who even cares how she got out of that one? After learning about the Federation’s use of drugs to conquer planets (I missed how that works, possibly dozed off) and getting a sample of an antidote, our heroes bugger off to fight Servalan another day. Fin.

So. This new normal. It’s quite a lot like the old one, isn’t it? Only this time we forget to give the gang anything to do that isn’t already happening without them. There’s scarcely any trademark Robert Holmes wit, besides Avon firing a broadside at Blake’s belief in people. It’s just a boring bunch of stuff with some ideas just sitting there. All a bit shit so far, isn’t it?

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Nah, they’re fine.

WHO’S WHO: Slimy but civilised Christopher Neame was in that unfinished story we can’t stop finishing, Shada. George Lee had minor roles in two Pertwee stories. David Quilter was in New Who - The Unicorn & The Wasp, as a butler - if that counts?

4. Stardrive
By Jim Follett

Four episodes in, it’s dawning on Avon that his new ship isn’t quite as good as the old one. 

Scorpio needs fuel. In order to sneak past some Federation patrols to a fuel source Avon tries hitching a ride on an asteroid. I think it’s a a neat idea (The Empire Strikes Back used it) but everyone yells at him that it’s a terrible idea actually, and then they damage the ship in the attempt. Whoops.

Temporarily crippled, Scorpio is almost blown up by some Federation raiders, except a mysterious something shoots them first. After wasting their time asking Orac what it was (he insists they figure it out for themselves - chuck him in a bin already), they realise it was an incredibly fast ship with an engine they could make use of. The only trouble is, it’s being flown by Space Rats: thrill junkies with punk hairdos who inexplicably strike terror into everyone they meet. (Is it the hair?) Avon sets a course for the planet where these engines are tested, hoping to steal parts.

That’s pretty much it for plot. The Space Rats don’t make loads of sense as test pilots - yes they’re good at flying fast ships, but as everyone keeps saying, they are also “psychopaths”. (Not sure I agree with that, but they’re obviously dangerous.) The hair is pretty impressive. So much that it’s a bit surprising that their leader Atlan needs to be so over the top - he’s achieved that just by going to hair and makeup!

Dr Plaxton is the brains behind the engines and has an uneasy working relationship with them. When Avon and co storm the place, which involves a very poorly directed scene where Atlan uses Soolin to escape and for some reason no one shoots him, Plaxton agrees to go with them. More fool her: after plugging in the new drive Avon deliberately activates it while she’s still inside. Turns out she was aiming the word “psychopath” in the wrong direction.

It’s one of those episodes where all I can do is summarise the plot. Is any of it interesting? Not massively: there’s a bit where Dayna tries to pretend she and Vila know Dr Plaxton to avoid getting killed, and this confusingly works even though Plaxton’s adamant she doesn’t know them. There’s a sort of car chase in (need you ask) a quarry, which looks all right. Avon’s total disregard for killing Plaxton moments after she helped them of her own volition is probably interesting, what with it being indistinguishable from something Servalan would do. I hate it, though. I’m all for making these characters anti-heroes - it is Blake’s 7 after all - but this is just a random bit of darkness and not a good look.

Um. Overall it’s fine I guess. It’s an episode where they need a new engine and then they get it. Terribly exciting.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Avon’s cruelty at the end is a bit brisk, innit.

WHO’S WHO: Dr Plaxton was in Planet Of Fire. A couple of the Space Rats have had minor Who roles.

5. Animals
By Allan Prior

Oy.

Look, I know they weren’t expecting to make a fourth series, so there’s bound to be a bit of filler until they can figure out where the story’s going. But can’t they at least make some decent episodes in the meantime? The best thing you can say about Animals is that it’s hardly the first Blake’s 7 episode where the goodies and the baddies all want something, and nobody gets it. In that way it’s... sort of?... classic Blake’s 7? But there’s no longer a “war is hell” feeling to underpin that. At this point in the series they can’t be bothered to show a society ruled by the Federation, ergo what’s being fought for, so Servalan and co. just look like random heavies whom Avon and co. randomly hate. (That’s why Avon’s recent callousness over Dr Plaxton’s death seemed so awful: if it’s not for anything, then your anti-heroes are just some other pricks.) Even in being similar to previous episodes, Animals epitomises the show’s current lack of definition.

Okay, plot time: Dayna goes to visit a scientist and ex-teacher in the hopes that his expertise will somehow be useful to the fight against the Federation. His work revolves around animals - they get the title into the script so often, there must be a bet on - which in practical terms means extras dressed like grunting, Nordic Gruffaloes. The aim is to make them immune to radiation, which will help rebuild stuff destroyed in the war. Problem being the scientist, Justin, has mutilated them for it to work. Despite killing several of them on sight, Dayna is understandably upset.

Well, at first. It’s immediately made clear that Justin - many years her senior - has a thing for Dayna, and she - despite having never mentioned him? - more or less reciprocates. The whole teacher-pupil thing is creepy and misjudged as hell, and Dayna’s affections go from “I am disgusted that he would do this to these animals” to “I love him” with unconvincing speed. I can more or less fathom Justin feeling like his ship’s come in, after all he lives on a planet with a bunch of cavemen and then Dayna shows up. But the relationship, even before you get into how inappropriate is the age gap, doesn’t convince.

And... it’s the cornerstone of the episode. Servalan (still sticking with the alias “Sleer” and wanting people dead if they recognise her, even though she has Servalan’s job and does Servalan things and looks like Servalan and everything) wants the radiation-proof animals, so she comes and kidnaps Dayna. Skipping right over the whole “you killed my father” business, which should by rights make any Dayna-Servalan scenes sparkle - oh well! - she brainwashes Dayna to “hate” Justin. This somehow translates into making her follow specific commands and betray him. Kidnapping them both then goes wrong when Avon and co. arrive and attack, and Justin is killed. The episode ends with Dayna - who 40 minutes ago was “disgusted” by his animal experimentation - cradling his corpse and woodenly mooing his name. As is typical, Avon orders a quick teleport because lol he don’t care and then that’s that. I felt nothing. I mean, well, a bit annoyed?

It’s just stupid. Adjacent to all this, Scorpio has been damaged (despite the super fast engine a woman died to activate last week - oh well!) so Avon, Vila and co. spend the episode repairing it. All of this is just irrelevant business: nothing to do with the plot. We also spend time with Servalan, trying to wheedle information on the animal experiments whilst preserving her anonymity which, I dunno, maybe you could try a different haircut or something? But it’s all filler since, once again, they’re all going home empty handed. Even Ogg, the hilariously unimaginatively named animal/caveman, dies anyway.

So. It’s shit, again. I’m getting a bit bored of this now.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! The whole business with Justin feels like an information film on inappropriate relations.

WHO’S WHO? Kevin Stoney in the house! Playing a different character to his last B7 episode - which is a bit odd as the plot goes to some lengths to avoid him seeing Servalan. William Lindsay was one of the vampires in State Of Decay. Max Harvey was in Arc Of Infinity.

6. Headhunter
By Roger Parkes

I’ve previously moaned that if this show isn’t going to have a point, it might as well put out some decent episodes. Headhunter is... sort of one of those? Self contained and of little use to the series as a whole, at least it’s fairly fun. Also a bit ridiculous.

Avon and co. are hoping to recruit Muller, a genius (yes, another one) in the field of robotics. All seems to go well, give or take knocking someone out at their lab, except there’s a mysterious box he really doesn’t want brought aboard. Tarrant insists on bringing it anyway. There is an altercation over this and Muller is apparently killed by Vila. They freeze his body on the off chance and take the box home, but going near it seems to cause problems onboard Scorpio, such as Slave getting uppity (er, perhaps I should rephrase that). Soon the ship is adrift and Avon (back at base) must intercede.

Well, it turns out that’s not Muller after all, it’s the robot Muller’s been working on. (And Vila hasn’t killed it.) Without the inhibitor built for it by Muller it will just go around controlling other machines and killing people. It really wants to combine with Orac, who is surprisingly keen to avoid killing all humans; he demands he be switched off and hidden. A run-away-from-the-killer-robot movie ensues.

This one’s all atmosphere, which helps as there’s nothing much for the characters to do. There’s Orac backing the good guys for a change, though not before a few infected moments where he pleads with them to hail their new robot masters. Soolin almost makes herself useful by carrying Orac around; at this point in the show Glynis Barber is a very likeable presence but I’ve yet to see the benefit of her character. Paul Darrow has some dramatic stares and flourishes; he almost selling a ridiculous spacesuit with sheer hammy presence. There’s some all right banter with Vila. And at the end, contrary to previous episode endings where Avon coldly dismisses someone not getting what they want or dying, he’s denied the killer robot he wanted because his gang blow it up. Serves him right.

The other thing going for Headhunter is the main idea. That box contains the robot’s inhibitor... and its head. As for the one on its neck when Tarrant picked it up, thinking it was Muller? Yeah, that was Muller’s. (The real guy is decapitated back at the base.) I’ve no idea how this works, but it’s such a grotesque image that it turns what might have been a simple rampaging robot into a bizarre identity crisis. It gives you something to think about, even if that thing is “yuck”.

It’s creepy. It’s silly. It passed an hour, I suppose.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! The headless robot looks a bit silly in some shots, and we don’t see Miller’s decapitated corpse, but the implication is there and it’s horrible.

WHO’S WHO? Lynda Bellingham plays Muller’s soon to be disappointed partner; she was the Inquisitor in Trial Of A Time Lord.

7. Assassin
By Rod Beacham

It’s another self-contained bit of business this week, with a plot that seems creakily obvious for one reason and then turns out to be thumpingly obvious for another. I... guess that’s sort of clever?

Servalan has put a hit out on our heroes: the mysterious assassin Cancer is coming for them. (That’s not a metaphor, it’s literally a person.) What to do? Avon suggests they go on the offensive and head to his last known location. Naturally this is a dismal quarry. (Do they even use different ones any more?) Avon ends up a slave, and befriends a kindly old man who says he saw the assassin’s ship take off recently. He then begs Avon to take him away.

I bet you think you’ve got the plot sussed now, don’t you? Well anyway, Nebrox and Avon make it out of there and they follow Cancer’s trail to his spaceship, which is patiently waiting for them. The assassin and a random slave woman named Piri are aboard. They quickly capture the man, and Tarrant befriends the kindly woman who begs him to take her away.

Credit where it’s due, the episode presents us with two unbelievably suspicious randomers who might be the killer. Neither of them really makes sense as anything else, which helps keep us in suspense, albeit by shortchanging both of them as characters. It then just becomes a waiting game until one of them shows their hand. Depressingly this doesn’t take long, when sommmmeone kills Nebrox.

At this point Avon, Tarrant and Soolin (still aboard Cancer’s ship for some reason) still think that bloke they captured is the killer, and now he’s loose on the ship. Tarrant is totally enamoured with the dippy, simpering Piri, because reasons, which means a lot of Steven Pacey doing his silly big-boy-voice. We also get some embarrassing commentary on female stereotypes when Soolin slaps the hysterical woman and Tarrant insists she’s “jealous”. (?) At this point you’re praying Piri’s the killer just so all that “I’m just a poor stupid girl” stuff can go in the bin where it belongs.

Avon makes the point that splitting up in a stranger’s ship would be just what they wanted, but for some reason they do it anyway. And before you know it we’re in the final act: Avon is tied to a slab and Piri has gone from unconvincingly half-witted girl to unconvincingly smug, but convincingly irritating killer. (It is not, all things considered, one for Caroline Holdaway’s demo reel.) She mocks him for being taken in by her which, well, yeah, it is rather out of character now that you mention it. When the hell was Avon ever swayed by a blubbering girl? Or a kindly old man, for that matter. He’s a total bastard! Three episodes ago he joked when a female scientist died after he turned the engines on too soon. The whole episode is a bit, really?!, as far as Avon is concerned.

Naturally Avon and co. get out of it, and Cancer’s apt choice of weapon - a poisonous artificial crab-that-is-really-more-of-a-spider, which is exactly as cumbersome and silly as it sounds - ends up killing her. We may at least be spared Servalan for an episode or two, seeing as she thinks they all died when her men blew up Cancer’s ship. The director spares us the terrible confusion of seeing how they got out of it without her noticing.

It’s cookie cutter stuff, and it could take place at any point in the series. (Apart from a bit where Dayna nearly kills Servalan because of their shared history. Naturally she ballses it up and then sulks about it.) Assassin does manage to wrong foot the viewer by playing an obvious trick twice. And on the plus side, someone has given the editors a tool for fades and wipes, which they overuse with heroic aplomb. Really though, this is dross.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! A fake crab explodes at the end.

WHO’S WHO? Suspiciously helpful old person Richard Hurndall doubled for William Hartnell in The Five Doctors. Also Adam Blackwood is in this - I didn’t spot him - later known for being one of a number of rather odd subterranean goose-fanatics in The Trial Of A Timelord.

8. Games
By Bill Lyons

In Games, Avon and co. set their sights on some feldon crystals - a hugely powerful resource used by the Federation. Their aim is probably to inconvenience the Federation in some way, which makes a nice change from aimlessly farting around from quarry to quarry. The man controlling the supply is Belkov, and he is well aware of how much power he wields. Over the course of the episode he plays Avon and - of course, sigh - Servalan for chumps as he tries to get away from the now barren planet with his life. (Yes, the planet is a quarry.)

Stratford Johns plays Belkov, and it’s a great performance. Most of his scenes are with his computer, Gambit, who as the title suggests is largely built to play games. By the end of the episode a believable and complicated relationship exists between him and his computer. They’re the best scenes, surprisingly warm and funny.

As for the rest of it? Well, three guesses whether Avon gets his hands on any crystals. Ditto Servalan. But Vila has lots of fun moments, as the plot leans towards theft. Soolin gets to do something useful (win a “game” where you have to outshoot a mirror image of yourself) as does Tarrant (pilot a fancy flight simulator), but that’s all for nothing as there aren’t any crystals. Or maybe there are. The episode ends in a welter of technobabble about negatives, positives and black holes as Belkov’s ship is destroyed. Probably.

It’s definitely an entertaining episode, and I can count those on one hand at the moment. A fantastic guest performance here, and some okay ideas. Yay. As for the rest of it, prepare yourself for yet another quarry and another nil-nil draw.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Some Federation guards get killed by rather odd triangle knives. You see a bit of blood and everything!

WHO’S WHO? David Neal played the President in The Caves Of Androzani. Stratford Johns was a big frog in Four To Doomsday.

