The Annotated Blake’s 7 - ‘Cygnus Alpha’ and Corny Declines

Even the oldest chestnuts were new once

A few outstanding points of interest about this episode -

Voices From The Past

Vila has a slight Cockney twang on location in this episode and the next. Presumably this was quickly, and wisely, dumped by the time the production moved to the studio. The world of Blake’s 7 has, as we shall discover, a rigid class system of which Vila is a lower grade member (though there is some blurring about this later on, and conflicting clues about how the grading is done).

Strike a light, this planet looks tom tit

When the series wants to sketch class in quickly, people are Cockneys;

Klegg, Travis 2, Sherm, Arco, Forres, Doran, Michael Melia’s Walford trooper next to Richard Franklin’s Cambridge officer. Cockney is acceptable in the future, maybe because it registers as funny, neutral or menacing depending on the occasion, where other working class accents register only as cosy or comic. It’s interesting that Cockney doesn’t seem to immediately invoke a particular physical location. As far as I can tell - and please write in if you can think of any more - there are only two Northern English accents in the series. First there’s Trooper Par, who gets away with it (Kevin Lloyd speaking in his own authentic Derby voice), maybe because most of his scenes are with Travis and are about blunt-spoken truth telling. And then there’s Gunn Sar, who is Yorkshire. But that’s ok, because he is intended to be funny.

The vast majority of voices we hear are either neutral RP or Oxbridge. The very ethnic people of Horizon talk in cut glass. There are no Scots, Welsh or Irish, and only a smattering of other non-English - Hal Mellanby, Moloch and whatever the rebel Shivan is meant to be. I’ll have more to say on this interesting subject when we meet Brian Croucher’s Travis, but one quick observation - it was telling that as late as 2005 in Doctor Who, which made a point of Dr Who’s northern accent, Rose instantly developed the poshest voice in the universe when she absorbed the power of time itself.

Killers?

‘Could you kill someone? Face to face, I mean?’ Jenna asks Avon about a third of the way through this episode. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies, ‘could you?’

Would you trust this man?

This is an odd little exchange, as they will both before too long be seen blasting away with guns like there’s no tomorrow. Coming when it does, it’s Jenna’s way of letting Avon know she’s taken his light-hearted remark - ‘I have to get rid of Blake first, you’re next on my list’ - seriously.

Avon never shows the slightest compunction at the moment of a kill, and we have already witnessed his dirty fighting skills. According to both ‘Countdown’ and ‘Rumours Of Death’ he shot dead the man selling exit visas from the city, and that can only have been a few months before this at most. So if we accept the fiction, Avon must be lying to Jenna here, to make his potential abandoning of Blake more palatable to her, and to make him more palatable to her as a character. His later words to her when the ante is much-upped - ‘You know he can’t win’ - are bitterly ironic, considering the series’ ending.

For all of Blake’s later vote of trust in him ‘right from the very beginning’, Avon seems pretty convincingly ready to dump him here, as he almost will in ‘Horizon’. Perhaps Avon fears - unconsciously - that it will become impossible for him to last out any longer, after Blake returns from Cygnus Alpha with however many grateful extra followers, who will be much harder to sway than Jenna. As ever, the question is - is he really the bastard he claims to be?

They’ve Got To Be Strong To Be Good

There are two absolutely deadly real-life objects in this episode, both of which utterly kill the dramatic moment in hand. First, we have the Sharps Extra Strong Mints that Vargas doles out to his new souls, ostensibly to cure them of the gripe that afflicts all who settle on the planet. And then there are Vargas’s spotless white pumps, which unfortunately are necessarily featured in the direction of the episode’s climax as he edges back into the teleport’s transmission area.   

The Cygnus Alpha tuck shop was surprisingly well-stocked

The old soft shoe

These incidents are irksome mainly because they’re so unnecessary. Someone could’ve been sent to fetch Brian Blessed some dusty bloody sandals. The tablets are a ‘simple compound’ - ‘just chalk’ in the novel and the earlier draft - but they are clearly machine-made, which doesn’t align with anything else on Cygnus Alpha. It surely wouldn’t have taken more than a tiny bit of extra effort to crumble them up a bit? Noticing things like this is one of the tiny, cost-free pluses that make all the difference in low budgeted TV.

Vargas and Corn

This is one of the very first BRIAN BLESSED performances from Brian Blessed. It may actually be the very first. (His ‘Where are my eagles!?’ and ‘Has anyone not slept with my daughter!?’ outbursts in I Claudius are funny, yes, but also scary.) His earlier turns in Space:1999 are big but fairly restrained. Then comes Vargas. And next up is Vultan in Flash Gordon, after which everything changes and he becomes the go-to shouty man. By 1983 he is the obvious choice for a loud part in The Black Adder and by 1986 something clearly written for a much younger man in Doctor Who.

