The Federation have changed their cipher codes again, and so Blake and Co head to the planet Fosforon to steal a TP crystal that contains the new A-Line message codes. He sends Avon and Vila down, as an old friend of Avon’s, Tynus, is the base security commander…

A wanderer class ship, over 700 years old, suddenly turns up close to Fosforon. Its course has taken it through 61 Cygni, otherwise known as The Darkling Zone, an area of space where spaceships are mysteriously destroyed. Could something be alive on the ship? Cally believes so, but if there is, what can it be?

Blake.

Nominally anyway. He manages to find a cure for the virus that has wiped out the population of Q Base on Fosforon, and also manages to get hold of the TP crystal they went looking for. He also leaves a plague beacon to isolate the planet, thus not condemning the chasing Servalan to certain death.

In a story that is full of death, there’s just a single death directly attributable to the Liberator crew this week and that’s Tynus’s, who fights with Avon and ends up electrocuting himself in the exposed working of the A Line Transmitter.

Vila and Avon spar about Avon having a friend:

VILA: I hope you can trust him.
AVON: I told you, he's a friend of mine.
VILA: Yes, I always knew you had a friend. I used to say to people "I bet Avon's got a friend, somewhere in the galaxy".
AVON: And you were right. That must be a novel experience for you.

Vila tries to find out if Avon likes butter

Avon reminds Tynus of the past:

TYNUS: You know you're asking me to commit suicide.
AVON: Is there something wrong with your memory, Tynus? You owe me, remember?
TYNUS: Not enough to put my head on the block.
AVON: [To Vila] We were in a fraud together. When I was arrested, I kept my mouth shut. [To Tynus] If I hadn't, old friend, you would be sweating out the rest of your life on a convict planet, and that could still happen if I were to let the authorities know.
TYNUS: So that's the way it is?
AVON: Well, let's just say I did you a favour and now I'm collecting.
VILA: Nice. When Avon holds out the hand of friendship, watch his other hand. That's the one with the hammer.

Avon and his "old friend" Tynus

Blake decides to do the right thing, much to Avon’s disgust:

BLAKE: Transmission ends.
VILA: Fosforon ends.
CALLY: It's no joke Vila.
BLAKE: Cally, Jenna, get the ship moving. I'm going to put out a plague warning.
AVON: Are you crazy?
BLAKE: I've got to warn all traffic to stay away from Fosforon until that virus burns itself out.
AVON: Listen, Blake, Servalan is on her way here. She lands on Fosforon, she gets the plague, she's off our backs for good. You cannot put out a warning.
BLAKE: Suppose some of them don't die. Suppose some of them get off in a ship. That plague goes out to all the galaxies, millions will die because of it. THAT is the one responsibility that I will not take. Zen, I want to put a plague warning transmitter into orbit round Fosforon, then set a course for the constellation Sauros, speed standard by ten.
ZEN: Confirmed.
BLAKE: There has to be a warning Jenna. There has to be.

Brush tip felt pens are still being used this far into the future.

A-Line messages are relayed using a TP crystal, which is set to decipher a particular pulse code that is used to send the message. It is the major component of the A Line Converter. The particular crystal Avon and Vila want to steal runs the spectrum between bands L-Y up to 30000 megahertz.

Avon, Vila and TP Crystal

Hibernation pills were used in early deep space travel to help with the time it took to get anywhere.

The Wanderer Class ships were used about 700 years before Blake’s time. They were infraluminal spacecraft and would have needed at least 3000 years to get to its current location in space.

A wandering Wanderer Class spaceship

Blake again wears a variation of his clothes seen in Redemption. He wears a brown bats wing sweater underneath the green leather bats wing jacket.

Avon wears his costume from Redemption again. .

Jenna is back in Lycra, a variation of the Horizon costume, only with turquoise drapes over a white body stocking, She has big silver boots and silver broaches on each shoulder and a silver belt round her waist.

Cally wears a black velvet dress with red flower designs on it. It has a plunging V-neck. There is white piping on the shoulders and frilly cuffs.