9. Sand
By Tanith Lee

The last episode by Tanith Lee involved dream sequences, possession and formless psychic monsters, so you’d be forgiven for expecting Sand to be a weird one. And it is, but perhaps not for the same reasons.

Servalan (oh, I’m surprised to see her here!) is off to investigate a planet for some reason. It went quiet five years ago; we can assume it has something of value to the Federation. Avon gets wind that a Federation ship is on its way to a place (incredibly he does not assume Servalan is aboard) and, on the off chance there’ll be something good there, he suggests they go as well. We’re scraping the barrel a bit now, aren’t we, for any sort of mission with these guys. Is this their life: hack Federation radio chatter and try to get dibs on any loot? Are they freedom fighters, pirates, or just terminally bored?

Anyway, the planet - not a quarry, but such cheap sets you’ll wish it was - is home to a lot of green sand. Servalan and a few men go looking for survivors, but something quickly kills them, or drives them mad. Tarrant teleports down with Dayna, who gets wounded and sent back up. Soon it’s just him and Servalan in an empty base. All around them there is stormy weather and shifting sands. (It’s at this point I thought “How can there be a storm if there are no clouds,” because there’s just a cheap backdrop of stars, fnar fnar. But the episode actually acknowledges this later on: those aren’t actually storms.)

We get a bit of character development for Servalan here, as she reveals she came here to check on an old lover. Also she’s been killing anyone who knows she’s Servalan, which seems like a waste of effort to me. (She was the President of the Federation. I think there might have been pictures.) Tarrant doesn’t grow much here - it seems there’s nothing to learn - but he does display a sudden Doctor Who-ish knack for solving mysteries. He figures out the sand has been killing people (don’t get smug, people-who-read-episode-titles), it uses the bodies as a well-preserved food source, and it always leaves a man and a woman alive to make more food supplies. I.e., all right you and you, get shagging.

I think it would be fair to say this is a bit of a reach, no? But Avon, more consistently a smarty pants, figures this out as well, so I guess it must be true. Whether because Tarrant is moved by Servalan’s tears, or whether he is certain the sand will kill him if he doesn’t get his end away right now, they pretty clearly do the deed. And look, this whole thing just raises questions, doesn’t it? How much does sand know about human mating? Could you both just wriggle about for a few minutes, say “that was sure some top sex work there, compadre” and be left in peace?

By this point Avon has also figured out / guessed and miraculously been correct that rain will kill the sand, and piloting Scorpio in a certain way will generate some. So, too late to prevent some Tarrant-Servalan boot knocking, he puts a brief stop to the sand’s saucy machinations, scoops up Tarrant and they’re off to their next tenuously Federation-aimed botherance.

In some ways all this isn’t as weird as the “Cally psychic possession” episode, but then again, the life cycle of an alien sand that basically exists to enable the plot of a sci-fi porno is not weirdness to be sniffed at. For good measure though, Soolin (of all characters!) randomly brings up the earlier episode, ‘cos guess who wrote that.

Academically interesting (if unlikely) plot bits, a good performance from Jacqueline Pearce, and an unfortunate pairing with Tarrant and his hair/teeth/lack of interesting qualities. Memorably weird counts for something at this point.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Sexxxx. (Off screen.)

WHO’S WHO? Stephen Yardley was a Muto in Genesis Of The Daleks, and an avid TV watcher in Vengeance On Varos. Daniel Hill was in Shada, but no one would see it until it came out on video a decade later. Peter Craze was Michael Craze - Ben’s brother, and in several stories. Jonathan David was in Attack Of The Cybermen.

10. Gold
By Colin Davis

Good one, good one, sound the good episode klaxon!

In Gold, Avon sets his sights on a caper that might actually work. A space cruise ship is transporting molecularly altered gold along with its passengers. With the help of his old friend Keiller (Roy Kinnear out of Willy Wonka) they will stop it being altered at the start of its journey, then steal it on the cruise ship. (All of which probably blah-blah-something-hurt-the-Federation-somehow.) Apart from an odd bit in the middle where Avon and Soolin fake their deaths to allay suspicion, it goes swimmingly - although they have to alter the plan on the hoof when they can’t turn the gold into back its regular state after all, so now they’ll have to steal it, then sell it.

Soon we’re on the cruise ship with Tarrant and Dayna posing as guests, Avon and Keiller doing the actual stealing. The heist bit is surprisingly tense, even down to the low-key music. Like all good heists it nearly all goes wrong at the end, and there’s a genuinely exciting moment where Avon is about to get blasted into space unless Vila teleports him in time.

It’s weird - I can’t fault any of this. The heist plot is very neatly worked out; the cruise ship is draped in enough muzak that we buy a few small sets as the whole thing; Roy Kinnear enlivens every scene, though we can’t help assuming he’ll try to betray them, since everybody does. You reach a point with the episode where you think, what can go wrong now?

By a strange coincidence this is also the point where you think Why Hasn’t Servalan Shown Up Yet, and sure enough these two are linked. To everyone but Avon’s UTTER SHOCK (for some reason) she is indeed the buyer they are going to meet. But she pays up - flirting outrageously with Avon, probably feeling embarrassed about her trip to Tarrant Land - and the crew get away with the money. Only for it to turn out that thanks to bad timing, their money is worthless and Servalan has come out on top. Tarrant puts this to Avon and he just laughs, presumably at Servalan’s gall.

It’s definitely annoying to once again have the crew attempt something that turns out to be a waste of time, and it’s a waste of words to go on about how none of them would have done all this if they knew Servalan was involved - she’s in it every week, Sherlocks, getting in each other’s business is all any of you do. But for once these are just niggles: Gold is a clever episode and it goes off almost without a hitch. Happy day!

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Keiller shoots an unarmed doctor who was quite nice.

WHO’S WHO? Norman Hartley (in here somewhere) was a Viking in The Time Meddler and a UNIT soldier in The Invasion.

11. Orbit
By Robert Holmes

This week, an old acquaintance of Avon’s has a proposition for him, but it turns out he’s working for Servalan and our heroes leave empty handed. Golly, where have I heard that before? Could it be... the previous episode? 

And yet, Orbit isn’t anything like Gold. In place of a cash heist we have a death ray being offered up in exchange for Orac. Instead of Roy Kinnear’s cheery blimp we have Corrie’s John Savident as Egrorian, an obsequious scientist, and because it’s a Robert Holmes script he’s part of a bickering double act, with his unfortunate 28-year-old servant Pinder having aged 50 years by accident. The two are tragic and very funny to behold.

Avon is no fool - I mean it’s about time he started remembering the plots week to week - so he finds a clever way to fake handing over Orac. Then it’s just a matter of escaping, but the small moon shuttle they’re using has been tampered with, and Egrorian is just waiting for them to crash so he can scoop up Orac and the death ray. It becomes a race against time to shift enough weight to break orbit and, unfortunately for Vila, it does occur to Avon that one less human body would do it. The moment where he weighs it up and then decides is a wordless triumph for Paul Darrow.

That sequence is probably everyone’s favourite bit, horrible as it is. Avon’s eerie “please come and help me” entreaties to a hiding, already crying Vila; it’ll be difficult to forget. It’s surprising to be reminded that these characters have enough grey areas for this to be plausible. At the last moment Avon thinks of something else and they both survive, but Vila has every reason never to be in a room with him again.

Series D doesn’t have a lot going for it but guest casting is a real strength: John Savident is fabulous here, particularly with Robert Holmes writing it. We don’t get much character development any more, but one scene with Avon and Vila does wonders. Yes, it’s getting ridiculously tedious having Servalan turn up every week, even more so never letting Avon achieve anything (he has to jettison the death ray), but apart from that Orbit handles its ingredients about as brilliantly as it could do.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Poor Pinder realises his friend isn’t looking out for him and irradiates the place, ageing them both to death.

WHO’S WHO? John Savident was in a previous Blake’s 7 episode (Trial, different character) but would also pop in Doctor Who as a Tudor who is promptly shot with lasers. (The Visitation.)

12. Warlord

By Simon Masters

Damn it. For a minute there it looks like Warlord will be the shot in the arm this series needs, but it’s not to be.

Avon has gathered a bunch of (you guessed it) warlords to form an alliance against the Federation. The plan is to counteract the drug they use to control people. (Hey, remember when there were actual people in this?) And heck, what a great idea! Why didn’t he think of it sooner? The worst of the new recruits, Zukan, is running late but then he too pledges his support. (There is now a little voice at the back of your head expressing caution and oh, I don’t know what to tell you.)

Without Zukan’s knowledge his daughter Zeeona is helping to unload the anti-drugs. She has a history with Tarrant, however, and when Zukan finds out she’s there he orders her sent home. For whatever reason, Soolin discretely sends her back to the base so the audience can get some more of that Tarrant love stuff they’ve all been craving. (Right? Someone out there must have the hots for this willowy, plummy-voiced tit, or why do they keep going back to this?) Apart from this little Romeo and Juliet-themed snag, it’s all power to the alliance against the Federation, yes? Guys, are we doing this?

I mean you know what’s coming, don’t you? What happened the last two episodes in a row? What happened two episodes before that? Zukan (please no) is working with (do we have to) (last chance) (oh come on) goddamn mother effing Servalan, BECAUSE OF COURSE HE IS. It’s genuinely baffling how she gets anything done whilst killing off Avon and chums occupies so much of her time, but that’s not as baffling as Avon and co failing to expect the unexpected in high heels and a fancy dress in every episode. Scooby Doo has more chance of encountering a legit ghost than they do of avoiding her for a single week.

Anyway. (For fuck’s sake.) Zukan has laid a trap to kill off our heroes, with a separate one waiting on his homeworld for Avon and (he thinks) Zeeona (but actually it’s Soolin). The trap is sprung, Xenon Base is heavily damaged and running out of air, and Orac is seemingly destroyed, but I doubt that somehow. Zeeona tries to tell Zukan she’s still there, but it’s too late and he can’t bring himself to believe it. Servalan doesn’t care either way and has Zukan killed. (There’s a nifty bit where he and his lieutenant find her bomb; he asks the guy to disconnect it, then closes the airlock and fires man and bomb into space. What a bastard! But his ship gets ruined anyway.)

Back at base, things are looking up air supply wise but Zeeona must neutralise an airborne contaminant she knows Zukan is responsible for. She succeeds but dies in the attempt. Tarrant finds her and woe is the viewer, presumably. Except who the hell was Zeeona anyway, and who’s watching Blake’s 7 in the hopes of that foppish git getting his end away again?

Much like the mooted (but now presumably moot) Alliance, Servalan attacking their actual base seems like progress for what we can laughingly call the ongoing story. It’s not clear if they have to abandon it now - did Zukan tell her where it was? - but I’ve been wondering for a while why she didn’t try that. Nevertheless, they’re still pulling this Uneasy Ally Betrays Them To Servalan shit yet again, and any gains made by finally remembering that the point of the show was to crush the Federation are reduced by shrinking the stakes to just one evil cow and a gang of overly trusting jerks who so far have lucked out and not died. So we’re one step forward, two steps back, all for a Romeo and Juliet bit that wouldn’t impress a hard up Mills & Boon fan. But hey, maybe the finale will rescue it. Please?

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Zukan executing his lieutenant is pretty grim.

WHO’S WHO? Roy Boyd (Zukon) was in The Hand Of Fear. Rick James - somewhat infamously - was in The Mutants.

13. Blake
By Chris Boucher

Well then.

It’s a peculiar sensation, knowing roughly what’s going to happen but not knowing any specifics. It’s almost 40 years since this was transmitted, so I know Blake dies. I know it looks like he’s betrayed them. I know it’s probably the end for everybody. In a way, it’s like the episode knows I know that stuff, and dangles the possible death of every character in front of us throughout. But people must have known this was the final end, so this may have been true to an extent. We know all bets are off.

Abandoning Xenon base just in case the Federation got its location in the last episode, Avon plays his last card: get Blake to be a figurehead once more, and unite people against the Federation. Only trouble is, Blake was last seen on Gauda Prime, a deadly, lawless dump. And before they can land they’re attacked. Scorpio crashes. Everyone but Tarrant gets away; he’s wounded, Slave is broken beyond repair. The rest of them search for Blake. The man himself is a bounty hunter these days, looking the worse for wear. He seems to have abandoned his moral compass, although he also seems moved when he mentions that Jenna died evading capture.

Gauda Prime is a forest, not a quarry - truly, it must be a special occasion. The location footage is beautiful, and Scorpio’s crash is about as well done as you could hope from this budget in 1981. But the real kicker is What The Hell Is Going On With Blake. We know he’s been brainwashed before, maybe something like that happened again? He’s certainly no friend to his latest bounty, a woman named Arlen, who he shoots in the leg.

Tarrant survives the crash and soon runs into Blake, though neither of them shares their name at first. He’s brought back to the base where he realises he’s the bounty. (It’s tempting to wonder what else he thought was going on there.) Blake regales his boss with the high reward for Tarrant and his friends, and Tarrant flees. But then we find out it was all an act, and Blake was “testing” him, as he does all new recruits. He’s still the same guy after all, fighting the Federation. He’s just added mind games. Arlen, is seems, was won over in the end.

You know that TV trope where characters just don’t talk to each other in plain English, they make assumptions, and that’s how you get more plot? Get ready for a massive dose of that. Avon’s gang reunite - after he pointedly didn’t tell them whether Tarrant survived, himself believing he’d died - and Tarrant breaks what he thinks is the news about Blake. Avon asks if it’s true and I guess Blake isn’t clear enough, so he shoots him. A lot. And bloodily. Arlen reveals she was a Federation plant all along, but then she’s killed; Federation guards arrive and zap everyone but Avon. It ends in an infamous standoff, with weapons fire over the credits. Fin.

It’s hard to imagine a more memorable last scene for this show, and for a series that routinely ends its episodes on crap “now everyone laughs” bits, that’s a godsend. Admittedly it could have been executed better: everyone but Blake gets shot by invisible rounds, so they all just flail about in slow motion. (Apparently this was to make it easier to bring people back in a potential Series 5, but come on, that would feel like a cheat.)

What does all this say about the characters? Blake fought the good fight, but he badly miscalculated what might happen if his “tests” went wrong. Arrogant to the last. Avon should have just listened, but he seemed a little too trigger-happy when given the slightest excuse to off Blake at last. Perhaps their rivalry triumphed over his brain after all. As horrible as the whole thing is, it rings true.

