Avon is distracted by a piece of rock. This is a rather special rock though- a living rock that thrives on the dark side of a planet. The rock though has some special properties that keep it alive in the dark... but what help will these properties be to Avon and his crew?

Meanwhile the rest of the crew plan a heist of the fabled harvest of Kairos...

Kairos

All woman!

Servalan is after the Liberator again, seemingly to destroy it. For some reason she's now decided that Tarrant is her biggest threat rather than Avon and is setting out to finish him and the others off once and for all. However even her best tactical computers are being outsmarted by Tarrant's rather fine tactical skills. Could an unskilled labourer be the answer to all Servalan's problems?

A labourer named Jarvik has been openly derisive about Servalan's lack of success against the Liberator crew. He claims he could take the ship and her crew with three pursuit ships, something not even Servalan can manage.

Jarvik: A Man's Man

Will his plan have something to do with the fabled Harvest of Kairos and the incredibly rare and expensive Kairopan?

Kairopan

Avon.

Sopron saves the day in a wholly unexpected way by reflecting back an image of a slightly more advanced ship than the Liberator and scaring off Servalan. Who saw that coming?

An impressive lump of Sopron

Avon kills three of the guards who are about to infiltrate the Liberator and does so rather smugly.

Servalan callously leaves all the slaves who harvested the Kairopan on Kairos to die and one of her guards accidentally kills Jarvik on the Liberator's flight deck.

Jarvik makes an immediate impression on Servalan:

Vila dreams of being rich (again):

VILA: 'Course I may settle down, you know, have kids. What do you think, Cally?
CALLY: What do I think of what?
VILA: The lakeside of Gardinos. We could go swimming by the light of three moons.
DAYNA: Who could? You and Cally?
VILA: No, me and the kids.
CALLY: [To Vila] But you haven't got any children.
VILA: Not yet, I haven't.
TARRANT: Vila, you're dreaming. Two weeks of that, and you'd be looking for something to break into.

Servalan takes control of the Liberator

DAYNA: They've all gone. Except Jarvik. And he's not going anywhere anymore.
TARRANT: A waste. He was a special sort of man.
AVON: Spare us the eulogy. He was a Federation thug.
TARRANT: No. No, that isn't what he was.
AVON: Zen. Servalan's voice pattern: erase it.
ZEN: Confirmed.

Mention is made of Servalan's reliance on computer predictions over instinct. Instinct wins out against the computer every time according to the outcome, where Servalan loses the Liberator because she will not believe what she sees with her own eyes.

A old fashioned, Apollo style lunar module is found in a warehouse on Kairos. How and why and when it got is a bit of a mystery, but shows that primitive space modules were used in early exploration of this part of the Universe.

The Liberator crew stranded!

The Liberator crew all have new outfits this week. Avon is wearing a green and beige outfit, with panels of beige corduroy on the top with straps across the green shoulders. He wears this top over a black top and beige trousers and dark brown boots.

Vila is in beige karate style costume again with cream piping worn with brown leather boots.

Dayna is wearing a starry blue jumpsuit with gold shoulders and cuffs and long sleeves. She compliments this with gold shoes.

Cally is wearing a beige and scarlet top with a V motif down the middle over a beige top, worn with a scarlet belt. She has beige trousers and knee high scarlet leather boots.

Tarrant wears a zip up beige top with brown stripes and matching trousers with a single brown stripe on them. He has dark brown boots.

Jarvik wears a grey jumpsuit with blue across the shoulders and neckline. He later changes into a Blake style peasant shirt worn under a brown leather top covered in studs with brown trousers and boots.

The guards on Kairos wear sparkly black jumpsuits with padded red and white shoulders, red piping around the the lapels. This worn with black gloves and boots and a white and black helmet.

Servalan wins this hands down. She's in an off the shoulder very clingy white dress, which on its own would be fine, however the right shoulder of the dress features an outrageously huge flower styled bow in silver and white. She wears this with a silver chocker, silver high heel sandals and sparkly earrings. Completely outrageous!