The seldom spotted Cally

Vila wears the grey chamois leather top he had worn in Weapon, with black tight fitting leather trousers.

Vila and Avon also don some rather fetching masks, which seem to be made from ski goggles.

Vila hopes the mask will take attention away from his cape

Oh my, where do you start? Every costume aside from the ones the regulars are wearing is a triumph of over the top design, from the capes made of padded plastic that look like insect carapaces for the staff of Q-Base (either in brown if in security or white if a scientist) to the strange bug like costumes of the fire fights.

But the winner in this kitsch fest of design has to be the infamous Michelin Men who board the Wanderer Class ship. The fact that they are wearing such a recognisable suit is not disguised by them putting on helmets with mouthpieces made from the same air fresheners my Grandma had all over her house when I was a kid. A triumph for June Hudson: her last hurrah as she leaves Blake’s 7.

No, no-one will notice...

Vila drinks a glass of 2 days old red wine, which Avon chastises him for, and Vila is also seen drinking some water from a fountain in Tynus’s quarters. Later Tynus brings the two of them a food pack each, made of hydrogenised proteins.

No-one was looking forward to dinner with Tynus

Cally is on duty this entire episode, sending firstly Avon and Vila down to Fosforon and later Blake too. All of them ask Cally to bring them back up, so she must spend all her time in the teleport bay this week.

No one loses a teleport bracelet this episode.

Orac analyses the information on the pathogens from the infected people on Fosforon sent from Dr Bellfriar and identifies the one that causes the infection, allowing Dr Bellfriair to devise a cure.

Jenna and Blake have an argument about the ethics of helping the people on Fosforon, which gets quite heated for a moment. Then Blake gently touches her shoulder, and she immediately capitulates. There’s definitely something there!

"Oh Blake, I just love operating the teleport!"

This is the first of four scripts from Robert Holmes, who aside from writing some of the finest Doctor Who stories ever, also script edited the show through one of its most successful periods ever, season 12-15. He had originally been approached by David Maloney to be the script editor of the series, but turned it down, suggesting Chris Boucher for the job instead.

Morris Barry, who had directed The Moonbase, Tomb of the Cyberman and The Dominators in the 1960s, plays Dr Wiler. He would go on to appear as an engineer in Creature from the Pit in late 1979.

Morris Barry takes a new direction in life

Despite the plague that kills everyone on Fosforon, this one gets a fairly high camp rating because of June Hudson. Talk about design working against the script!

Robert Holmes was a brilliant writer with a penchant for writing double acts, so it’s no surprise that the dynamics between Avon and Vila are well explored in this episode. Their dialogue is snappy and very true to the relationship between them that has already been established. Special mention goes to Michael Keating and Paul Darrow for some excellent acting; Darrow in particular seems to be really enjoying himself and his scenes with Ronald Lacey really crackle with tension and threat.

The focus on Avon and Vila means the rest of the crew are sidelined. Holmes seems to struggle writing for Blake, and so the character comes across more like the Fourth Doctor than the Blake we know, especially so with his sudden and convenient historical knowledge, which has never been mentioned before. More worryingly, Jenna and Cally are almost completely absent, with Cally appearing in just a couple of scenes. This becomes the norm for the next couple of episodes sadly and is probably where the oft-repeated complaints that the girls were only there to look glamorous and operate the teleport. After a good start with equal roles for all, this is disappointing.

Looking glamorous and operating the telport: Cally and Jenna

What really works against this episode is the costume design. I’m a fan of June Hudson’s work in general, despite her tendency to go for the operatic in her designs, but here it really doesn’t work. The costumes are miles over the top, look silly and make it very difficult to take any of the characters seriously. Paul Daneman had the right idea and got June Hudson to hack his cloak away until there was very little left, and so his character escapes with some dignity intact. In a story that’s as serious as this one, the costumes are just wrong.

So aside from the costumes and the sidelining of most of the cast, there’s nothing really wrong with Killer, but somehow it just feels less than the sum of its parts. It’s got a good atmosphere and is really rather grim, but it just doesn’t quite work for me.