The rebellion in all likelihood dies right here because of these flawed men and this failed bit of communication. And thrillingly, Servalan wasn’t even there, as if she finally decided she had better things to do. The whole thing is like a tragic shift in perspective, where we realise how prone to error and hopeless the fight ultimately was. It’s incredible television, but they should have called it Bleak.

TL;DR: Way to go, Tarrant.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Blake’s death. Blood and guts galore!

WHO’S WHO? Blake’s boss is David Collings, also seen in The Robots Of Death.

BLAKE’S... 1. Orac is the last man standing, unless you think Avon makes it.

Blake's 7: Series Three

“...FIRE!” Against all odds, Series Two proved a tough act to follow. And, well, Series Three never quite figures out what to do next. Prepare for major and abrupt cast changes and some of the very best (and absolute worst) episodes so far, as they give it a damn good try anyway...

1. Aftermath
by Terry Nation

All change!

We join the battle of Star One already in progress and, oh dear. Say hello to some familiar model shots (that don’t even  match the alien ships we saw last time), all desperately cut together to look a bit more exciting but not, alas, any more expensive. All is not well on the Liberator: destruction seems possible so Vila, Avon and Cally head for the escape pods. Blake and Jenna don’t want to abandon ship but eventually they do the same - entirely off-screen. 

Amazingly this is Jenna’s exit from the show. (We’ll see Blake again. Rather infamously.) And can I just say - ouch? I never really liked Jenna, but that’s largely down to her having nothing to do. Sally Knyvette was mostly required to moon at Blake. Wikipedia says she “often maintains her opinions stubbornly” which, whoa, unforgettable stuff, huh. She at least deserved a heroic death.

Anyway, Avon quickly fills the heroic gap at the centre of the episode, as he crashes on a planet with a nice seaside (ooh!), populated, need you ask, by Viking knock-offs. He is saved from execution by Dayna, a forthright young woman with a bow and arrow who obviously will improve the female representation on the Liberator. Strangely Servalan is also here - explained as showing up to claim victory then oops, getting shot down - but it’s worth it for the power play through the rest of the episode as she tries to make inroads with Avon. Darrow and Pearce sparkle in a way you just wouldn’t get with Blake or (hahaha) Travis. They are just as likely to snog as shoot each other. Interesting. With the Federation apparently in tatters thanks to Star One blowing up, most bets are off, so who knows. (It’s almost a pity Blake has unceremoniously sodded off now, but then again this is what he wanted and his character’s not really built to navigate the weirdness of no-more-Federation.)

The bulk of the episode is a waiting game while the Liberator repairs itself (I forgot it did that) and Servalan bides her time to either dupe Avon or steal Orac / the Liberator. By the end of it, Dayna has good reason to want Servalan dead, Vila and Cally are still AWOL, and some random bloke who I know joins the cast shows up at the end to point a gun at Avon. But hey, the Liberator’s fine now.

Technically not a lot happens apart from taking a breather after the big fight. But the character interplay is great, and the whole thing feels like opening the windows in a stuffy room. I’m here for it. Jenna was robbed though.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! A nice young woman gets killed offscreen and strung out on planks.

WHO’S WHO: Mike Yates is in this briefly, then he gets murdered. I hope he got a nice hotel stay out of it. His mate Michael Melia once played a Tereleptil. Alan Lake, head of the who-cares Vikings, was in Underworld.

BLAKE’S... 5, now that Blake and Jenna have gone.

2. Powerplay
By Terry Nation

Now that we’ve dropped the No More Blake bomb it’s time to get the rest of the band back together. Powerplay does this as busily as possible, but it’s a still a bit of a nothing episode when you stand back from it. Albeit a fun one.

Much to Avon’s chagrin, the Liberator is held by Federation Death Troopers, apparently led by a man named Tarrant. Avon and Dayna must get back control, but someone is murdering the troopers so they might as well just wait? Vila is wounded on a lush but primitive planet and is soon picked up by 1) primitives, then 2) apparently friendly women who feed him and take him to a nice hospital. The local primitives have nothing good to say about these ladies, but maybe they just don’t know better?

Cally has been picked up by a hospital ship which also picks up (wouldn’t you know it) Servalan. Pointed awkwardness ensues. Cally then ends up at the same place as (wouldn’t you know it) Vila, and it soon transpires they need to get away fast or lose their organs. Avon finds out the murderer on his ship is Tarrant, who’s secretly one of the... er... good guys, I guess? And before long the Troopers are gone, Vila and Cally are back, and Dayna and Tarrant get Liberator friendship bracelets. Servalan is technically powerless but she still has big plans. Servalan gonna Servalan.

We’re still settling into the scrappy post-big-space-fight world, what with displaced Federation heavies, Servalan sharing a room with Cally and no unified enemy. (The series has already included so many “neutral” worlds that the planet of the organ-pinchers is neither here nor there. EDIT: And we get another neutral one next week!) That messy sense of “now what?” adds something exciting to what is otherwise just a bunch of bits. However, Tarrant is an interesting addition, in that he’s more bloodthirsty than Blake. When you add Dayna, whose first impulse is always to knock people off, there seems a definite movement towards the anti and away from the hero.

As for the regulars, Avon’s long-held plan to win the Liberator isn’t going away just because of some lousy Death Troopers, and his determination here is pretty cool. He shares some fabulously grim lines with Dayna when they find a Trooper knifed to death: “That’s a difficult way to commit suicide.” “Maybe he was cleaning it and it went off.” Otherwise Vila lives it up very briefly and adds his usual comic flavour - in some ways his character is as limited as Jenna, but it’s a fun limit. Cally tries to use her telepathy with predictably pointless results. (What good is sending Vila a message if he can’t reply? Then again she seems to “hear” Vila’s discomfort, so maybe they’ve just decided she’s proper psychic now. They might as well. EDIT: No, next week it’s one-way again. Who knows.)

By the end we have a full complement on the Liberator again. Getting there was a lot of fun, but the real proof is seeing the new stuff in action. For that, next week.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Some literal back-stabbing but it’s Pat Gorman, it’s an occupational hazard. We just miss some organ removals.

WHO’S WHO: How long have you got? Michael Sheard, here uncharacteristically violent as a Death Trooper, guest starred pretty much through Who’s entire run. (Mainly Remembrance Of The Daleks and Pyramids Of Mars.) Fellow Trooper Max Faulkner was a UNIT troop / android in The Android Invasion. Bald alien John Hollis was in a Pertwee story (The Mutants), better known as Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back. His large mate Michael Crane played a large chap in The Monster Of Peladon. Primi Townsend (one of the lovely organ-gatherers) was in The Pirate Planet. Helen Blatch, the receptionist at the organ place, was in The Deadly Assassin and The Twin Dilemma. Pat Gorman shows up again!

BLAKE’S... 7! With the newbies joining (and remember the computers are included) it’s Avon, Tarrant, Dayna, Cally, Vila, Zen and Orac.

3. Volcano
By Allan Prior

It looks like the show has settled into its new normal. And, well, it’s quite a bit like the old one.

Tarrant and Dayna have only been here five minutes and they’re already going on missions! Dayna has some friends on the planet Obsidian who might join the cause. (Also Blake may have been spotted here. Don’t get excited, Gareth Thomas left. Why tease the audience?) However it turns out the people are total pacifists, so they’re of no help to a violent rebellion. I’m not sure why Dayna didn’t know this, as it’s not a new thing.

The Federation and, need you ask, Servalan are also buzzing around the planet, hoping to snatch the Liberator. They nearly do it as well, which is an unfortunate piece of repetition as well as being embarrassing for them. Can we go at least one episode without someone battering Avon’s crew and taking their stuff? It’s also getting a bit dull going back to “everybody wants the Liberator” as a plot device. And as for Servalan’s now weekly contributions, let’s just say she works better as an occasional treat. Like going out for dessert, if the dessert immediately tried to murder you.

While we’re discussing Servalan then: if you’re going to fragment the Federation, why act like you haven’t done that? She’s still got her servants and space fleets, and she seems to be auditioning replacements for Travis. (Ben Howard plays Mori, a much more subdued sort of heavy. But he ends up falling in a volcano. Back to the drawing board!) She does eventually figure out that with Blake out of the picture she can focus on other things for a bit - which is probably giving Blake too much credit - but at this point I doubt that’ll amount to anything new. Give me grey areas! Test existing loyalties! If you insist on making her a regular, at least stop doing the same stuff.

Anyway, the people on Obsidian have an uncanny habit of repelling the Federation and everyone else. Why is that? It turns out this is because they’re all living above a nuclear bomb which they’ll detonate, killing themselves, if people won’t leave them alone. (I’ll let you guess what happens at the end.) That and an active volcano makes Obsidian a pretty strange thing to fight over. You just wouldn’t go there. Keep it, lads. To make it even less appetising, the inhabitants are all dying of radiation poisoning, presumably because of the bomb. (They are weirdly reluctant to clarify this.) To make it even strangerthe people, led by Michael Gough, are so obsessed with pacifism that they electro shock their citizens to enforce it. Yikes.

Unfortunately for all the effort Allan Prior makes here, the episode isn’t really about these guys or examining said practises. At one point Mega Pacifist Gough gets sick of his son opting for rebellion and kills him. So, pacifism shmacifism? Don’t bother thinking about it as it’s nearly time for the inevitable bomb. Ideas are just sitting here in a heap. (Remember when they thought Blake was here? Anyone?) What’s the point of any of this, if Obsidian doesn’t also have some amazing advantage that you’d want to possess? This crummy planet, the dying people with their problematic ways, the big red suicide button all amounts to zilch.

So, they go to a place, it’s pointless. Servalan tries to steal the Liberator, nearly does it, then doesn’t. Oh, and Cally uses her telepathy again - hilariously no one warned Dayna and Tarrant about it. But no one else does anything noteworthy. The newbies more or less fill the roles Blake and Jenna would have had.

It’s all very disappointing. How are we in a rut already? Dear oh dear oh dear.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Some bloodless shooty deaths, and a not-great CSO fall into a volcano. You’ll cope.

WHO’S WHO: Michael Gough was Anneke Wills’s (less than stellar) husband, and also played The Celestial Toymaker and a dodgy Time Lord in Arc Of Infinity. Ben Howard played another heavy in The Green Death.

4. Dawn Of The Gods
By James Follett

Hey, a new writer! I wonder what bountiful rewards this will - ah no, it’s shit.

For about 15 minutes it looks like Dawn Of The Gods is going to be entirely set on the Liberator. By the end, it might as well have been. The ship is... going off course, or something? Cue lots of talking until they figure out 1) they’re heading into a black hole and 2) it’s Orac’s fault for wanting to study some interesting space phenomena and didn’t tell anyone. Someone must go outside for some reason and Vila draws the short straw; lucky for him (moments away from falling to his doom) they’re actually in some kind of cave which looks uncannily like a black, featureless sound stage. He still manages to get attacked and almost killed by an angry bumper car. Sure, why not.

Mercifully it turns out there are people here, one of whom is communicating with Cally telepathically. He is the Tharn, a figure from her childhood legends whose backstory she relates at questionable length and who sounds suspiciously like Omega from Doctor Who. (Angry big shot who taught powerful aliens everything they know is stuck in an antimatter universe, you haven’t heard the last of me etc etc.) When we meet him he looks suspiciously like one of the aliens from Colony In Space, also Doctor Who. (Big whoop alien turns out to be tiny but is massive of noggin.) At the end of the episode when the Liberator escapes the Tharn gets out as well, which um... can’t imagine anyone watching was desperate to see him again, but okay?

Forgive me for skipping to the end of the plot, but there’s not much else going on. Tarrant and Avon are kidnapped by the Tharn’s lackeys, who want to slice up the Liberator for scrap and make use of Orac. (The snag with the latter is that they don’t know who or what Orac is, and even with a magic truth stick they somehow fail to determine that he is a computer.) The lackeys offer the main point of interest here, not least because one of them is dressed like a magician in a top hat, the other like a croupier/accountant. Black set, random costumes, lengthy bits on the Liberator... seriously, who blew this week’s budget? One of them is at least interesting, in that he’s trapped here and longs to get back to his family. At the end when he has the opportunity to do just that, he stays. Why? Is blowing it up really more important than getting out? (Blake and co head off to give his regards to his family, which will take some doing without a name or address.)

Tarrant and Avon don’t exactly bond. To the extent that we know him, Tarrant is a man of action; take him away from people he can kill and he’s just a skinnier, posher Blake. Avon just looks bored. Dayna has the same fish-out-of-water problem as Tarrant. It should be a good one for Cally, what with her telepathic stalker, but she spends most of their conversations lying on a big rug. (Oh, there’s the budget. That rug guy saw you coming.) She eventually gets the better of the Tharn (and frees the Liberator) by asking him nicely to switch off his defences, which he then does. See why I’m not excited for a rematch?

Vila gets the best line when he wakes up after a crash and has double vision: “I’m in hell, and it’s full of Avons.” But otherwise this is a total dud. At best, it’s a meta experiment in what it would be like to get stuck in a black hole: no passage of time and nothing happening. Bravo.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Your kids will not sit through this.

WHO’S WHO: Terry Scully, the inexplicable accountant, was in The Seeds Of Death. Marcus Powell - the Tharn - was a slave in Destiny Of The Daleks.

5. The Harvest Of Kairos
By Ben Steed

Wow, we’re on quite the streak at the moment. This is terrible.

I just don’t get it. Remember the end of Series Two, with Avon in charge and the Federation crumbling against an alien threat and the old conflicts no longer seeming important - everything at stake? What the hell happened to all of that?

Five episodes into the next series and there’s no Federation (except for the bits of the Federation we still see almost every week), Servalan’s still the bad guy (except all she ever bloody wants is the Liberator) and despite banging on for two years about wanting the Liberator when Blake was done with it, Avon seems to have quietly passed control of it over to Tarrant. As for what the crew of the Liberator are up to nowadays, answers on a postcard. Last week it was board games and a trip to a black hole. This week they take up piracy. Can a quiet night in be far off?

The Harvest Of Kairos is by another new writer, and after last week’s debacle and now this shit-astrophe I’m wondering if those are really a good idea. Ben Steed for some reason goes all in on Tarrant: Tarrant is the famed leader of the Liberator, oh yes, it’s Tarrant Servalan must contend with. And this is based on what, exactly? She has no on screen history with him. He didn’t noticeably exist half a dozen episodes ago, and has done cock all since. My only thought here is that they (or Ben Steed) felt they had to literally replace Gareth Thomas, but seeing as they’d been inadvertently building up Avon to do exactly that, and you only need to watch the end of Series 2 to see it in action... well, they’re off their heads. Tarrant is going nowhere as a character so far, whereas Paul Darrow has consistently been the most watchable thing in the show. A dim chicken could tell you which one is the lead. Avon, though, spends this episode either standing on the sidelines or nattering on about intelligent rocks. They can’t even make a thing about how he’s playing second fiddle since there’s no working relationship or even antagonism between him and Tarrant, besides one line suggesting the other guy is getting a little full of himself. The two characters just boringly co-exist.

