The Annotated Blake’s 7 - ‘Orac’

It’s just a box of flashing lights!

A box of bad luck?

It’s a mark of the production’s competence that I have very few production-related annotations for this episode, and hardly any negative ones. It is an outrageously exciting story that is told very, very well; the final fling of the solid aesthetic of Series A. The series will swagger with sprezzatura again, for sure, but never in quite the same way.

Vere is thankfully handed a script without much in the way of fights. The Phibian attacks on Servalan and Cally are blizzards of bits in true Lorrimer style, but he had the sense to cut these to the barest minimum to avoid showing the shortcomings of the monster costume - something that he tragically forgets by the time of ‘Moloch’.

As usual, Vere is very, very good on actors and catching their reactions. The illness acting is convincing. The tetchy scene of Avon, Jenna, and Gan waiting at the teleport and getting on each others’ nerves is played and choreographed very neatly.

Feeling a bit peaky

However, it takes the crew ages to work out why they’re feeling ill, which is odd considering that they were worried about it in the previous episode. Blake at the start of the episode seems utterly oblivious to Jenna looking like she’s about to spew up over the flight controls.

Cally whipping out a Geiger counter is played as quite the brainwave. I don’t know about you, but if I’d lingered far too long on a planet boiling with radiation, I might give myself a quick check the moment I got back. This sequence is also notable because it seems to have given some of the incoming guest writers - Allan Prior in particular - the notion that Cally is the Florence Nightingale of the Liberator. From now on, she’ll forever be diagnosing backache, handing out medication, leading the crew in yoga, etc - a marked change, and not a good one, from the original conception of her as the guerilla girl.

The rehearsal script contains some oddities that were fixed for the recording, but one regrettable excision is a brief moment of Gan having a fever dream, talking in his sleep about the death of his ‘woman’ - ‘no, leave her alone!’ If this had been kept in, there’d be no doubt that he is a tragic figure and a medical guinea pig, not a maniac psychopath.

The camera script also tweaks the scene of Blake discussing Ensor with Avon in the rest room, adding the snark element of Avon not volunteering his knowledge of Ensor. The original version has Avon saying vaguely, ‘I thought I knew the name’. Blake is now, we might note, using Avon (and not Jenna) automatically as his go-to guy, both here and in the slightly naff recap scene at the top of the episode. (I’m not sure if a terrorist maintaining a ‘Captain’s log’ is a very good idea. Presumably Blake records a detailed video diary entry after his every outrage, which puts real-life jihadis not wiping their phones into perspective.)

The episode seems to have been slightly under-running. The VT studio interior tunnel scene of Servalan finding the skeletons, and the information about the lost Federation expedition to Aristo - of which presumably those bones are all that remains - aren’t in the rehearsal script at all. There is one other major change, which I’ll come to later.