Servalan and Jarvik drink a couple of glasses of some noxious blue drink through bendy straws.

Relaxing in Servalan's boudoir

We get another glimpse at a liberator cabin this week and it's rather tastefully lit in purple and green giving it a rather unearthly feel.

Dayna teleports Tarrant over to the Kairos Transporter. Later on Cally teleports Servalan onto the Liberator for the first time. Presumably one of the many Federation guards brought on board the ship teleports Jarvik down to Kairos and them back onto the ship with Dayna.

At least four teleport bracelets are lost this week, as Jarvik takes the ones belonging to Avon, Tarrant, Cally and Vila. Thinking about it though, it's probably more than that, as the crew would never retrieve the ones worn by Servalan and her guards when they leave the Liberator at the end of the episode.

After a star part in Dawn of the Gods, Orac doesn't contribute a great deal to this episode, other than to help Avon detrmine the true nature of the Sopron. Orac sees the living rock as a very advanced computer.

There's the matter of that degrading act Servalan was subjected to on the flight deck. After her initial disgust about this treatment, she shacks up with Jarvik and they're seen together in her boudoir with the implication, that, you know... Obviously she's after a bit of a rough, but she does seem rather sad for a moment at least, when he's shot down in front of her.

A disgusting and degrading act on the flight deck

Well, where do we start? This is probably the episode where Jacqueline Pearce decides to really go for it in the camp stakes from throwing her arms out wide to protect her guards from Jarvik and the truly outrageous dress she wears.

"Will you OBEY ME!"

Up until now the camp aspects of the character have always been kept in check by moments of real threat, but her performance here tips over the edge and while it's enjoyable as a one-off, this is the template used for many of her later appearances in the show. In the plus side, it's a very enjoyable interpretation of the character, almost as if now that she's got the power she's always aimed for, she can afford to sit back and enjoy it for a while.

This was the first episode of Blake's 7 to be directed by Gerald Blake. He'd directed his two Doctor Who stories by the point in his career, The Abominable Snowmen in 1968 and 1978's The Invasion of Time.

This episode’s big guest star is Andrew Burt, who would go on to appear in 1983's Terminus.

Frank Gatliff had appeared as Ortron in 1974's Monster of Peladon. Anthony Gardener who plays Captain Shad had been Alvis in The Macra Terror in 1967.

Frank Gatliff as Dastor

Obviously this is really camp.

Where was Chris Boucher this week? This episode feels jarringly out of step with the series so far. It seems that Ben Steed really hadn't done very much research into the show and Chris Boucher didn't really do anything to correct this.

For a start the motivation of the Liberator crew seems wrong. Here they're pirates, trying to steal the Kairopan for the monetary rewards it'll give them. Only a few episodes prior to this, in Powerplay, much was made of the fact that the Liberator has huge reserves of jewels and currency, so why the need to steal the Harvest? Just for something to do it seems, as it's very unlikely they'd have used it all up in the preceding weeks.

Secondly, especially considering the events of early in the season, Servalan's decided that Tarrant is now her biggest threat among the Liberator crew. That feels plucked out of thin air to justify Jarvik's involvement in the plot and is especially strange considering Servalan has never even met Tarrant.

In fact, looking ahead for a moment, this episode really feels like it belongs in Season 4, where the crew are more on the back-foot than they are at this point in the series. There the scramble for funds would feel more in keeping and Jarvik's involvement in the plot would have made more sense as yet another person who knows Servalan's true identity and someone not afraid to shout about it.

Then there's the rampant sexism. It's not really defensible and becomes laughable when poor Andrew Burt is forced to declaim about the strengths of men against women and men against computers at every possible opportunity. It feels forced here, but it isn't as bad as it will be in other Ben Steed scripts to come.

Another disgusting and dgrading act on the flight deck

Anyway, despite all this this episode almost works. It's quite enjoyable to watch, despite some shortcomings in the production. And we all know what the shortcoming was...

The very frightening Kairopan Monster, yesterday