Impressively though, the Has The Writer Even Seen This Show Award for bad characterisation doesn’tgo to either of the Liberator’s would-be captains: it’s Servalan. Her now tedious obsession with the Liberator would be bad enough, especially since the last time we saw her she said she had time to go off and do something else since Blake was no longer around. On hearing that an underling talked smack about her behind her back, she calls him up to have a look at him, and he forces a snog on her... and she likes it, spending the rest of the episode either in googly-eyed thrall of him or terrified of his swaggering machismo. What the remote fuck? This is Servalan, yes? Famously the biggest and baddest and-yes-okay-sexiest force in the Federation? I’m amazed Jacqueline Pearce made it through the episode without wandering off set in bewilderment.

As for said dazzling example of manliness, Jarvik ostensibly seems like another have-a-go Travis, except he somehow ends up calling the shots. This might not seem too surprising given that he for-real-this-time captures the Liberator, though in the first of numerous howlingly bad directing choices, we don’t see that bit. (Other dodgy moments include some confusing continuity and Jarvik’s hilarious death, when a gunshot meant for Dayna hits him by seemingly-impossible accident.) He overpowers seemingly all of Tarrant’s gang - which we should probably call them at least for this episode, as they cower helplessly at a safe distance. Has two years of fighting the Federation taught them nothing? They can’t defeat one large but not particularly muscular bloke wearing (for no apparent reason) one of Blake’s outfits? They need Tarrant-whoever-that-is to do all their fighting for them? Absolutely no one walks away from this episode a stronger character.

Anyway, in the end Avon uses one his magic rocks (I bet you thought that wasn’t going anywhere!) to trick Servalan into abandoning the Liberator, putting yet another nail in her reputation. Cheers everyone, good work. Here’s hoping she finds another hobby at last.

Anything to recommend? Well, there’s a random moon lander type thing that the gang uses to get back to the Liberator. That looks pretty good. There’s a fairly complex-looking giant insect monster that, despite their obvious efforts, looks like a bloke with a bad case of worms. That’s hilarious. And there’s a bit where Avon observes, not without reason, that his new favourite rock is smarter than any of the people he knows. But this technically innocuous episode still manages to make the Liberator’s crew look like complete idiots, Servalan a misogynist parody and the show an aimless mess. Utter, utter bollocks.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! The whole episode is harmful.

WHO’S WHO: Andrew Burt (Jarvik) was in Terminus. Frank Gatliff, one of those Federation people who totally don’t exist any more, was in The Monster Of Peladon. Andrew Gardner, here capturing the Liberator entirely offscreen, was in The Macra Terror.

6. City At The Edge Of The World
By Chris Boucher

Good episode, good episode! I can hardly believe it. We should have a parade.

Still, it gets off to a fairly annoying start, with Tarrant throwing his entirely unearned weight around by ordering Vila to go on a mission. Again I’m wondering who the hell this guy thinks he is. Is he supposed to be charming because he’s really plummy? Vila crumbles and goes down to a planet where his temporary services, in theory, will earn the Liberator some crystals they need. Naturally it’s a trap and, in theory, they were never going to get Vila back. 

There follows a lovely scene where Avon makes it very clear who’s in charge and that if Tarrant keeps acting like a spoilt birthday boy, he’s dead meat. It’s almost worth having Tarrant act like this if it means underlining the good stuff about Avon. Hopefully he’ll properly take command soon; even Dayna thinks the twatty newcomer needs putting in his place.

Meanwhile, Vila has been conscripted to break into a vault. A gang of criminals are responsible, and not the Boring Feudal Society In Space Of The Week locals after all. The gang is led by Bayban the Butcher and bloody hell, it’s Colin Baker! And bloody hell, he’s great! Not exactly a shy type when playing Doctor Who, he’s a well oiled scenery-chewing machine as the bad guy here, armed with lots of sharp dialogue. The script is quite witty in general, which makes it all the better that it’s a Vila-heavy episode.

And that’s probably the best bit. Vila’s been in the show from the start, and while his snarky comments are funny, they’re usually all he ever gets to do. In this one he doesn’t seem too fazed by his kidnap, being more interested in applying his skills to the vault. He considers the designer to be his opponent, who he also admires, and takes loads of pride in the whole thing. It’s refreshing to stop and make light of what a character is actually good at, especially one as underdeveloped as Vila.

He also noticeably strikes up a romance with one of Bayban’s crew, Kerril. There’s a definite whiff of contrivance here to move it along: Vila and Kerril eventually get through the door and find themselves in a spaceship with limited air, and decide not unreasonably to sleep together. (When Vila later notices they still have air, Kerril observes that they’ll have to die “of exhaustion” instead of suffocation!) From there - the ship having landed - they find a world and consider living on it. Yes, all of this is very sudden and rushed, and Kerril certainly trades in some of her badassery the moment she inexplicably changes out of the threatening leather into a dress. But Michael Keating and Carol Hawkins manage some real chemistry, and Boucher’s script puts them on a similar page. I buy it.

There’s not a lot else going on. Avon and co must rescue Vila (with a rightly shamed Tarrant in tow), but they get some decent lines en route. Dayna also shows off a remote control bomb on wheels, which suggests untapped talents. Eventually it turns out the people here were always intended to reach another world via this spaceship, and the only thing in the vault was a teleport pad. Boucher overthinks this a bit, because welcome to Boucher: the ship is designed to accept and then kill people smart enough to get into the vault if the ship hasn’t landed yet. Why bother? And the planet they reach is, apart from having the crystals the Liberator needs, a complete dump that looks like a cheap recreation of the moon. The handful of people would be better off where they are. But hey, it’s sort of a cool idea, particularly the vault door not being a real door at all, but a forcefield.

Like many obsessive baddies, Bayban goes back for what must be untold riches and ends up destroying himself. Pity, I’d welcome another episode with Colin. Vila loses Kerril, but she gets to go and live on “Vilaworld” (as they dub it during their brief honeymoon). Avon gets his crystals.

A slightly too complicated (but still satisfying) plot, a great villain of the week, and good material for the whole crew, especially one who’s been lacking it. City At The Edge Of The World doesn’t do much for the overall malaise of Series Three, but bloody hell, I’ll take it.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! For a criminal of such infamy, Bayban doesn’t do anything too violent.

WHO’S WHO: Colin! And Valentine Dyall, aka the Black Guardian, who inevitably uses his booming voice for the recording on the spaceship. He’s also one of the aliens.

7. Children Of Auron
By Roger Parkes

Mixed feelings about this one. There are some hugely dramatic moments in it, but good grief, do we REALLY need to see Servalan go after the Liberator again? This relentless and tedious obsession makes the galaxy, and the show’s whole remit seem roughly the size of two spaceships. Get a life, Servalan.

To be fair, she has another motive in this one: she wants to clone herself. (Probably reasoning that half a dozen Servalans might hold onto the Liberator for more than ten minutes.) To this end she tracks down the planet Auron, famed for its cloning powers, and infects an incoming pilot with an alien plague. This promptly infects the entire planet - take that, Covid! Servalan’s ship arrives to offer miraculous (but limited) aid, and the clones are her price. It’s a decent scheme, but I’m surprised she bothered with the subterfuge. She’s mean enough to just demand the clones and withhold any help until she gets them.

Meanwhile one of the clone scientists is Cally’s twin Zelda, who summons her help. (This cuts off a weirdly specific plot where Avon wants to go to Earth and take revenge for Anna Grant, the girl we found out about in Series Two. Why do that all of a sudden? Oh well, maybe next week.) The Liberator arrives and weirdly doesn’t notice Servalan’s ship. Zen and/or Orac must be slacking, but to make up for it they easily (off-screen) come up with a cure for the plague. That’s one of those throwaway bits that makes me wonder if Orac could be put to grander use than the show’s random attack missions.

What follows is a fairly action-y runaround where Servalan wants to baggsey the Liberator, almost dies it (again), takes hostages, loses them, and ends up firing on the planet hoping to kill the crew once and for all. She’s convinced by a guard to blow up the cloning chamber and her progeny, after he tells her another guard swapped out the DNA for his own. (He’s lying to spite the other guy, who passed him over for promotion.) When the place blows, she feels the death of the foetuses - I guess they were born psychic? - and promptly kills both guards on the spot. It’s a genuinely horrifying moment. I almost hope it informs her character going forward, but it probably won’t.

Speaking of psychic links, more or less the same thing happens to Cally after Zelda refuses to teleport up, so she can stabilise the clone babies. (Admirable but stupid, given the whole reason they’re evacuating is that Servalan is destroying the place.) Cally feels Zelda’s death, and it’s a chilling moment for the character we know, but the episode doesn’t do anything to establish Zelda, who seems a bit one-note. It also doesn’t back-fill Cally as a character all that much. We learn a few facts, but it’s not like City At The Edge Of The World where the story was tailored to Vila. Cally has a psychic conversation for once, but other than that and Zelda’s death, it’s business as usual.

After all that horror, the episode ends with that old TV traditions of ending on a joke to defuse the tension. This would be horribly inappropriate even if it wasn’t badly done, but the thing Avon says to trigger it isn’t especially funny. It’s an amazingly bad ending.

On the whole, it left me a bit cold. I suspect it’s one of those episodes people hold up solely for a few good bits.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Plague boils and psychic deaths are pretty nasty indeed.

WHO’S WHO: The doomed pilot is Michael son-of-Patrick Troughton, absolutely wasted here. Head of Auron, Ronald Leigh-Hunt was in The Seeds Of Death and Revenge Of The Cybermen. Servalan’s right-hand-man-of-the-week Rio Fanning was in Horror Of Fang Rock.

8. Rumours Of Death
By Chris Boucher

It’s all kicking off here! We start partway through the action, a trick that has enhanced a fair few Doctor Who stories: Avon has been captured and is visited by Shrinker, the man who tortured Anna Grant to death. Only, it’s a trap! Tarrant and Dayna arrive and now Shrinker is theirs. Avon plans to exact information, then revenge.

Meanwhile on Earth, revolution is proceeding independently of the Liberator.  Sula, a high-ranking official in the Federation, turns on her husband and leads some rebels in official garb to hunt for Servalan. Soon Avon has Shrinker alone, and he’s adamant he never met Anna Grant. Avon gets the name of someone responsible - Bartholomew - and leaves Shrinker to starve to death or shoot himself in a cave. Well, no one ever accused Avon of being sentimental.

By now the viewer will have noticed (thanks to flashbacks) that Sula and Anna are the same. I slightly wish they hadn’t done that, as it does suggest where the plot is going. But anyway, Sula/Anna captures Servalan. Seriously, these guys are running rings around Blake and co. They could teach this stuff.

Avon confronts Servalan demanding to know who Bartholomew is, and soon finds out: it was Anna all along, using Avon to keep her political aims a secret. (I think? I’m a little hazy to be honest.) Inevitably, he shoots her. He escapes a presumably broken man.

Heavy, isn’t it? And not just for Avon: Servalan has a pretty rough time of it, somehow bonding with Avon during their well written and intense scenes in the cellar. He lets her go and she tries to kill him anyway, but you sense they enjoy circling each other too much to ever go through with it.

It’s one of Chris Boucher’s best scripts, really highlighting the grey areas of this world. There are two Federation men observing a lot of the action, bickering like a Robert Holmes double act, and after we grow to like them they’re shot. The rebels dress like Federation men. Sula/Anna, ostensibly a bigger hero than Blake, betrayed her lover, then her Federation husband, then Avon again. Avon and co inadvertently leave Servalan back in charge, despite the rebellion being in the black for once. Even Shrinker has a history of swapping sides. This kind of stuff is what makes the show interesting, and I wish there was more of it.

It’s satisfying to pick up on a thread established in the last series; character development for Avon is always a gift and Paul Darrow is predictably great with it. There’s not a lot else to say really. It’s strong stuff. Poor Avon.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Servalan’s bruised and bartered face at the end is pretty grim.

WHO’S WHO: David Haig, looking fluffy and cherubic here, is best known for The Thin Blue Line and The Thick Of It. He was also in The Leisure Hive. Avon’s nemesis, John Bryans, was in The Creature From The Pit. Donald Douglas was in The Sontaran Experiment. Philip Bloomfield was in The Keeper Of Traken.

9. Sarcophagus
By Tanith Lee

Female writer alert! And Sarcophagus is a fittingly memorable one.

In the first place, it’s bloody weird. We begin with a long-ish, dream sequence-ish funeral procession where aliens in a room use various psi-powers...ish... stuff. Look, there’s a scene, okay. Moving on, the Liberator finds another ship in space and it’s calling to Cally. She’s still reeling from the loss of her home world and, unspoken though it is here, her sister. Avon - who went through his own loss with Anna - seems closer to her now. An investigative mission is cut short when the ship threatens to explode, and Cally only just pulls Avon and Vila out in time, having salvaged a piece of equipment first. The object is inevitably a source of trouble; Cally soon finds herself in a coma and a spectre that looks like her haunts and attacks the crew.

Much of this cuts between the crew as normal and them dressed in mourners’ robes back on the alien ship. At one point there’s a musical interlude where Dayna sings a song - though she’s off screen at the time so it’s hard to know if it’s diegetic. Much of what happens in Sarcophagus is possibly not real. Rather than being infuriating, this is spooky, particularly as the Liberator malfunctions and the always steadfast Zen starts talking funny. It’s amazing how much atmosphere you can get from just dimming the lights.

It all comes down to Avon and not-Cally, a being the drains life force and takes things over, but hasn’t reckoned on its link with Cally. The being can’t bring itself to kill Avon; shippers can no doubt fill in the blanks. He goes in for a kiss in order to prise off a ring Cally took from the ship, which is its source of power. Later, after the broken creature fades away rather sadly, Avon and Cally share some significant looks. Paul Darrow and Jan Chappell are incredible here. Pretty much off their backs, it’s beginning to feel like Series Three is actually going somewhere.

