In this exchange Vargas explains to Blake why he should take the Liberator. Note Blake’s nice line in sarcasm!

VARGAS: I am directly descended by the true and chosen line. Mine is the power by right.

BLAKE: But this planet was uninhabited until the Federation brought the first batch of fifty criminals here. Is that the noble line from which you stem.

VARGAS: My ancestors came here on that first shipment. They had nothing. The Federation gave them no tools, no supplies. So they worked together. They worked hard. And made a community. There were children born here. They were settlers trying to build a new world on a new planet. Later, more Federation prisoners came. There were disagreements. The community began to break up. They fought and killed. All that they had achieved was being destroyed. And it was my great-great-grandfather who found a way to unit them. (picks up old, rusty revolver from table) He gave them a religion. Brought them together in the love and fear of God. That is the line I stem from. (yells) That is what gives me the right to rule.

And finally, Vargas’s last line is the stuff of Brian Blessed legend and deserves to be up there with his classic "DIVE!" from Flash Gordon…

VARGAS: I was their priest. I shall return to them a god... A GOD... (he explodes!)

Being set mostly on a primitive penal colony, this episode doesn’t feature much in the way of distinctive technology. Leylan has swapped his Tupperware beakers for metal ones in this episode, and uses a log machine to verify his report on the actions witnessed in Space Fall, which is hand activated and locked by pressure switches that seem to recognise his hand scan. It’s very chunky

There is mention of the Aquitar project, a large scale project which has been studying the possibility of Teleportation. It seems that a new alloy called Aquitar, could possibly have the right properties to teleport living beings but the process couldn’t be stabilised enough to send living beings through the stresses of teleportation and come out alive at the other end.

Avon uses multi-coloured ring binder hole protectors to mark which switches to use to operate the teleport, which is nice. Obviously no-one ever used to actually protect punched holes and in the future they’re being put to better use.

Traditional items like torches of fire, candles, knives and a rather rusty revolver are examples of the low level technology seen on Cygnus Alpha.

Jenna’s exploration of the wardrobe room results in her changing her clothes for the first time. Of all the options available to her, she chooses a really vile outfit featuring too much purple velour. She wears a top made up of patches of different colours with a multi-coloured satin collar. This is over purple velour trousers.

Jenna's delightful new outfit!

Compared to this the rest of the episode features some pretty standard costumes. The priests on Cygnus Alpha, as you might expect, wear plain brown Hessian habits and only the priests are allowed to wear anything more exciting.

Kara, the female priest wears a scarlet pleated robe beneath her habit, and Vargas has a beige habit, beneath which he wears a robe of a similar style to Kara’s only in purple. He has very clean white pumps too!

Again not much in the way of food is seen in this episode, but it’s probably worth mentioning here that the drugs given to the convicts on Cygnus Alpha look suspiciously like Extra Strong Mints…

It’s our first whole episode on the Liberator, and so Blake, Jenna and Avon begin to explore the ship. The ship is implied to be really big, full of connecting hexagonal corridors, all lit up with white tube lights inset into them.

On the flight deck we’re introduced to Zen, the Liberator’s computer who’s screen dominates the left had corner of the flight deck. At the right hand side, past the view screen (which appears with a black oval outline across a brown screen), there’s the Liberator armoury.

Welcome Zen

The Liberator guns are some sort of energy weapon that glow when fired and make a sort of "wow-a-whizz" noise. Interestingly, the ship has some kind of detector that only allows one person to take one gun at a time, making other hot to the touch which is as Avon puts it, "A single function isomorphic response", which of course, you guessed, didn’t you? This function would be forgotten about pretty quickly, when it became easier to send one person to collect all the guns for each mission.

Blake and Avon consider their elaborate toothpicks!

They also visit the teleport area for the first time. The main feature of this room is the teleport bay which is comprised of blocks of glass that shimmer with orange light as the teleport is activated. There’s the operation panel just opposite, with more of the leather seating similar to that seen on the flight deck, and to the left of the teleport bay there is a stand which has racks of teleport bracelets in it.

Blake and Avon count the Teleport bracelets before they lose the lot.

Interestingly, this episode seems to imply that there is more than one teleport bay in the area, as Vargas teleports onto The Liberator in a different bay to that which Blake, Gan and Vila arrive in seconds later. This is never used again, even when lots of people are being teleported back to the ship.

Jenna and Avon both explore the ship while Blake is down on Cygnus Alpha. Jenna finds the very exciting wardrobe room, well I imagine it’s very exciting, as we never get to see it, but it most contain some of the most outlandish clothes in the universe. I imagine it’s huge and that it takes them the duration of the first three seasons to find the most flamboyant clothes that are housed in there, as they seem to find the dull ones first, like the special down on the planet anoraks. It’s just lucky I suppose that the room has clothes that fit the crew perfectly.

There’s also the room that Avon falls in love with straight away that contains jewellery, loose gems and gold and other precious things. This will prove useful in several later adventures…

We have our very first use of the teleport in this episode. When Blake is teleported down to the surface of Cygnus Alpha, Avon operates the teleport to send him down and bring him back. The second time he goes down, Avon and Jenna operate it between them, and finally when bringing him back, along with Vargas, Vila and Gan, Jenna is the one who operates it, after Avon tries to stop her.

