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by Simon Hart |
Gan’s limiter is malfunctioning and he needs help fast. Blake needs to get him to a surgeon as soon as possible, but all facilities in the sector are too far away. Space Station XK-72 seems to be the nearest by a direct route, but if so why is Zen refusing to take them there? What danger lies ahead for the Liberator and will Avon be leaving the crew?
Three pursuit ships are sent to destroy the Liberator after Kayn sends a message to the Federation telling them Blake is at the station. Will they get there in time to destroy the ship before Gan is operated on?
The Liberator controls go off line with Zen when the ship is en-route to Station XK-72… can the crew get themselves there in one piece, and is something nasty lurking in the space between them and the station…
Blake But only just. They just about get away from the pursuit ships in time, having saved Gan’s life.
A rogue plasma bolt from a Federation pursuit ship accidentally destroys the station and the unspecified number of people who live and work on it while trying to destroy the Liberator.
Avon has had enough: AVON:
Blake, in the unlikely event that we
survive this -- Blake show’s some steel: BLAKE:
How soon can you complete?
Fed Tech: The Liberator’s medical kit contains tranquilliser pads. Two of these are used on Gan which we’re told would "knock one of us out for about 100 hours", so they’re pretty strong then. Primary and secondary computer control on the Liberator are controlled by Zen, and when they go off line, all the small compensations for power surges and flight drift from the programmed co-ordinates have to be made manually, which causes stress for all concerned. Space Station ZK72 uses a big telephone like machine for station wide communication. This has a large handset with lots of multi-coloured buttons next to it. Gan’s limiter has micro-linkages that have burned out causing a conductivity loss. This sends scrambled signals to his brain.
Professor Kayn prefers to use a small, more mobile communicator that is slim and hand held. Traditional dial faced stop clocks are still in use. Fashion: The staff of XK72 wear variations of the same uniform, depending on their rank or the section they work in. Farron wears burgundy trousers with a matching long sleeved burgundy jacket with three silver stripes to denote his rank on each shoulder. He wears this over a brown polo neck jumper. Kayn wears a waistcoat like brown top in brown, with three silver stripes on each shoulder, over a fawn coloured polo neck sweater. He has very clean white boots. Renor’s uniform is much the same as Kayn’s, except he only has one stripe on each shoulder. Kayn and Renal also have surgical gowns to wear. These off-white in colour with more silver stripes and each arm ends with a green cuff. There’s a hat in the same green with a silver band round the top.
There are a number of rooms seen for the first time this episode. Most significant of these is the Surgical Unit. This is a large room, in the centre of which is a bed readily equipped with large round restraints across it. These are the generators of a force field that is operated from a control panel close by. There are various medical scanners attached to the bed, including a heart monitor, a diagnostic analyser and a voray scan which uses a radio scan to transmit the images of Gan’s malfunctioning Limiter to a nearby monitor.
We also see Avon working in the Liberator’s computer control room. This is a functional room seemingly made of corrugated grey walls. As you might expect, this room is full of panels of flashing lights and levers. There is a big square ceiling high central control system in the centre of the room.
There is also a small room glimpsed as Blake attempts to find Gan. All we see though are a few more flashing lights on a panel as he opens the door. On the flight deck we see the secondary view screen that is used when the main screen is off line for some reason. It is square rather than oval like the main view screen.
It is Avon who teleports Blake over to the station, and he teleports Professor Kayn across to the Liberator. When Avon is ready to investigate the station, he gets Vila to teleport him across. Vila then operates the teleport for the rest of the episode, bringing Dr Renor over for a good flirt with Jenna. Cally later brings Avon back when he’s ready to leave. It is Avon who teleports Kayn and Renor back to XK72.
Two teleport bracelets are lost this episode when Kayn and Renor return to the space station wearing theirs just before the station is destroyed. Looking at the bracelet rack this episode, this seems to take them down to a total of 6 bracelets… that’s one each. I hope they don’t lose any more!
There are no little glances, touches, hand holding or hugging this episode at all. The crew are all in such bad moods anyway that this isn’t a surprise. Jenna though, does get to flirt outrageously (for Blake’s 7 anyway) with Dr. Renor when he arrives on the Liberator. That’s it though.
Peter Brachacki, who designed the original TARDIS control room sets for the pilot episode, designed the sets for this episode. His new sets here don’t show much of the uniqueness of that design, sadly. The costumes though show equal flair with Rupert Jarvis’s Doctor Who efforts. This was the man who brought us such delights as Nightmare of Eden’s Mandrells, Skagra’s hat in the unfinished Shada and the actually very good costumes for The Stones of Blood, as well as the mostly dreary work on Underworld. He had been joint designer on Project: Avalon, but from this episode to the end of the season he’s sole costume designer. On the acting front we have the mighty Julian Glover who had played King Richard in The Crusade and who would go on to play Scaroth and his various human guises in City of Death a year after this episode was broadcast. Ian Thompson who played Farran was Hetra, one of the Optera in The Web Planet and also played Malsan in The Chase shortly afterwards.
Not camp or particularly bleak. Just dull. As the Campometer doesn’t measure dullness, I shall go a slightly bleak rating.
There’s nothing actually wrong with this episode. The problem is there’s nothing very much to get excited about. The main problem with it is that it’s very difficult to care about Gan. Of all the characters in the original line up, Gan is by far the most under developed, and when finally he is the focal character of an episode, he spends most of it unconscious.
It’s a shame because there was some potential in the character, and the whole reason why he has the limiter is left unexplored. Some other commentators on the series have come up with elaborate theories on this matter, but these remain supposition because the fact is, of all the many regulars, Gan is the one we know least about, so asking the audience to care about his plight, particularly after he’s tried to murder his crew mates seems a bit odd.
It also doesn’t help that the trip across the prohibited zone of space and its red vortex feels like its been padded out to fill out an under running episode. This should add lots of jeopardy to the episode, but the bad moods of the crew (or is it the cast?) are just irritating and their sniping at each other just isn’t up to the highly entertaining standard set by the last few episodes.
Despite this, the last third of the episode is pretty good and probably could have served just as well as the focus for the story. There could have been further exploration of the idea of a neutral station and the tensions that a Federation loving surgeon could have with the station staff and with Blake. With Avon seemingly set on leaving the crew and joining the station’s scientific research teams there was a lot of potential in this episode that just isn’t exploited. Still, Julian Glover gives a very good performance as Kayn, as the misguided Federation loving surgeon who refuses to operate on Gan because of his association with Blake. His sense of self-righteousness comes across very well. You can really sense the anger bubbling underneath his calm demeanour, which ultimately comes out when he unexpectedly strangles Farran at the end of the episode. Despite some great model work and explosions ultimately this episode is dull and unfocussed.
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