There are moments when it threatens to get too weird or silly, but Sarcophagus keeps it in check. Besides, Blake’s 7 should be allowed a little inexplicability now and again, and certainly some unspoken character building. And we get some that’s spoken, as they finally stop arsing about and canonise the idea that Cally is a full psychic... now and again. Also, more importantly, Avon and Tarrant finally discuss the elephant in the room, which is who really runs the ship. I wonder if Tarrant knows that nobody watching the show has any doubts.

Great stuff, anyway. Come again Tanith Lee.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! There are some mouldy skeleton.

WHO’S WHO: Val Clover, one of the weird alien mourners at the start, was in Full Circle.

10. Ultraworld
By Trevor Hoyle

Meh. Just some space shit innit.

After really enjoying City At The Edge Of The World and Sarcophagus, it seems hypocritical to complain that an episode is self-contained and has nothing to do with story arcs. And yet that’s a problem with Ultraworld: it’s just a sci-fi-of-the-week, with no relevance to anything else. You could easily skip it. As to what those other episodes had that this one doesn’t, that’s easy: they serviced the characters. Ultraworld is just a Star Trek-ish thing that happens to the Liberator. (And anyway, the story arcs are mainly dead in the water at this point. Blake’s 7 might as well BE Star Trek.)

So anyway, they find an artificial planet. It has some kind of effect on Cally. (Really? This again, so soon?) She teleports over, probably under duress. The rest of the gang except Vila go to rescue her, only to find a planet-sized computer obsessed with gathering knowledge. (This, too, feels like a repeat of the last episode, but it’s a much more literal take on alien-thing-that-absorbs-people.)

There’s no conflict here beyond the obvious. The blue-skinned “Ultras” want to drain the smartest people and use the rest for manual labour. (Tarrant, hilariously, is in the latter category.) They obfuscate this at first, but then start draining Avon in earnest. Dayna and Tarrant must put a stop to it. But at one point, the Ultras want to record these two having sex because they don’t have that process in their records. (What, not anywhere?!) This scene is noteworthy for seeming even more bizarre than anything in Sarcophagus. Whatever floats your boat, guys.

At least Vila enjoys himself: he’s busy teaching Orac riddles, jokes and rhymes, which ultimately confuses Ultraworld enough to get them out of there. Cally meanwhile spends the episode mostly asleep. Tarrant seems a little less of a dick after confronting Avon last week; I’m not sure if that’s the end of that as far as the leadership contest goes.

And I’m out of things to say. Ultraworld is an episode that exists. I doubt you’ll hate it. You don’t need to find out.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! There’s a big gloopy brain spitting green stuff everywhere, but kids are gross.

WHO’S WHO: Stephen Jenn was in Nightmare Of Eden. Hugh Cecil popped up in The Dalek Masterplan, The War Machines and The Silurians. Tex Fuller did stunts in The Masque Of Mandragora. Ridgewell Hawkes was in Warriors Of The Deep. Reg Woods was in State Of Decay.

11. Moloch
By Ben Steed

All right: who watched The Harvest Of Kairos and said, yes that’s good, let’s have that writer back? Sure enough, Moloch includes great ugly gobs of misogyny. But it’s mostly just boring and pointless as an episode, not actively offensive. Hooray I suppose.

The Liberator is chasing Servalan. I’ve no idea why, since the last time we saw her they’d inadvertently put her back in power. Her ship disappears, having found a planet that is completely shielded from view. (They go on about this at length but ultimately it doesn’t matter.) They go in after her, but to do this Vila and Tarrant must first sneak about a Federation troop carrier. (Again, it seems like a big deal but they never quite explain why. TL;DR, everybody goes to the planet. Just get on with it.) Aboard the carrier Vila makes a friend, Doran, who in all probability is a serial rapist and murderer. The cheeky chappy!

The planet is seemingly staffed by women - uh oh - and run by a computer named Moloch. Some thoroughly unpleasant Federation men have made themselves at home here and summoned Servalan. The planet houses a machine for perfectly replicating matter, which would be awesome enough on its own, but their specific plan is to duplicate the knowledge of a great pilot and copy Servalan’s flagship with that installed so anyone can fly it. Who cares, quite frankly; I wasn’t aware that Servalan’s ship was the best thing in space. (That’s the Liberator, surely?) It’s marginally more interesting that Servalan’s forces are in the minority, and the thoroughly grubby Section Leader Grose wants to take over. Series Three has  seriously phoned in the difference between Federation-at-full-strength and Federation-in-tatters, so it’s nice to make something of that for once. I could have done without Servalan being chained up “for the men” as punishment - and she’s the second woman in the episode to be “given to the men” - but by all accounts, she doesn’t actually get raped, so er, I guess all is forgiven?

As for the misogyny, the instant takeover of what on the face of it is a planet run by women speaks for itself, as does that gleeful punishment of women by men. You might well argue that these are bad people and we’re not supposed to see this behaviour and think, this is good and I approve - villains gonna villain, after all, shouldn’t they be reprehensible? But it’s interesting that these examples of villaindom keep occurring to this writer. And don’t forget Doran, who takes Vila for a go on the chained-up Servalan, so he must be terrible, right? Except he’s essentially painted as a good guy by the end, and Vila’s sad when he dies. Amazingly, this could all be worse: in Ben Steed’s last opus, Servalan likedbeing treated like garbage by men. I’m sure there are some who will argue that her consistent annoyance here, and a bit where she kills a potential rapist with a rock, is progress. We’ll be giving her the vote next.

Back to the episode: after Vila chooses sportingly not to have his way with her, he lets Servalan go and they briefly work together. Then she escapes, largely off screen - odd choice, and it’s interesting that she doesn’t try to seize the matter replicator first, but I can’t blame her for sodding off. And here’s where things get... well, interesting is the wrong word. Moloch, it turns out, is an evolutionary experiment: a replicated being that’s 2 million years further along than a human. Needless to say he’s hideous and he wants to possess the Liberator. (Oh whatever, most people do.) But he dies the instant he teleports out of his computer chair, and that’s that. Fascinating. Grose and co seem to have been dealt with and, apart from Avon cleverly using it to restock some teleport bracelets, no one is ultimately bothered about the replicators. Great. The Liberator departs, but not before finding Servalan in hot pursuit. Will she attempt, for the five thousandth time, to steal the Liberator? Oh what excitement awaits.

It’s a nothingy runaround with added unpleasantness. Please stop asking this guy back.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Rape threats top the bill, but there’s a seriously freaky body in a tank.

WHO’S WHO: Doran is Davyd Harries, who was in The Armageddon Factor. Moloch is Deep Roy, aka Mr Sin in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. Stuart Fell, perennial Who stuntman, is one of the guards.

12. Death-Watch
By Chris Boucher

Hunger Games, anyone? Chris Boucher’s got his ideas hat on this week, and rattles off a dystopian sci-fi scenario that will sound familiar now.

Somewhat breaking continuity with the last episode, where the crew were once again on the run from Servalan, this one finds Vila suggesting they all have a nice rest. He suggests - for some reason - a nearby region that has just declared war. The “restful” bit is that spectators are encouraged, and are afforded neutral status; the “war” is really two combatants who fight to the death, and have their experiences relayed to everyone watching via a mind link. It’s a funny form of entertainment, but then it’s a solid satire. (The only bit I don’t get is that Vila’s “rest” ends up being strictly within the confines of the Liberator’s flight deck. Not exactly shore leave, is it?)

One of the combatants is Tarrant’s brother. (Wouldn’t you know it, they’re identical twins. Bit Children-Of-Auron, isn’t it?) And the “neutral arbiter” of the fight is Servalan. This might seem a strange use of her time until Avon et al figure out she’s planning to somehow violate the rules, thus triggering a real war and using the resulting chaos to claw back some power. This is a nicely subtle use of the ongoing “Servalan/the Federation ain’t what it used to be” idea, and it’s just as subtle that Avon’s “resistance” is to make sure no one kicks off in the first place and the fight goes as planned, leaving her with nothing. It’s all a bit more Cold War than we’re used to in Blake’s 7, but at least it’s a kind of rebellion against a kind of Federation, and isn’t yet another attempt of Servalan’s to steal you-know-what. This time last series events were actually building to something, so I’ll take any rebellion plot I can get.

Not-Tarrant is a little too nice to shoot his opponent in the back, and not long after that he’s killed. Tarrant feels his death by mind link. (That’s another bit of Children Of Auron. You’re slacking, Chris!) Orac figures out Servalan’s wheeze: the opponent was an android, so there was no way not-Tarrant could have won. (Apart from shooting him in the back. D’oh!) Once that is discovered, it’s war! So the gang swoop in, Tarrant demands a rematch and wins. (Even though he, too, is uncharacteristically squeamish about shooting him in the back.) Vaporising the android leaves Servalan with nothing. And unlike something like Doctor Who, where the whole Hunger Games business would surely come under scrutiny or be dismantled, Avon and Tarrant leave them to it at the end.

The whole thing’s very neatly put together, even if it does all feel a bit like small potatoes. The satirical stuff works like gangbusters, particularly a bit where the fight newscaster bitches off-screen at his director. The direction is frequently excellent, particularly some snazzy camera angles during the face off with not-Tarrant. And the cast seem to be enjoying themselves; I wasn’t bowled over by Stephen Pacey’s other Tarrant, but actual Tarrant seems more defined by all this. Avon and Servalan share a scene where flirtation and a kiss seem to come naturally at this point. It’s a strange little relationship they’re having.

Chris Boucher has become the go-to guy for Blake’s 7, and Death-Watch is another good one. At this point I think my issues are more with this series as a whole. What exactly are we building up to? Find out next week...

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! Not-Tarrant’s POV death is pretty grim.

WHO’S WHO: Not-Tarrant’s friend Max is Stewart Bevan, who was Jo Grant’s husband. The newscaster, David Sibley, was in The Pirate Planet.

13. Terminal
By Terry Nation

Well, Series Three did go somewhere.

Avon is behaving strangely, following a mysterious signal and refusing to answer any questions. The Liberator’s course takes it through some random space goo and then to the artificial planet Terminal. (Not to be confused with the artificial planet Ultraworld.) He transports down there alone, and promises to kill anyone who follows him. Naturally, Tarrant and Cally follow at a distance.

Avon finds, as well as some aggressive and aggressively shit-looking gorilla monsters, an underground medical facility that has been working on (wait for it) Blake. It’s Blake’s signal he’s been following, and uncharacteristically for this series (wait for it) Blake is bloody there as well! Paralysed by awake, he has some good news to share with Avon, but it’ll have to wait. The sinister medical orderlies get hold of Avon, who from our perspective seems to be cutting between his visit to Blake and unconsciousness in a lab. Something’s amiss here.

And just as you’re starting to think we’ve got away with it, yes, Servalan is here. Of course she bloody is. And it was a trap. Of course it bloody was. She has brought Avon here under false pretences so she can take the Liberator. Of course she bloody has.

Avon, despite the seemingly reasonable offer of Blake in return, orders the Liberator to go, knowing it’ll mean both their deaths. But there’s no need, as they have no intention of leaving orbit and actually go along with Servalan’s request, making sure to take Orac before they close up the shop. She has one final twist of the knife: Blake isn’t here, he’s dead, and Avon’s meeting was an illusion. (Of course it bloody etc.) And off she goes triumphant.

Well, not quite. The random space goo from earlier has been eating into the Liberator’s hull. It’s more than the ship’s spooky regenerative powers can handle, so Servalan has actually inherited a broken ship. When she tries to break orbit - having somehow failed to spot all the gloop and rot everywhere - the Liberator explodes. Servalan is last seen possibly teleporting out of there; of course etc etc.

There’s much about all this that is just plain obvious, and yet it works as a kind of inevitable tragedy. The whole sentence of events pivots on Avon acting out of heroism: he wants to rescue Blake (not discounting Blake’s plan to get rich, of course), and he wants to protect the crew from any potential trap by telling them nothing. It’s presumably this foolhardiness that makes him blind to risks like the random space goo, and ends up costing them the Liberator. But the joke’s on Servalan too, as her hell-bent fixation has resulted in a dead ship and a lot of wasted effort. (Naturally it is hopeless to think it’ll cost her life as well.) Avon and Servalan make more compelling nemeses than when Blake was in the equation, and their shared misfortunes seem apt here. Avon, at least, smiles at the end.

What does it all mean for Blake’s 7? A new ship, probably, and a change of tack for Servalan. She really will have to get a life now. I hope the latest shake up puts the next series on a stronger path; Series Three has had tremendous high points but, overall, it’s been a lot of wiffwaff. 

Terminal is a strong closer, and if not particularly big on fresh ideas - such as the gorilla people being hyper-evolved humans, which directly repeats and contradicts a recent episode - it at least puts them in a satisfying character context. Paul Darrow does wonders as the steadily more broken Avon, whose faith is then redeemed at the end. And Michael Keating gets maximum pathos out of Zen’s breakdown; acting your heart out against a giant babbling LED light is nothing to sniff at. Series Three, if nothing else, made the most of the Liberator.

IT’S NOT FOR KIDS! One of Servalan’s lackeys gets sucked into space.

WHO’S WHO: Just Stuart Fell, from the looks of it!

BLAKE’S... 6. Alas, Zen.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #125 – Twilight Of The Gods by Mark Clapham and Jon De Burgh Miller

The New Adventures
#23
Twilight Of The Gods
By Mark Clapham and Jon De Burgh Miller

NB: This review contains spoilers for how the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures ended. The book's quite old, but forewarned is forearmed, eh? I've coloured in the spoiler bits, so just highlight them to read.

NB (2): This book has nothing to do with the Doctor Who Missing Adventure Twilight Of The Gods, it's just an unfortunate repeated title. 

It’s the end – for real this time. Virgin lost the Doctor Who license in 1997 and, after a 23-book run, they knocked the Bernice Summerfield range on the head as well. It was a good effort, telling stories about someone other than what’s-his-name and making use of new authors where possible. I think it’s apparent by now that I wasn’t bowled over by the spin-off, which retreated to the warm embrace of a murder mystery as frequently as Doctor Who did to quarries, but it’s no less an achievement that they went and did it.

Which brings us to the finale – for real this time. (Sorry, Tears Of The Oracle.) You might expect a bit of a “name” to handle this one, but Gary Russell wasn’t available (no, seriously, that was the plan) so we’re going with lesser-knowns instead. A bold choice. Enter Mark Clapham, who had co-written a couple of novels (starting with Benny’s Beige Planet Mars) and Jon de Burgh Miller, who hadn’t. Like Richards and Stone before them they had been given a ridiculous timeframe to get it done. (“Six weeks from pitch to print” according to Miller.) I wouldn’t envy anyone that, especially if they were relatively untested, but it helps to know what they were up against when reading the finished result. Because the finished result absolutely reads like someone with little experience didn’t have long to put it together.