Just another day at the altar

He is also the first guest star to be having some fun. There will be several others - Aubrey Woods, Colin Baker, John Savident - who all take their opportunity to go stratospheric. But we should remember all that those parts are written stratospheric. One wonders if the similarly florid Sharaz Jek, who has lines very similar to Krantor’s or Egrorian’s, was written to be played like this? Or did Robert Homes anticipate that his ‘vulpine degenerates’, with their bloodcurdling threats, would be played more real? I remember giving some of this kind of stuff to actors in SJA, and they took it as a signal to ham for the ages. Maybe, in the alternative universe where ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ and ‘The Twin Dilemma’ were assigned to each other’s directors, they’re still raving about Christopher Gable’s turn as Mestor and naff old Jek played by Lionel Blair.

Religion is dead in Blake’s 7, by order of the Federation. This should make us wonder again about the historical situation at the time of its foundation. The Federation’s ideology again seems to be a managerial ‘progressive’ Soviet-style one, with no racial element or ‘blood and soil’ but with IQ used to stratify its people and economy. It is all very concrete and computer-controlled, soulless.

But when we do encounter religion in the series - which is rare, though passing exclamations about God and Hell abound - it is not normally a positive thing. Vargas’s use of it as a tool to bond his subsistence-level community together is portrayed very much as a calculated political move.

Only from His hand come mints, and from His mouth comes Fanta

Significantly, it is a monotheism, and very Old Testament, with Vargas as its Abrahamic patriarch. (Vargas is a Catalan name but also Sephardic Jewish via Spain.) Presumably there are little Vargases aplenty among the ‘five hundred people’. The three speaking Cygnets are all very healthy looking, considering the barren outlook of the place.

The stress on ‘only from His hand’ in the dialogue suggests that there were competitor gods, golden calves and Baalim or whatnot, in this little tribe at some point. Vargas may be a political sophisticate, who lies to his flock to keep it together, but he is also a true Believer. Unlike Blake, he really does think the Liberator is a sign from above. It’s interesting that religion is portrayed here, as elsewhere in the series, as part of ‘reversion to primitive’, of which much more soon. (Though the religions of Cephon and Keezarn are much ‘nicer’, as, after all, those declines were planned for by high-tech folks like us.)

Terry Nation was fond of prison planets in his work - Cygnus Alpha is very much a retread of Desperus, one of the pit stops in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ in 1965, and similarly peopled by beardy psychopaths. There was also ‘Botany Bay’, his play for ITV sci-fi anthology series Out Of This World in 1962, though from what we can tell (it was wiped) that was about an institution for the criminally insane rather than a Devil’s Island.

Cygnus Alpha seems to be the final punishment for Federation citizens. Judicial execution for civilians we don’t hear much about; it might even have been abolished. Vila has been in and out of institutions for at least half his life, which is again evidence that the Federation is not a fully totalitarian ‘state’, as is their research into limiter implants. This is serious, and costly, work at rehabilitation.

Other prisons - Exbar for example - are bleak, but allowed family visitors at some point, Kalkos had bunk bedding, and cells, and guards. Vila’s teenage ‘academy’ CF1 sounds very much like a modern youth offenders’ institution.

As Tarrant will later point out, Avon would’ve been rotting on Cygnus Alpha if it hadn’t been for Blake. What would’ve happened if the Liberator hadn’t happened along? Blake would’ve lasted mere hours under Vargas. Avon I can see as an assistant priest, manoeuvring to take control. Jenna … I dread to think.

But in the world where the Liberator did happen along, this episode ends with the crew expanded with two more Blake followers. Avon is now locked in as the Estelle Getty of this show. Which is a problem when he becomes the lead.

But I’m afraid what the planet story section of this episode mostly brings to us is corn. The lusty high priestess, the colony sliding back into superstition, the chanting monks and spear throwing. It could be any other sci-fi show, just about. You can picture Picard and Riker or Koenig and Helena on Cygnus Alpha. Some of the best episodes take place against a corny backdrop, but this one lacks the extra vitality needed. Take away the arc story, and this is our first example of ‘Blake/Avon goes down to a planet, he is captured, he escapes’.

But when I was 9? I found Vargas and Cygnus Alpha gripping and terrifying. And that’s enough, once in a while.

Reversion To Primitive

But before we leave Cygnus Alpha, it’s time to talk about such corn.

There are only seven or eight episodes of Blake’s 7 featuring formerly technological peoples who have reverted to tribal life, but it feels like there are more.