Vila is in bad trouble:

Avon and Dayna find a guard with a knife in his back:

Some good Servalan/ Cally banter:

Tarrant reasons out who Avon is:

The new crew are formally introduced:

The Chengans use spare part surgery to maintain the longevity of their race. They harvest the bodies of the primitives on their own planet and scavenge the battlegrounds of the war with the Andromedans for survivors to maintain their stock. They have the technology to paralyse their patient’s bodies before extinguishing life.

Their hospital ships appear to contain equipment to help heal their patients. Cally’s burns were treated by a restorative helmet that has a transparent facemask. The Chengan nurse tests how the healing process is going on Cally with a handheld sensor that makes part of the burn that isn’t fully healed feel "a bit tender."

There’s not a great deal that’s new here. Avon, Cally, Vila, Dayna and Servalan all wear their clothes from Aftermath. Tarrant, Klegg and all the other members of the Federation Death Squad wear the standard Federation trooper outfits.

The Chengans get the bulk of the new costumes. The Hi-Techs wear figure-hugging lycra and velour jumpsuits in black with a sliver belt around the waist. This is topped off with outrageous black capes and black helmets with red lights set into a silver panel at the front. They of course wear big boots too.

The Chengan nurses wear a variation of the traditional nurse’s outfit, only in navy blue with green aprons and a green and white hat. They wear green plastic gowns when they’re about to perform surgery- and Vila and Cally also get to wear these gowns.

At the very end of the episode we see a glimpse of some new costumes for Vila and Cally. Cally wears a sky blue jumpsuit with beige boots and Vila is wearing a beige top with a lace up front and dark brown trousers. We’ll be seeing these again next episode I’d wager.

There aren’t many options, so almost by default it has to be the Primitives costumes. These must be the only primitives on BBC TV to have ever discovered how to print tribal designs onto plastic sheets and then the sheets as if they’re authentic tribal weavings. These are worn over a yellow skirt and accessorised with metal arm plates and for Mall a very large, plumed helmet.

Both Cally and Vila drink a green liquid in the Chengan hospital and take a pill which they claim contains trace elements, but actually causes paralysis prior to the harvesting of their bodies.

Powerplay provides our first glimpse of The Liberator cabins. Sadly they’re not very inspiring. The one we see is a small room with light panels above a rather small bed (that has a silver duvet and silver pillows). There is a chair but no other furniture in the room and the whole room is too silver and rather uninspired considering the size of the ship.

We also see the inspection channels that run the length of the ship. These are accessed by going down a ladder after going through one of the inspection hatches that are unclipped and lifted from points in the corridors around the ship. The channels themselves are tall enough to stand up in and move around and are all lit with red light.

We also glimpse the electronic door that leads into the Liberator’s strong room that contains all the money and precious jewels, as was mentioned way back in Cygnus Alpha.

Avon operates the teleport to bring Cally and Vila back aboard the Liberator moments before the Chengans extinguish their lives.

No teleport bracelets are lost this episode, though the receiver on Vila’s bracelet is faulty and no messages from Zen are getting through to him.

After being used extensively last episode, Orac does not even appear in this episode.

This episode we hear that Blake is uninjured and en-route for the planet Epheron.

After the astonishing amount of kisses last episode, we’re back to normal this week, with nothing really going on at all.

Servalan is doing her best to cling to power while she’s away from earth. She’s at her imperious best throughout this episode, telling Cally that she’s known power too long to give it up easily and giving orders even though no-one on the hospital ship is listening.

Her finest moment this episode comes when she arrives in the reception area on Chenga. She strides up to the receptionist and once again is ignored. This really annoys her, you can tell, and so she tells the receptionist just who she is, declaring, "I want to see a senior official. I want to see him here and I want to see him now!" Funnily enough the receptionist complies with this. Well you would do, wouldn’t you?

The main guest star of this episode is the iconic Michael Sheard playing Klegg. He needs no introduction really, but for completeness sake he played more guest roles in Doctor Who than anyone else, having been in The Ark, The Mind of Evil, Pyramids of Mars, and The Invisible Enemy before making this episode and then subsequently appearing in Castrovalva and Remembrance of the Daleks as well as the Big Finish/ BBC 7 audio adventure The Stones of Venice.

John Hollis who had been Sondergaard in The Mutants plays Lom one of the primitives who befriends Vila. Michael Crane who had been Blor in Monster of Peladon and was also one of the guards in Genesis of the Daleks plays his friend Mall.

One of the Hi-Techs is played by a heavily pregnant Primi Townsend (who had to have her costume let out a great deal while filming apparently) who had been Mula in The Pirate Planet.

Two members of Klegg’s Death Squad are played Pat Gorman and Max Faulkner.

The Chengan receptionist is played by Helen Blatch who was in both The Deadly Assassin and The Twin Dilemma (may my bones rot for mentioning it).

Making their first appearance in Blake’s 7 after many appearances in Doctor Who’s seventeenth season are the strange hubcaps that set designers at the BBC seem to think look vaguely sci-fi. They’d been in The Armageddon Factor, Destiny of the Daleks and on the legs of Scaroth’s ship in City of Death and here they’re sprayed gold and are on the walls of the Chengan Reception Area.

This is neither bleak nor particularly camp, so we’re in the middle of the Campometer scale this week.

Like Aftermath this episode is something of a retread of a previous episode and some familiar themes. We’ve got the murder mystery of Mission to Destiny (right down to the there could be someone else on board we don’t know about decoy and the life capsules) mixed with some primitives and some almost topical social comment with the idea of organ harvesting. Terry Nation was quite shameless about his recycling. However, the fact that it’s taken me 19 years to realise this goes to show that it doesn’t matter at all. This is a highly entertaining episode raised above the ordinary for being effectively the second part of a story begun in Aftermath and for having enough witty lines and good performances to lift it above your average episode of the show.

The scenes on the Liberator have a rather nice sense of suspense, more so at the time I suspect than they do now, as we know Tarrant will be in the show for the next two seasons. Still there are enough moments of misdirection to make for a pretty effective murder mystery, although the fact that it’s Klegg’s rather nastier than usual bunch of Federation guards means that our allegiance is very definitely with Avon and Dayna. Tarrant makes a good impression here, even if the character is obviously written with an older actor in mind. Steve Pacey gives a strong performance though that wins over the viewer fairly quickly.

This contrasts nicely with the more humorous scenes on Chenga with Vila. Michael Keating really excels in these especially in the scenes where he is pretending to communicate with his men and his scenes with the Hi-Techs are a delight too, especially so as the audience really sense they are not quite as they seem when Vila doesn’t. His reunion with Cally is delightful too. Both Michael Keating and Jan Chappell play this scene with genuine warmth and it’s a nice pay off for the audience who have been waiting for some of the crew to meet again all season. Jan Chappell also plays her scenes with Servalan on the hospital ship very well, showing us a glimpse of the fearless and gutsy Cally we’ve not seen for quite a while.

Some commentators, Paul Darrow included have commented that the more heroic Avon we see in this episode is somewhat out of step with the earlier Avon, but I disagree. I think this is a logical step forward for him now that he has the Liberator. I think even his selfish streak would want to do whatever it takes to keep hold of the ship, even if that means he has to have the occasional selfless heroic moment every so often. It might have been an interesting way to develop his character, but there are plenty of other developments to come that develop him in interesting ways.

So by the end of the episode we have a new crew established and Blake and Jenna are a distant memory. Now we just have to see how they all work together.

Introducing the new crew