Yeah, it’s going to be that kind of review. Twilight Of The Gods is bad. With surprisingly little competition (which is nice, really), this is comfortably the worst book of the run. And this is the one they went out on. Good lord.

Let’s start with the good. Continuity. Justin Richards thought he was writing the last Bernice book in Tears Of The Oracle – so someone clearly let him think that, great editorial oversight there guys – and to accommodate that, he put in an ending for the Dellah gods arc: a spaceship containing a force that feeds on belief crashes onto the planet of the obsessive believers. Job done. Return To The Fractured Planet ignored it, or Stone just didn’t know about it (editors?), and now it’s time to go back to Dellah. Surprisingly, Clapham and Miller don’t ignore it: they incorporate it into the plot. The crash caused “a wave of unbelief” across Dellah which has destabilised the factions of worshippers and made the “gods” compete to the death to keep what they have. At least one has set up a device to keep all this going artificially. At the end of the day it would have been neater to let Richards take it home, but using it is at least better than pretending he didn’t try.

Next, the setup. The Time Lords (unnamed as per) and the People have had enough of the gods and are sending a device to detonate Dellah, and its entire sector of space, once and for all. Bernice and co have a plan B: send Dellah back to the universe where the gods came from. But they’ve got to get it done in time to stop the bomb. Okay, it’s quite similar to Walking To Babylon in some respects, and without diving into the other wonders of this sector it’s a bit difficult to buy the appeal of sending Dellah and everyone on it to the gods’ realm instead of blowing it up – either way the locals are screwed – but hey, it’s a decent ticking clock.

Okay, so what’s wrong with it? Well, let’s pick up where we left off. Continuity. Yes, it’s nice that we’re picking up plot threads from previous books – not all of them, with Bernice’s memory loss crisis only warranting a brief mention – but the authors get a bit carried away near the end and it doesn’t end well. The magical universe that spawned the gods sounds awfully familiar, and sure enough it’s the one mentioned in Cold Fusion. In order to have someone recognise this they quickly resolve Chris’s corrupted memories from Dead Romance, which again is nice – he had been trained to hate the Doctor! Boo! – but as there’s been no mention of it since Dead Romance, or any recognition of it by other characters, or any exploration of how else it changed him, it makes no material difference to his character to undo it now. Worse, the Cold Fusion link undoes the whole Tears Of The Oracle thing they just set up. Now the gods aren’t killing each other to compete for worshippers: Tehke, the Worst One apparently (?), is doing it “knowing that they were planning to create a universe where he would be one of many rather than the ruler of many.” Motivations aren’t even kept straight during the book! (For a bonus point Clapham and Miller undo Chris’s new appearance, probably in the hope that more books will eventually happen. Fair enough. Making him short, bald and fat has been an example of what Ken Campbell used to call a jokoid: something with the shape of a joke that isn’t in any way actually funny. Ditch it by all means.)

Next, ah what the hell, the setup. Yes, it’s a reasonable ticking clock, but it has some issues. One of the group’s aims is to rescue a diplomat to solve a crisis on the planet Vremnya. A crisis we don’t see. No offence then… but who cares? I kept forgetting his importance in all of this because, against the destruction of an entire sector, which is already a little abstract, and the certain doom of this planet either way, which is philosophically more complicated than anyone writing the book appears to have noticed, an unseen problem feels all too slippery. Then, on the destruction, when they resolve it all – and we’ll get there – no biggie, but the book doesn’t actually say what happened with the bomb. Right. Okay then. Great stuff. (I am guessing it didn’t go off.)

The wider problem with that setup is one of tone. Twilight Of The Gods is all action. That’s not to say it’s constantly exciting; more that the book is, beat for beat, mostly just incident happening. This is a problem for a series of books that has largely got by on the interesting personalities of its characters. They don’t exactly come alive during spaceship entanglements that move one of them to say “They’re closing on us fast” or “Be ready with the weapons … I think we’re going to need them.” Then again, sometimes it’s action in the Terry Nation these-seven-episodes-won’t-fill-themselves sense, with Benny and Jason trekking through dreary desert and drearier caves to meet standard sci-fi filler people with great names like Gruat and Meil. It’s just pages of stuff.

When it comes to the climactic moments the authors then get very excited and try to make everyone sound cool, so everyone’s equipped with quips, such as Jason’s entirely believable response to a friend’s imminent execution of “It’s clobberin’ time!” Or Clarence, that thoughtful and unknowable character who has only recently learned some basic tenets of humanity, telling a group of unconscious people after a successful brawl: “Thanks for the workout … We must do it again sometime.” Or Clarence, again, that unfathomable being who barely understands himself, squaring off against a fighty god with – and I’m embarrassed even typing this out – “Are you a god, or just a big girl?” They don’t sound cool. They don’t, if you want to get into it, sound much like themselves at all. Because the New Adventures are not, on the whole, cheesy SF action movies. There’s an unhealthy amount of swearing sprinkled over all of the above just to make sure it all sounds mega grown up and not, absolutely not at all, like an embarrassing teenager’s early attempt at a SF fantasy epic that should perhaps have remained on their hard drive.

I think we’ve arrived at the key problem here. It’s the writing. And before we get into it, there is something accidentally reassuring about a book like this, because it makes you realise the standard you’ve been used to beforehand. Have all the Bernice NAs been brilliant? No. But the writers tended to have a good handle on the characters, a recognisable authorial voice and quite simply, an aptitude for prose. On the whole we’ve been fortunate. Twilight Of The Gods is over a cliff with all of that. We’re right back at the early New Adventures now, with youthful authors and still-learning editors putting out some hot, steaming whatever. I can’t imagine any of their fellow NA authors reading this book without having to peek through their fingers at it.

Want to know what a character is thinking and feeling? Okay, Clapham and Miller are here to list it out for you. “Benny felt sad…” “Benny found herself frustrated…” “Benny felt terrible…” Curious how one character is reacting to the dramatic actions of another? Okay, but don’t get your hopes up for any variety. “Benny had never seen anyone fight so hard.” “Benny saw a look of determination and pure anger unlike any she had ever seen on him.” “She had never seen him looking so bad.” (See also some of those half-hearted, quite repetitive quips. “‘This is all very fascinating,’ said Clarence … ‘But could you guys please choose a vehicle so we can get out of here?’” And then not long after, “‘Look, this is all very pleasant,’ [Bernice] said, ‘but we really need to hurry up and get out of this cold.’”) Want a hint about how a character feels when they’re delivering, or hearing dialogue? Here, have constant descriptions of their smiles or half-smiles or smiles-inwardly so we all know this is witty or apt, which I guess is easier than actually writing things that are witty or apt. Six weeks from pitch to print. How much of that do you reckon was allocated to somebody with a red pen?

Some of it’s embarrassing even on a technical level. “He used the back of his hand to slap aside a woman with an axe, then kicked a man with a gun in the gut.” (A man with a what? Doesn’t he have enough problems without you hitting him?) “‘I completely understand, Jason,’ Benny told him.” (What is the point of inserting names into dialogue all the time if you’re going to say who is saying what and in which direction afterwards? Never mind how laughable that line is for Bernice.) And loads of it is just dry and lifeless. We get reams of inward character reactions to things that are just acknowledgements. “She couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed at his reaction.” What is that sentence achieving? Everyone, even Benny, has a running commentary instead of an inner life.

So much of it is just unpolished, unambitious chaff. And in amongst it all are the characters we’ve been following through the series. They haven’t a hope. Chris, whom the authors refer to either as that or Cwej seemingly at random, is in a particularly foul mood throughout. Or he’s just a really crass guy now. It’s hard to tell. (It‘s even harder to picture him as a former actually-good policeman when he’s battering people or encouraging Clarence to do so or reflecting on how much he’s disgusted by people.) Clarence, all with the quips here, now has all the intriguing mystery of a joke on a Penguin wrapper. He forms a bond with a young abused woman, Palma, who at one point murders a fellow almost-identically-spunky female character to rid her of a possessive god, which it turns out would have been removed in the next scene anyway had she not shot her. (No comment from Clarence or anyone else.) Jason, at the best of times a little too much like Chris only with rougher edges, is much the same as him here, when he’s not asking Bernice dippy questions or dropping non sequitur pop culture references about The Simpsons or Star Wars or The Fantastic Four in lieu of characterisation. He does at least get to rail against all the quasi-religious forces in one scene, in which the authors soapbox so hard they’re liable to fall off and break something, and they pat him on the back for his incredible logic even though he’s talking to a brainwashed victim and not a rational bad guy.

As for the tenuous do-they-don’t-they Jason/Benny relationship that was continued by proxy in The Joy Device, forget it, as Clapham and Miller are here to bluntly force “I love you”s out of Jason and Bernice, making the former sound uncharacteristically needy and the latter uncharacteristically naïve in the process. At this point, we know it’s not as simple as Just Get Back Together. It rings utterly false to go, “Oh Yes It Is.”

They don’t, of course, but only because of the plot and what it does with Bernice. She is facing up against gods – not even the ones we started with, who are of course reduced to lame colloquial quips along with everyone else here (my favourite was “Sorry, girlfriend!” Seriously WTF) but the “Time Lords” of that Cold Fusion universe who wobble between benevolence and muahaha evil on a random, cheesy whim. Benny must choose between fighting to save Jason and getting back to her universe. She has faced similar choices throughout the book, and in all but one example she went with the greater good. So what does she do here? (Highlight for spoiler.) Greater good, again. Which isn’t terribly dramatic as she’s already let bunched of people die several times, but in this case it means leaving Jason alone on a ruined planet in a dying universe before buggering off to a cushy new university job, and all after suddenly professing her undying love for him. That’s how we leave these two. Meanwhile, Chris has been de-aged into a (blonde) child and Clarence is dead, which weighs on Bernice’s mind for two entire paragraphs. The last chapter is supposed to be a gentle reset after all that, a fond (and not subtle) farewell to the New Adventures. I did not feel fond reading it.

I can’t quite believe any of this. All this time and we end on an absolute hash of a piece of writing that trundles along like they’ll fill in the character stuff later, which ends by setting up a new status quo built on (highlight for spoiler) the death or doom of two main characters, and it’s supposed to be hopeful. In what way is any of this better than just crashing the damn spaceship in Tears Of The Oracle? Bernice, needless to say, has few opportunities to shine – I know, why break the habit of a lifetime, but any attempt at a final statement on who she is and what these adventures have meant to her is lost in all that dreck.

As for the series, it had its ups and not too many downs. I’d trade a lot of Doctor Who books for Walking To Babylon or Dead Romance, and there have been very few serious misses here. Bernice was certainly worth the gamble, because in almost anyone’s hands, she sings. I wish she’d had more adventures in print. (She had some at Big Finish, albeit more as novelties between audio plays.) She’s a truly great creation, and her literary life deserves a better remembrance than Twilight Of The Gods. Luckily there’s plenty to choose from.

3/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #124 – The Joy Device by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#22
The Joy Device
By Justin Richards

The New Adventures were at an awkward stage when this one rolled around. We’ve introduced a major arc, run with it more consistently than the range has done before, then appeared to resolve it, but introduced a new arc element anyway, then knocked that one off that in the next book. The main arc is over or merely paused, depending on who you ask, and we’re just… still here. It’s like waiting for a bus. They’ve brought Justin Richards back one book after his quasi-finale (did they even let him leave the building?), probably in the hope that at least he’ll know what to do.

By all accounts he didn’t, because The Joy Device is anything but a decisive next step. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Bernice needs a holiday. Before long she becomes entangled in a crime and a murder due to a Hitchcockian wrong-place-wrong-time contrivance. Various parties seek a mysterious artefact. No one seems remotely interested in what is or isn’t happening on Dellah. It’s as if they all collectively picked up a script that fell down the back of the sofa ten books ago.

None of that is by mistake. Per Richards: “[They] came to me … and said ‘We need another Benny book and we need it in a month.’ I said, ‘Well, to be honest I've written the last-ever Benny book. Doing some more is a shame from a narrative point of view.’” As a stopgap, he came up with something even he didn’t think would sustain a novel, and probably no one would think of as essential to read, but which might pass the time amiably enough. Think, average Benny novel, but as a farce. (“So, average Benny novel then?” you might say. No comment.)

Bernice’s need for a holiday does at least come via the arc plot. She is no longer dying, but chunks of her memory have gone for good. She doesn’t know how to cope with that – having copious journals isn’t the quick win you might think, partly because she rewrites them all the time. So she wants to make new memories. The best way to do that, she reckons, is to live dangerously, which horrifies all her closest friends. (It’s worth mentioning here that she isn’t 100% committed to this and expects them to talk her round, but Jason makes such a balls up of it that off she goes. (It is also worth mentioning that all her closest friends are men. Isn’t that weird?)) So Braxiatel, Chris, Jason and Clarence decide to keep a close eye on her activities and swoop in – literally viz Clarence – to remove any dangerous obstacles. Bernice is going to Mr Magoo it, in other words, whether she likes it or not.

I’d be lying if I said this approach reaps a lot of rewards (as would Richards: “I don't think that's a book. It might be a short story but it won't sustain a novel”), but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The entire conceit is based on how much the characters care for Bernice, and that appeals to me enormously. One of the major issues I’ve had with Jason as a character is that he butts heads with Bernice, usually as a tired prelude to the old “they fancy each other really” routine, but often with a real unpleasantness that makes you think, well why bother adding him in then? Since Beige Planet Mars though, he’s kept the twattishness to a gentle sarcasm and by all accounts he actually wants to be here. Suddenly the bullish uselessness is endearing, and the concern - though not enough to sustain a marriage between two unstoppable forces - is genuine. (As I said about another Dave Stone protagonist in Return To The Fractured Planet, I wish they’d reached this point sooner. I’d read more books about this guy.) To a lesser extent, concern for Bernice makes Clarence a better character too: he has identity crises for days, but one thing he’s sure of is his platonic love for our scrappy archaeologist. It anchors him, which is no mean feat for an artificial life form with giant angel wings. In short, these two running around to make sure Bernice is okay made me smile a lot.

