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by Simon Hart |
Blake and his crew are tired. Tired of running from the Federation and Blake is tired of not having much to show for his crusade. He wants to get one planet freed from the Federation and he wants a base from which to work. Could Horizon be that planet?
With a big reward for capturing Blake and an even bigger reward for capturing the Liberator, the Kommissar of Horizon is anxious to keep hold of his prisoners long enough for Blake to hand over the Liberator. Will Blake acquiesce before the radiation sickness from the mine kills him?
Selma has influence over Ro, the puppet ruler of Horizon. Will she be able to persuade him to side with Blake against the Federation before they are both executed?
Avon. Although he considers running, he doesn’t when he realises the odds are stacked against him, so he goes and rescues Blake and co. It might have been selfish reasoning, but he does save the crew from 30 time units of mining.
Avon kills four Federation guards at the mine once he comes down to Horizon and takes a pot shot at Blake, which narrowly misses him. Blake deploys the careful strategy of not running away to destroy all three ships in Flotilla 13 as the ships hadn’t been protected for passing through the magnetic barrier.
Zen proves his worth: BLAKE: Carrying what? Blake plays the percentages: BLAKE: Well, it's as good as any other. We know the
Federation only visit it once a year. It's on the edge of the spiral rim.
Oh, hell, I'm tired of running, Jenna. We must get at least one planet
behind us. Avon explains why he isn’t going down to Horizon: AVON: No, I am not. I am not expendable, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going.
Blake sets the seeds of doubt in Ro’s mind: BLAKE: When you are all dead, Ro, the Federation will use this as a booster planet to extend their empire further. With their new ships, with your fuel. You are digging your own graves, Ro. They code-named this place Horizon. It's a horizon you will never cross.
Fed Tech: The Federation have installed a magnetic barrier in space to stop ships coming to Horizon. Ordinary ships would have to have their hulls demagnetised or else be protected by a force wall to be able to travel through this.
The Federation relies on an element named Monopasioum 239 to fuel its latest Hyperspace ships. Horizon is one of a few planets where this element can be mined. Being a good dictatorship, Horizon is well stocked with torture devices. The first is a bed type affair, that when triggered flashes in green and pink to disorientate the person strapped to the bed. The second is a more portable boxy device. The subject’s hand is placed on a sensor plate, and then has another sensor placed on top of this. Pain is generated in the subject while being questioned, pain that will kill after prolonged exposure.
Fashion: Blake again wears a variation of his clothes seen in Redemption. He wears the big green bat wing jacket with a white peasant shirt underneath. Avon is wearing the silver leather costume from Shadow, complete with thigh high black boots. Jenna is back in the Lycra body stocking, only this time it’s white. Over the top of this is draped a purple and pink mini-dress with extra drapes that float down the back. Vila is dressed in a bright yellow top with brown trousers. The Komissar and his assistant are dressed in plush purple velour. They have high collars, and minor changes depending on rank. Ro’s, for example, has gold braiding around the edges of his sleeves and gold braiding around the edges of the collar.
The slaves wear typically ragged slave clothes, based on the ceremonial robes that we later see Ro and Selma wear. They are of course, very dirty! Selma’s ceremonial robes are predominantly a light blue pleated material dress with feathers across the shoulders. She has a silver belt with jewels attached to it that drape down the front of the dress. This episode’s most outrageous costume: Ro’s ceremonial outfit is quite outrageous. It’s made of the same blue material as Selma’s, but his reveals far more bare chest. He has a skirt in the same blue material, with a silver sash down the middle and a big belt. On his head he wears a gold helmet with an enormous plume of feathers. Outrageous!
Food and Drink: Blake is seen drinking something light blue at the start of the episode. Vila drinks a green vitamin solution that he’d like Cally to lace with Soma. Both Jenna and Blake both drink a mouthful of water on Horizon. We also see the miners feeding from a bowl of slop that looks like porridge.
Avon is on duty this episode. He teleports Blake and Jenna down to Horizon, after overhearing them talking about him. He then sends down Gan and Vila. He tried to persuade Cally to run away with him, but fails, and sends her down to investigate what’s happening on Horizon. After checking the odds, he himself goes down, teleported by Orac, who then brings back the whole crew. Finally Avon sends Blake down to the palace, and then brings him back up once he’s helped Ro shake off the Federation shackles.
No one loses a teleport bracelet this episode.
Orac uses the standard procedure of crosschecking prisoner and execution records, and also operates the teleport again.
Love is in the air for Ro, who pines away for Selmar while watching her getting dirty in the mines. Fortunately he makes the decision to save her and they are happily reunited by the end of the episode.
There’s also some knowing looks passed between Blake and Jenna and between Avon and Cally. It’s telling that the only member of the crew that Avon asks to run away with him is Cally. She turns him down though. Maybe the feeling isn’t mutual at the moment?
Pretty much contemporaneously, William Squire appeared in The Armageddon Factor giving a far less restrained performance than he does here!
As well as being Elisabeth Sladen’s husband, Brian Miller made several contributions to Doctor Who. He was Dugdale the owner of a shoddy little booth in Snakedance and provided Dalek voices in Resurrection of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks. The location for this story’s filming was Clearwell Scowles in Gloucestershire. This is very close the caves used for filming The Christmas Invasion and The Satan Pit.
This one is neutral. It’s not particularly bleak, as it does have a happy ending and it’s not really all the camp either.
Horizon has a reputation for being rather worthy but also a rather dull episode. I think that’s a bit unfair to be honest, as I’ve always found an engaging and entertaining episode. Allan Prior would later write scripts that were often impractical to make on Blake’s 7’s budget, or episodes that were just plain dull or simply odd, but here it gets it about right. He concentrates his storyline on colonial politics, and what it means to be a far outpost of a huge empire. Drawing parallels on the last days of the British Raj in India or maybe the independence of the African states, he presents a small case study of a planet that has slowly had its customs and traditions subsumed by being part of the Federation. Ro is a puppet ruler educated and allowed to rule by the Federation, to show how progressive the Federation can be, but he’s shown to be naïve and unaware of what’s really going on. This is where the power of Blake and his crew come in; they upset the status quo and inform of the facts he was shielded from, and with the help of his lover, Selmar, his horizons are broadened and he does the ultimate act of betrayal and kills the Komissar, freeing himself and his people from the tyrannical rule that was coming. After the sidelining of Blake and his crew in Weapon, we get plenty of involvement from them all this week, well except Gan who gets about 6 lines and then is knocked out for most of the episode. Blake gets suspicious of Avon and his motives and uses Jenna as his confident, Vila gets to be concerned about work again (only this time we see him doing it too!) and Cally begins to change from a hard-bitten guerrilla to the Liberator’s voice of reason and nurse. It’s not a great move for the character really.
The episode belongs to Avon though. He gets all the best lines, gets to be self interested and he gets to save everyone too. Paul Darrow relishes another chance to take the limelight and gives a great performance, milking his lines for all they’re worth. I like the fact that he doesn’t go back to save the crew through choice, more because it’s the only way to guarantee his safety… well for the time being anyway.
This is a slightly above average episode lifted by great performances, strong design work (the Aztec/ Mayan influences on the sets work really well) and some decent direction.
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