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by Simon Hart |
Blake goes to Exbar because Travis has his father’s brother and his father’s brother’s daughter held in captivity. Can he free them from the clutches of his arch-enemy?
Servalan is under pressure yet again from the higher echelons of the Federation to sort out Blake once and for all. Can she stop his myth spreading? Can she stop Travis now he’s an outlaw? And from whom does the mysterious message telling her to got to Exbar and collect Travis come from?
Travis has gone quite insane and got some Crimmos from somewhere and gone to Exbar where he somehow knows Blake’s father’s brother lives. Then he calls Blake because he wants the Liberator and wants to do a deal, only he doesn’t want to do a deal he wants to kill Blake. How this affect Blake is anyone’s guess.
Blake’s Father’s Brother. Because he’s the only character who manages to retain any credibility. He gets enough food stock to feed the inhabitants of Exbar and thus probably gains control of the planet.
Jenna kills the Crimmo Molok by teleporting him into space. Avon and Blake polish off at least one Crimmo with some polystyrene rocks.
Servalan pretends not to be a drinker: SERVALAN:
Send him in. Counsellor Joban.
Servalan and Joban play one-upmanship: JOBAN:
There has been indeed progress, and more
importantly order. Order, order Servalan. It is all that matters.
Travis forgets how to get teleported and wants to know the WORD: TRAVIS:
Now you see Molok has a bracelet on. All
you have to do is talk. Demonstrate. Tell us the word.
Travis calls for his allies: TRAVIS: Crimos. Crimos. Crimos.
Fed Tech: The Federation pursuit ships are now able to travel at Time Distort 10.
Travis has a set of hand held communicators which have a red light on the top to show when he’s using them. This week Travis’ messages to the Liberator are visplays. Avon’s much vaunted detector shield has broken down and the crew consider giving priority to getting hold of the parts needed to fix it. Fashion: Blake has a new waistcoat in this episod. As with all his clothes this season, it’s in green leather, but this one has different sahdes of green across the torso and a series of buttons down each side that fasten together with a leather strap. Cally has a cream jersey top with buttons across the shoulders. She wears this with tight cream trousers.
The crew also have new silver surface suits, which seem to be replacements for the thermal suits seen in Project: Avalon. These suits are silver jumpsuits, with grey stripes across the shoulders and around the collar. There’s a big button, presumably for controlling the temperature of the suit in the left hand side towards the shoulder. The suits are worn with grey boots and silver gloves. Servalan is wearing yet another white dress. This one has a white flower on the left shoulder and has a high collar, which she accessorises with pearl earrings. When she travels to Exbar, she wears a white fur across her shoulders. The Crimos wear black jumpsuits with ammo belts over both shoulders. Each one has a different coloured panel on his torso. This episode’s most outrageous costume: After the excesses of Killer, the costumes on this episode are decidedly down to earth! The best we can find for this one is Inga’s costume, a brown dress that reveals a lot of flesh and is highly impractical for such a cold planet. It’s odd that she’d chose something like to wear when her father (or uncle’s brother) is wrapped up in practical furs. It’s almost as if she’s a woman who doesn’t have to go out on location in the middle of winter or something.
Food and Drink: On the Liberator, Cally brings two glasses of a pale blue liquid to the table, but no one is game enough to try it. Servalan drinks two glasses of some green liquor, and pours one out for Councillor Joban, who likes the edges blurred.
On the flight deck there is yet another glass table positioned next to Vila’s seat with white chairs arranged around it. It’s different to the one seen earlier in the season.
Vila teleports Blake and then a while later also teleports Avon down to Exbar. Jenna then sends Vila down. She also teleports Molock up to the ship, and then out into space. Presumably Cally teleports Jenna down with the requested teleport bracelets and then brings her back up with Blake, Avon and Vila.
Blake loses one teleport bracelet on the surface of Exbar and another explodes with Molok in space.
Orac has recorded Travis’ message from Exbar while Vila is asleep.
The implied romance between Blake and his Uncle’s daughter is rather disturbing. It’s implied that he fell for her many years ago when he last visited Exbar, but since Inga is a whole lot younger than Blake, it seems slightly dodgy. More so considering the false charges laid against Blake during his trial in The Way Back. It’s probably best not to think about it, especially as it is never mentioned again. Still, it does lead to Jenna noticeably going off Blake. The look she shoots at him when she arrives with the spare teleport bracelets is one of absolute disgust and things are rather cooler between them from this point on.
The scene that stands out for Servalan in Hostage is the one with Councillor Joban. The way she downs a glass of green alcohol before the meeting and then maintains that she prefers to keep a clear head when talking to Joban shows that the image she projects to others is somewhat different to the true Servalan. The whole scene tingles with tension between the two characters. The way they use the other’s official title to remind each other of their respective status is fun as they try to score points against each other and gain the upper hand. I’m still not quite sure who wins.
Three of this episode’s guest stars appeared in Doctor Who. Firstly, Andrew Roberston had recently been seen as Mr Fibuli in The Pirate Planet in 1978. Even more recently on first broadcast John Abineri had been Ranquin in Power of Kroll, his last role in Doctor Who. Previously he’d appeared in Fury from the Deep, The Ambassadors of Death and Death to the Daleks. Kevin Stoney had appeared less recently, but was well remembered as Mavic Chen in The Daleks’ Masterplan, as Tobias Vaughan in The Invasion and Tyrum Chief Councillor of Voga in Revenge of the Cybermen in 1975.
One of the spaceship control panels in Servalan’s pursuit ship had recently been seen in The Armageddon Factor, where top extra Pat Gorman had spent a couple of weeks pressing the fire button.
Not camp. Not bleak. Just rubbish!
This is the first really bad episode of Blake’s 7. It starts well with a fairly exciting and tense space battle comprised mostly of existing model shots (some of which are repeated in the same sequence) but goes downhill from shortly after that. The episode is weakly plotted, with a big thing made of Ushton’s limp disappearing, but then never being referred to again, everyone knowing about Crimos, but not bothering to explain where Travis got them from, what they are (other than men who are criminals perhaps) so it feels like we’re missing vital information. It’s sloppy writing. The dialogue is the most appalling part. Aside from the ridiculous way that Blake refers to his uncle as his father’s brother as if that is someway less complicated, Brain Croucher has some terrible lines to contend with, culminating in him standing, pointing his laser arm at Vila and shouting "The word". Dire, especially after all the hard work Robert Holmes put in to the Avon and Vila dialogue in Killer, here they’re back to petty sniping at each other.
Even more galling is the way that characters have forgotten just about everything they know about each other. Travis in particular forgets that Vila is the weak one of the crew, he doesn’t know what they say to teleport up to the Liberator, despite watching them teleport more than a few times before, and quite frankly it beggars belief that after she worked so hard to get rid of him, Servalan is already proposing a truce between herself and Travis. I know this is to lead into the next episode, but really it doesn’t quite ring true and makes a mockery of Travis’ line at the end of Trial, "You’re not going to use me anymore." Oh and Jenna has become Vila’s Mum, sending off to the planet making sure he’s ready, as if he’s going to school. It’s dreadful writing and a real insult to the careful work that has gone into the characters this far into the series.
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