It’s also quite funny, although your mileage may vary. I’ve watched enough Frasier to rub my hands with glee at the thought of a comical misunderstanding, and there’s tons of that here, with Bernice being assured of danger at every corner by her well-travelled guide Dent Harper only to see nothing of the sort. “I appreciate your tales of danger and mystery and intrigue, really I do. But everyone here is just as nice as pie.” This slowly drives Harper to distraction, which is quite fun in itself. Later, when the two of them are tasked with finding Dorpfeld’s Prism – our mysterious object du jour – they narrowly escape execution only because, unknown to them, Jason is jabbing a knife against the mob boss in question, so she suddenly becomes courteous.

Some of the writing is just downright good, like this bit of unseen slapstick: “‘The genuine ones are incredibly strong and emit a perfect C-flat when you tap the lip of the opening on something.’ She carefully lifted it up again. ‘Here, like this.’ The embarrassed silence was broken by the sound of the lift arriving. Dent followed Benny in without a word. Benny coughed. ‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have someone who clears up?’” And I’d direct anyone in need of perking up to Chapter 2 – the comedy of errors as Bernice makes her mind up and her friends panic is a thing of bliss.

How far any of the above will take you probably depends on your tolerance for frothy comedy and gentle character beats. I was clearly in the mood for it, and even then I found the story almost aggressively lightweight. The whole debacle around Dorpfeld’s Prism feels like it should be interesting, but it isn’t. The artefact causes whoever holds it to be happy, but only because they are oblivious to danger. That’s a thematic link to what Jason and Clarence are doing for Bernice, but even then it’s just the same thing again, except more literal and more obviously a bad idea. So bad you sort of wonder what the local crime boss thinks she’ll get out of stealing it. But even then, Bernice eventually gets hold of the thing and is fine actually, so I don’t really know what Richards is saying. It doesn’t do much to enhance the action; narratively all it does is defuse situations or get people killed by proxy. As for the idea that real happiness can’t be as easy as holding a magic gem, I’m struggling to even take the piss out of such a basic concept, but Bernice does pretty much have a nice time with or without it, so…

Most of the non-regular characters are similar non-starters. The crime boss, Mrs Winther, shows promise as a weary and potentially reasonable fixture of the underworld, but firstly it’s hard to root for someone with such a patently daft retirement plan, and secondly Richards won’t stop making references to her weight, as if that has any bearing on her characterisation. (Technically it could do, but it doesn’t, so it just seems cruel.) Her number 2, Nikole, thinks her boss is old and weak and is itching to bump her off and take over the business - but first of all, how bog standard is that, and second of all, that was Mrs Winther’s plan for her anyway. Chill, love, the promotion’s in the post.

Perhaps wonkiest of all is Dent Harper, Bernice’s famous guide, who just doesn’t quite add up. He’s an adventurer who keeps journals and rewrites them – okay, there’s a parallel with Bernice. (Again, it ain’t subtle.) But he’s a little different in that his rewrites exist to sensationalise his life and make him sound better. (Bernice’s rewrites also come from a place of insecurity but there’s no pomposity there, and she keeps the original versions.) After we’re introduced to Dent and the concept that he embellishes things, he then appears to believe his own hype, which makes for good comic fodder. But then, with Jason and Clarence taking care of business all around him, it’s not really possible to show that his (overhyped) worldview is wrong – because it isn’t, if external forces need to get in the way to make it safer than it really is. You could show him being surprised at more real life danger happening than is normal, and then bafflement when it’s taken away before Bernice can spot it, but that’s a layer of complication that just isn’t happening. As with Dorpfeld’s Prism then, I ended up wondering what Richards was trying to achieve here. A comic buffoon who can’t tell reality from aggrandisement? Probably, but he’d have had exactly the same journey if he really was the danger-loving guy he purports to be, and that doesn’t seem right.

Probably the only material gain from The Joy Device is Bernice’s perspective on memory loss: she eventually decides that not knowing how she got out of this scrape or that disaster is no bad thing really, so long as she knows that she did. This is not as much of a boon as getting her memories back - and I still think that was a weird, mean thing to do to your protagonist in her surely soon-to-end series - but it gives her something of a restorative to be getting on with. (And it probably would have felt a bit pat anyway if she got them back right after she cured her terminal illness. Here’s an idea, just don’t fire these random life-altering horrors at her if you don’t want to keep them around.) Apart from all that, The Joy Device is knowingly just a runaround, destined to be enjoyable in the moment or irritating as part of a series. I got through it very quickly, which ought to count for something, and like Benny I really did have a nice time, whilst sort of wishing more would happen.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #123 – Return To The Fractured Planet by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#21
Return To The Fractured Planet
By Dave Stone

Well, that’s this range of books over with. Cheers, Tears Of The Oracle. On the whole then, I thought it went – wait, what? We’re still going? Argh! Does anyone have a book ready to go, like right now?

Lucky for us, Dave Stone did. Return To The Fractured Planet was written mostly as an original novel, or at least “not entirely disconnected from the world of Benny … with the intention of going back over it and detaching it entirely.” (Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story.) I don’t know whether Stone intended to spin off the adventures of his unnamed hero from The Mary-Sue Extrusion, but what we end up with here is enough of its own thing, even with that sequel element, to imagine that might have worked. The Stratum Seven operative (a fictional version of him was once called Flint, so I’ll use that here) learns in the course of Mary-Sue that his memories are not his own, just as he is not really human. He’s not entirely artificial either, leaving us with a fairly complicated and generally pissed off intergalactic wetwork guy. I’m not saying he’s endlessly fascinating or anything, but it’s perhaps a shame Stone didn’t hit upon this idea sooner. You could have had him work alongside Benny and Chris a few times, and you could probably spin him off too if that was an option.

All of which is to say, Return To The Fractured Planet being intended as its own unrelated thing? Knock me down with a feather… I don’t think. Regardless of its merits as a novel, you might reasonably feel a bit narked reading a book like that at this point in the series. Quite simply: are we arc-ing or aren’t we?

“Ah,” you might say. “But it’s all been tied up now, hasn’t it? That Justin Richards doesn’t muck about.” Well, yes and no. The Gods arc has – nominally, if you want – been given a resolution. We didn’t go and watch it play out, but it’s there. And Stone… just doesn’t appear to know about that, with Bernice and Brax investigating what they think is another escaped Godlike entity from Dellah. Even though they’re all stuffed. (It turns out it isn’t one. But then, it is? Sorry if I’m spoiling the twist here, but then again the “twist” is that yes, this book is part of this series. Even if the author didn’t get a very important memo from one book ago.)

So we have continuity, even if it’s of the “I wasn’t really listening but I think I got the gist of it” kind. More importantly, we carry on with Bernice’s condition: she found out she was dying in the previous book, likely thanks to a botched temporary memory wipe in The Mary-Sue Extrusion (thanks a lot, Dave!) and that is picked up again here. Again though, he misses some specifics: Tears Of The Oracle ends with a hopeful lead on the Fountain Of Forever, which might save Bernice. No mention of that here, although a still-game Benny appears to have longer left to live than when we last saw her. (Months, instead of weeks. Is that progress… or another memo gone astray?) In the last 20 pages or so, when it is hurriedly revealed that something-something-Dellah-I-guess after all, the plot contrives to get Bernice out of her illness too.

I’ve got to give Stone plaudits here for fitting that so neatly into his plot, but good heavens, it would be nice if that sort of thing happened to her in a book where she could aspire to be even second billed. “Flint” grows to like Bernice (whom you may remember he barely met last time), and he becomes concerned about her both subtly and visibly deteriorating state. That’s nice, but it would be nicer (since it is part of an actual y’know ongoing series type thing) if I knew what the actual sufferer of said condition was going through. She does at least get to strike the critical blow against the baddie at the end, which – as well as being handy for her salvation – might be a sweetener to any Benny fans wondering just who they’ve got to knock off to get a solid heroine in this town.

Hey ho, Flint’s our man whether you like it or not, so what kind of jaunt is he on this time? Well, picking up on threads (and literally some of the text) from Mary-Sue, we dive back into his past to his awakening as an Artificial Personality Embodiment – a sort of cyborg with another person’s memories – and his first mission. Alongside Kara, another APE that he instantly likes more than the rest, he is sent to investigate Sharabeth, the fractured planet of the title. The fractures refer to time, but there’s little in the text to round that out. Sharabeth is just an unpleasant and out of control hellscape, with crazed surgeons and roaming metallic creatures. It’s suitably ’orrible but not very interesting; the interesting bit is Flint’s time spent with Kara. Or at least as far as it informs the other half of the book – because, surprise, it’s two books running alongside each other! (This isn’t as confusing as you might expect, with handy different fonts to keep your head right.) The second, main chunk is Flint now, assigned by Braxiatel to investigate the possibly-sorta-arc-relevant murder of Kara.

The interesting-but-also-frustrating thing about The Mary-Sue Extrusion was that a seemingly unrelated adventure (that happened to involve Bernice) took up most of the book, only to turn out to be right in the thick of the series arc by the end. Return To The Fractured Planet is, for reasons that should be obvious if you’ve read this far, even more of the former and less of the latter. As we cut between Flint’s would-be suicide mission on Sharabeth and his investigative vengeance back home on the Proximan Chain (another bit of world building that just doesn’t come off, and he’s had two books for this one), there’s at least more of a grip on the main character this time around. That’s what I meant about how it would have been good to discover this guy sooner: he is emotionally invested in the story this time, cut up about the death of someone he more or less cared about and not now caught by surprise regarding his origins. (I can’t remember – ho, ho – whether the reason for his amnesia was in Mary-Sue. There’s no sign of it here, just a past and a present where he’s aware of what he is.) He can cut a bloody swathe about the place, in other words, for what feels like an actual character-driven reason.

Does that help if you’re here to read another New Adventure featuring Bernice Summerfield? (And would you even be here if you weren’t?) Probably not. To briefly draw an unfair comparison, Dead Romance didn’t feature our fave archaeologist at all, but it did matter to the arc and the established New Adventures world. The only established bits here (apart from Chris Cwej appearing fairly late in the game – Stone got that memo) are care of Mary-Sue. When you take out the last-gasp arc bits, and do the same with Mary-Sue, I think this story is the stronger. The dual narratives idea is quite effective, although all Operation: Sharabeth really does is give us more time with Kara and (eventually) set up our villain, who we finally discover does stereotypical things that don’t always make sense because *checks notes* he can’t help himself. Huh. I don’t know whether the sudden parachuting in of Dellah mythology weakened the villainy Stone already had planned, but what’s left seems awfully like a lot of mean-minded, vaguely satirical busywork. It’s not much of a pay off. Still, Flint’s investigations in the present have a pulpy, enjoyable quality to them, like a less eyeroll-deserving Mean Streets. The prose never dawdles off down an alleyway like a lot of Stone’s novels. You might actually miss that, of course.

Crucially, Fractured Planet doesn’t change our perspective at the end like Stone’s previous, perhaps less emotionally invested book did. So if you’re going to compare them – as I can’t help doing – you have a weaker novel with an ending that means something more to the series, followed by a more rounded book that tosses in a critical plot point as if it’s working on a computer battery that’s about to go. I think, on balance, Mary-Sue has more reason to be a New Adventure, whereas it’s downright strange for a series now in its twilight volumes to provide literally random manuscripts to be getting on with. You can probably put that one on the management more than on Stone himself, who just wanted to write about his cyborg guy, I guess. It’s best looked at in that light.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #122 – Tears Of The Oracle by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#20
Tears Of The Oracle
By Justin Richards

Oof.

Look, I know every book can’t be Dead Romance, and that a sideways nightmare not even featuring Bernice Summerfield won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But for the very next instalment to not only jump back into the structurally sound embrace of Justin Richards, but also make things far more traditional overall, feels like an over-correction to me.

Still, there might be reasons for that besides “that’s just how he do.” During my customary post-book visit to Simon Guerrier’s Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story I learned that Richards believed he was writing the final Benny book. (There was a lot of that about at the time: Where Angels Fear was assumed by some to be the end.) That certainly might explain why a series that has just spent the last few books pushing further and further away from its conventions should suddenly find Bernice – oh, lord – on an archaeological dig that turns into a murder mystery. It’s probably supposed to be a victory lap. You don’t do those in completely uncharted territory.

It also explains why Richards delves into recent continuity more than you’d expect for just another one-off trope jolly. For a while I thought he was just being thorough, but the significance piles up: the treaty between the People and Time Lords, established in Dead Romance, is front and centre, and we pick up Chris’s story from there; the events and characters of Walking To Babylon get a mention; Clarence’s mysterious origins are given some more fuel; The Mary-Sue Extrusion is potentially still important to Bernice; a character arc I didn’t know was a character arc is resolved from Dragons’ Wrath; characters from The Medusa Effect are seen again as Bernice and Braxiatel revisit Dellah, which then shoves us right back into Where Angels Fear; hell, one of the book’s sub-sub plots is setting up the Braxiatel Collection from Richards’ (and Braxiatel’s) debut, Theatre Of War. (Said back-when-they-had-the-license book also forms a critical plot point near the end.) There’s even a flashback to Happy Endings! Plus Richards canonises, as much as you can without the license, Brax being the Doctor’s brother. This stuff isn’t continuity box-ticking, it’s “don’t forget to turn out the lights when you go.” You can even read one of the book’s final flourishes as a neat resolution to the Gods arc. I know hindsight is wonderful, but Richards has just made it rather awkward for that idea to keep going for three more books, one of them his. (And to think, I was only just marvelling at how well the editors and authors had been keeping it together.)

You’ve got to admire – and I do – the effort it takes to tie this all together. But a lot of that stuff comes quite near the end, or becomes clear at that point, with Tears Of The Oracle feeling in the main like a decent meat and potatoes dig of the week. The main concern of the plot, as well as being a riff on The Thing (and perhaps a riff on riffs on The Thing), even feels like suspiciously similar territory to The Medusa Effect (also by Richards), as a series of historic deaths threaten to happen again to Bernice and friends. In this case a trip to The Oracle, a fortune-telling statue long thought lost, goes better than expected until an unexplained shape-shifter starts offing the expedition. Is this what happened to the previous expedition? Paranoia increases, naturally, and Bernice hurtles ever closer to the book’s framing device, which sees her preparing to complete a murder-suicide bid.

It’s good, solid stuff, as you would rightly expect from Richards, though if anything I thought the team would be more paranoid. (It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the killer must be one of them. Goodness knows who they thought dunnit.) The paranoia angle is very specifically tied to having contact with the killer, and it mainly manifests in Bernice going on a panicked rampage at the end, which is rather frustrating to read as we’ve got very little reason to believe she’s right and everyone else is wrong.