The various stages of Teleporting

Oh dear! Right from the start, Blake proves rather inept at keeping hold of the teleport bracelets. Initially, there are 18 in the bracelet stand in the Teleport area, and Blake takes several of these down to the planet with him so that he can bring back the convicts with him.

Once Vargas has captured him, he taunts Blake by destroying them in front of him. Although Blake claims they "have no value in themselves" he’s noticeably annoyed when Vargas destroys two of them! At the end of the episode, another is destroyed when Vargas explodes in space, and presumably most of the bracelets Blake took down with him are left on the planet, as only Gan and Vila come back up to the ship. Not a very successful start!

In a highly unusual move, Gan gets lucky here, sharing a rather passionate kiss with Kara, as the convicts begin to explore Cygnus Alpha for the first time. Indeed, Kara seems to think highly of him, as she later gets herself killed when she calls out his name to save him in the middle of the end of episode fight.

The simmering tension between Blake and Jenna also continues here. She rushes to hug him after he successfully teleports back to The Liberator, and she seems determined to give him all the time he asked for on Cygnus Alpha when Avon suggests that they leave.

Gan gets lucky!

The guest stars of this episode, Brian Blessed and Pamela Salem both appeared in Doctor Who. Brian Blessed was the shouty and loud King Yrcanos in Trial of a Time Lord parts 5-8 and the lovely Pamela Salem was one of the voices of Xoanon in Face of Evil, but is better remembered as either Toos in Robots of Death or Professor Rachel Jensen in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Brian Blessed as Vargas

Robert Russell who plays Laran was The Caber in Terror of the Zygons and a guard in Power of the Daleks, while Peter Childs who plays Arco was Jack Ward in Mark of the Rani.

Pamela Salem as Kara

A rather nasty cruxcifiction

This is another rather nasty episode, with a glimpse of a rather nasty crucifixion on a St Andrews Cross, and a very grim atmosphere on Cygnus Alpha all round. There is only a wonderful moment of camp when Vargas is teleported in space booming "I should be a GOD!" and then explodes, but that’s not enough to lift Cygnus Alpha from a high bleak factor.

This is another really good episode. There’s a neat recap of the events of Space Fall in Leylan’s report at the start which serves as a reminder of that episode’s events before The London arrives at Cygnus Alpha and the calm on that ship contrasts neatly with the first few scenes on the Liberator, which still at this point is a quite and alien and unnerving place for Blake, Avon and Jenna. It’s a shame that some of that feeling is lost as the series develops as I rather like the idea of the shop being alive and a rather unpredictable place to be, but I suppose it was inevitable that the Liberator would become comfortable and safe as the series goes on.

Once we’re down on Cygnus Alpha itself we’re in a stock sci-fi setting, a primitive planet controlled by religion, but it is done in a thought provoking way, which means this episode stands up to repeated viewing. Brian Blessed hisses and booms his way through his part, and is entertainingly over the top, while Pamela Salem gives a thoughtful and sympathetic performance and is rather sexy too!

The inventive design work on show also helps lift this episode above the ordinary; the statue of the deity the convicts pray to is an interestingly twisted design for instance. There are some more good matte shots used on the surface of Cygnus Alpha (and more night filming too) as well as yet more wonderful model work, lift the production values to a higher standard than you’d expect. You can sense that the BBC designers are slightly more at ease in the stone walled primitivism than they are in the future, and everything looks and sounds very solid, even the plastic wood door. Despite this, the mix of film and video tape scenes in the middle of the well staged fight at the end of the episode feels awkward, although it looks like the scene of Pamela Salem shouting at Gan in this scene has been filmised for the DVD.

Interesting Deities on Cygnus Alpha

The regulars continue to all be served. There’s some marvellous character stuff between Avon and Jenna, particularly as Avon attempts to convince Jenna to run out on Blake, with Jenna’s sense of fairness getting the better of her and gives Blake his time. I love the quiet menace she gives off when she asks Avon if he could kill someone face to face… there’s a subtle warning there!

Blake continues to be passionate about his cause and gets a particularly worthy moral speech, where he attempts to browbeat Vargas. Gareth Thomas’s performance is quite spellbinding as they attempt to out shout each other. Brain Blessed wins of course, but it’s a good moment, if you turn the volume on your TV down a little!

Gan seems to be a very willing follower and seems to give in to both Kara and Blake as if needs to take orders from someone. Michael Keating gives another brilliant Vila performance, giving this episode some nice comic relief as a neat contrast to the bleakness of Cygnus Alpha. There’s also interest if you’re watching this episode for the time in who might make it. Selman and Arco look like potential members for a while and their deaths come as a bit of a shock first time round.

"Shut up!" Vila and Arco

Best of all Dudley Simpson gives us his first ever snatch of Teleporting music! It’s difficult to imagine the crew teleporting without it and it’s a part of the show’s charm to me.

"A Goddddddddddddddd!"