What with all the continuity affecting Braxiatel, the People and even – significantly but also just as a means to have him show up – Chris, who regenerates in this one, Bernice comes close to being a silent partner in the book, especially when she starts drifting along with the antagonistic folie a deux. (Bernice not being entirely herself is also one of the range’s tropes, while we’re at it.) It’s an odd one to end on, in theory at least, since it also lobs a terminal illness into the mix. Yes, we end on a note of hope and a spirit of adventure. You know in your gut that she’s going to zoom off and beat this thing, with or without further adventures. But if you know the range is wrapping up now or even soon, “she’s dying” could seem like a tasteless footnote.

As ever, you’re in safe hands with Richards, and this is definitely a tighter effort than The Medusa Effect. I think I’m just not the most receptive audience for his puzzle-solving narratives; the tendency throughout Tears Of The Oracle to present information in journal entries, confessions or other forms of data seems oddly antiquated, like Victorian novels that are all diaries. That form of storytelling also ironically minimises Bernice, unless she’s writing all the journals, which might seem a rather choosy criticism after flying through Dead Romance without her, but if you’re going to send her specifically on a last hoorah with trowels and crime scenes then she really ought to run away with it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #121 – Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

The New Adventures
#19
Dead Romance
By Lawrence Miles

Things have been looking bleak for the universe since Where Angels Fear unleashed its godlike entities on Dellah. Now along comes Lawrence Miles to ask the important question: what about other universes? Can they be screwed, too?

I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s in keeping with Dead Romance, a novel told in first person by a distinctly unreliable narrator named Christine. Her notebooks full of memories are not always in the right order.

First person is just better, in my experience. Obviously it needs to be done well – it is done very well here – and third person can be better written, but first person just gets a story into your brain faster, or gets you into the story faster. Christine’s direct and unpretentious reactions to the weirdness and horror that stalks London, and later space at large, grounds Dead Romance in a way that would have helped plenty of other New Adventures to get their ideas across. (That includes ones by Lawrence Miles. Early parts of Dead Romance recall gnarly NAs like Christmas On A Rational Planet or The Death Of Art – all spooky WTF imagery and gross body horror. But this time there’s a clear purpose from start to finish, and nothing feels like it’s happening just to sprinkle on a bit of atmosphere.) The occasional bit of information arriving too early, like a wound in Christine’s leg or an as-yet-unmentioned character named Khiste, really only serves to make you rethink what you’ve already read and want to know more. I was never confused by Dead Romance, but the gulf between what had been revealed and what was very quietly still a mystery often fluctuated.

Here’s the gist: Christine, who tells us from the start that the world ended in October 1970, is having a terrible time thanks to rather too much cocaine and some kind of cannibalistic creature attacking her. She also has a run in with Chris Cwej, who later rescues her and recruits her to the cause. He is here on a mission from his employers (hold that thought) and as Christine knows too much, she’ll go along with him. She travels to other worlds and between universes as Chris tries to do something about the Entities.

As with The Mary-Sue Extrusion, we’re seeing this conflict from an unusual perspective, once again with Bernice Summerfield more as a concept than a character. An interesting editorial decision there. (I sympathise with anyone wondering when the hell we’re going to get on with it, Bernice-vs-the-Gods wise, or even where-is-Brax wise. But I’m not having a bad time waiting for it.) Christine, not a native of the twenty-sixth century, has even less idea what all this means that Dave Stone’s protagonist du jour. But I think both authors approach their outsider perspectives differently. Christine’s lack of preconceptions about the Time Lords are especially helpful when framing the good and the bad in this conflict.

Because ah yes, Chris’s employers – referred to here as “the time travellers” – stand no chance of anonymity behind Miles’s barely-trying air quotes. And they do not come out of this well. Some of their questionable practices are likely just the worst-case-scenario inventions of Christine, such as a murder-regeneration cycle that gradually causes more agony in the recipient. But at least one is on full display in front of her, as Chris foggily remembers his time with an “Evil Renegade” who went around ruining everything, which handily makes him more compliant around said renegade’s big collared betters. When they’re not brainwashing the friendliest character in this series, they’re experimenting on him and others in the front lines, causing mutations into things that will fight better, perhaps survive a little longer. Perhaps this isn’t really “our” Chris – we’ll see what he has to say for himself if he crops up again – but maybe that’s just me hoping, because good grief, the damage to Chris in this, both physical and mental.

And what’s it all for? The time travellers (why not) aren’t actively fighting the Entities in this: they’re retreating, possibly to think of a better idea later on in relative safety. Either way it’s not going to get rid of the problem. This fits, in a rather twisted way, with their policy of non-intervention. They retreated quite openly in Where Angels Fear, so it’s really just an escalation of that. Even the creatures they are most keen to negotiate with – the sphinxes, dimension-expanding monsters that originally worked with the Entities – aren’t directly interested in the conflict. Even the Entities aren’t uniform on the matter. (The Mary-Sue Extrusion highlighted that different “gods” have their own interests, and we are reminded of that here.) After a while it begins to feel like this is more about them being challenged than a genuine assessment of the threat they are facing. Later, when things kick off in this much-maligned 1970, they arguably have even less to do with the arc plot and more to do with the time travellers themselves and their warped monopoly on the worlds they observe.

(I have heard it said that Dead Romance feels like a novel apart from the series, and this bit of plot supports that. But the central question of what will be done in the name of defeating monsters slots perfectly into what the books are doing right now. And besides, no writer could create Dead Romance without being fundamentally interested in Doctor Who and the New Adventures. This one is too broad and too deep for BBC Books by a long shot, but it still finds time to casually throw in a sequel to Shada.)

Underneath all this is Christine, gazing in wonder at the weird worlds where Chris must make treaties with monsters, before – or during – finding herself back in her flat. Again with that out-of-sequence storytelling: she can never entirely hold on to a sense of where she is in the story, or even in her relationship with Chris, which seems to happen mostly when we’re not looking. All of this creates a tantalising sense of the story being both enormous and room-sized, as much itself in a cavernous realm of space as it is in a ruined magic shop. This fits entirely with the story itself, where monsters bigger than human imagination can be reasoned with and huge decisions can be made as simply as tossing a coin. It’s a novel that shrinks and expands throughout, as if sphinxes had settled in between the words.

It’s tempting to dive more into the plot and what it all means for Christine and Chris, but perhaps it’s better to tear those pages out of the notebook. Dead Romance holds together more confidently than I’m used to, and despite its earnest Doctor Who nerdiness – because this is the guy who wrote Alien Bodies, which barely seems bleak at all now – it feels like it ought to appear on sci-fi bookshelves on its own merits, a nightmare you want to share with others. You should go and read it, in other words, despite how gloomy I’ve made it sound. If Christine can stare all this stuff right in the face, so can you.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #120 – The Mary-Sue Extrusion by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#18
The Mary-Sue Extrusion
By Dave Stone

We’re in uncharted territory now, folks. All of a sudden and against all known laws of the Bennyverse, we’ve got continuity and we’re sticking to it.

That’s not to say there have been loads of continuity errors in this series. It’s more that these books have rarely seemed all that interested in what came before or in what’s coming next. With the advent of Where Angels Fear we have a fully fledged plot arc to be getting on with, and right from the prologue we’re reminded of those events – in a roundabout sort of way, it transpires. It immediately feels more like reading the New Adventures of old. (Granted, some of their arcs were a total mess, if not most of them, but it was great to feel like it mattered that you had read the one before and would stick around for more.)

All that said, it’s an interesting choice to take the next big step of this arc with Dave Stone. He’s mostly into surreal comedy and the idea of nailing him down for a bit of serious plot feels like a contradiction in terms. But I’ve got a pet theory about his writing that I think holds up here: if there is a clear enough assignment at the heart of it, be it a genre to take the piss out of or the next step of an arc, then he can focus his wackiness in a way that either helps or won’t hurt the story. If there isn’t, you’re left with wackiness that just sort of congeals. (I think his swings-and-misses are Burning Heart and Oblivion: a mean Judge Dredd imitator and a vague trip through the multiverse respectively.)

The Mary-Sue Extrusion takes a while getting to the point, but that’s par for the course with Stone. We follow (in first person) the adventures of an intergalactic mercenary/hit man/occasional time traveller who may or may not be named Flint McCrae. He has been tasked with finding Bernice Summerfield and he is being pursued by a couple of inept assassins, which doesn’t bother him much. He’s highly capable and less than pleasant, but there are numerous hints and cutaways throughout of a grim upbringing that may have toughened him into this. Anyway, he talks too much, or narrates too much, or however you want to put it. There are blobs of text which seem to underline the joke that if you hire Dave Stone, you might drown before the end of a sentence. “If I kept on going into the minor details of every little thing that flashes through my mind upon seeing a garbage canister and the possibly dangerous things it might contain, we’re going to be here all night and no further on by the end of it.” Quite. He throws in automatically ironic little qualifiers like “simple as that” and “what I’m trying to get across here is” after some exorbitant tangents, making me wonder how consciously he’s taking the piss. See his character’s reaction when faced with an acquaintance who has an aggressively long name: “Almost all of that’s mere extraneous bollocks, of course.” Really, Dave?!

I found myself skipping to the end of particularly self-serving chunks in Ship Of Fools and I was going that way in the first third or so of this. That’s not to say it’s never fun to read in and of itself. Stone is a very funny writer if you don’t mind settling in for the end of a thought. For instance this description of a grossly overweight crime lord: “A capable and effective man with eyes that missed nothing, secure enough in his own abilities to relax into them, to suffer fools to a precise and particular point and then no more, like a steel trap buried in lard.” It’s just that you start to notice how for every long and winding paragraph, there is maybe one concrete fact of the matter buried near the end of it. If you were so inclined you could probably speed run a Dave Stone book.

The action starts to get concise when he arrives on Thanaxos, the planet nearest to Dellah, and receives some scraps of information on what happened to Bernice after the exodus. He thinks she’s dead for a while because of a confused first hand account of her being carried away by an angel. (We know that was Clarence.) Then he gets genuinely trapped on the prison he has infiltrated, and only escapes when a reporter friend happens along and spots him in a crowd. At around the page 150 mark he ends up on a mission to Dellah – ostensibly to set up diplomatic relations between the two planets after Dellah’s mysterious transformation, really to look for clues re Bernice – and I wondered if you could just start the book there, or at least thereabouts. I’ve only just read the thing and I genuinely am not sure what Flint even got up to before Thanaxos.

That’s a situation made even more murky by Stone’s tendency to cut away, often to weird Elseworlds versions of his story or characters. Oblivion featured side characters slipping between entirely different lives; Ship Of Fools kept cutting to a strange pulp adventure. The Mary-Sue Extrusion falls somewhere in the middle, cutting in-universe to the fictionalised adventures of Bernice, called The New Frontier Adventures. Heightened and silly, Stone is here able to get in on some of that Beige Planet Mars ribbing of the series so far: “They couldn’t seem to make up their minds whether they were adventure stories, murder-mystery stories or some half-baked bastard hybrid of the two.” More pertinently we get occasional back-story on Flint (?) building to the reveal that he’s not an entirely organic life form, and these may be inherited memories. All of which is quite interesting – just as the New Frontier Adventures are quite funny – but when you start your book with a reminder of the ongoing arc and then veer off towards this instead, it’s tempting to ask what it’s in aid of and where the hell it’s going.

It’s all theme, I guess. (And hey, at least it’s not as meta as the title, provided by Kate Orman, makes it sound.) The trip to Dellah yields only secondary answers: he now knows that Bernice went back after her escape and left her diary behind which is a) unthinkable and b) confusing because the diary seems wrong, full of references to Benny’s apparent real life friend Rebecca. (Rebecca was her childhood doll, inexorably tied to parental trauma.) This is a clue that all is not as it appears – just as Flint is not – and Bernice is now in hiding, physically and mentally, on another world. She has used the titular Mary-Sue device to overwrite her mind and block the influence of the godlike Entities. All is pretty much well at this point (it was only a temporary override) except that Flint’s trip has inadvertently allowed the Entities to spread to Thanaxos. Benny, Flint, as well as Jason, his telepathic friend Mira (she was in Ship Of Fools apparently) and Emile (who we learn was possessed by an Entity in the previous book, and also went into hiding) rush back to Thanaxos to stem the tide.

And, well, that’s a hell of a lot of plot for a last act. It does an impressive job of putting the rest of it in perspective, a seemingly unrelated adventure subtly highlighting the gravity of the Gods situation: you don’t have to write a book directly set on Dellah or focusing on the Entities to show their influence, or the change happening in their wake. You can show the planet next door slowly and awkwardly adjusting to the new status quo. The very real possibility exists that Bernice has gone a bit potty with grief (although I didn’t buy that), and the lack of immediate closure on say, Braxiatel just makes you wonder even more how he’s getting on. (Getting an immediate answer to What Happened To Emile was a definite surprise, but it’s not as if his situation is resolved here.) Flint’s overall disinterest in Dellah and its upheaval somehow makes it feel more real, like a news story you’re sick of hearing about even though it’s still terrible. Even the victory won against the Entities feels temporary and entirely lucky, because he happened to be looking for Benny and that happened to lead him to a telepath. (Dave Stone-y sidestep: how’s this for an Elseworld? This entire “Gods” setup would have been a great pay-off for the Psi-Powers arc. You could keep all the morally grey stuff because it’s all done to stop a problem even the Time Lords and the People can’t solve. Ah well!)

The Mary-Sue Extrusion seems like a good use of Dave Stone’s talents, or bad habits if you’re so inclined. He can ramble and sidestep and not even write a book about Bernice per se, and still service the ongoing story in the end. (When we finally do get to Bernice she’s on reliably good form. “‘It’s a stupid grenade … It’s thrown into a room and, once primed, it hunts down the stupidest person in it and detonates…’ ‘Well, I personally think that certain tropes and themes to be found in Finnegan’s Wake were rather overdone,’ said Bernice, instantly and brightly.”) Flint is a decent enough protagonist, though I’m not sure he really evolves through the telling: he is neither as organic nor as artificial as he appears, but he already seemed comfortable with that knowledge. The main issue here is that the really satisfying stuff doesn’t occur until you’re a ways in already, and some of the really Dave Stone-y chaff is liable to fall away from memory entirely after that. It’s marginally more fun to think about than it is to read, then, but it’s at least a close race. I’m glad he’s got another assignment coming up. I hope it agrees with him.

7/10