The Annotated Blake’s 7 - Seek Locate Destroy 1

They seek him here, they seek him there

Catch up

Before we launch into ‘Seek-Locate-Destroy’, I recently watched ‘Cygnus Alpha’ again, as you do, and I noticed three more interesting things.

Blake’s first test of the teleport is a success on the technical level. But he doesn’t tell Avon and Jenna what happened to him down on the planet, how he was attacked by robed figures. Uncharacteristically, he makes two quite witty remarks.

Watching this again, this felt terribly significant. Blake is already withholding information and manipulating his crew. He clearly fears that Avon, in particular, will declare the rescue mission to Cygnus too dangerous and want to pull out. When viewed in the light of the circumstances surrounding Blake’s death, and indeed Gan’s, this reluctance to open up and revise plans when awkward facts present themselves starts to look very much like Blake’s fatal flaw.

It’s also quite amusing to wonder how many of his former fellow inmates on the London Blake intended to rescue. There were about fifty transportees, it looks like. Did he anticipate a huge crew for the Liberator composed of this lot, who have already proved themselves to be both pretty useless and not very committed to his cause? It’s just as well he only managed to scoop up Gan and Vila, particularly as there are only five chairs on the flight deck. Avon would be the least of Blake’s problems with fifty dodgy blokes skulking round his ship.

Two bits of dialogue stood out for different reasons. First, Glyn Owen has the tech line ‘we have ground zero contact’ as the London lands, but because this is 1977 and he’s 49, he delivers this as ‘We have ground. Zero contact’. This is the kind of thing you have to watch actors for, believe me. (There’s also dialogue in this sequence about ‘entering silo’ - a silo described in design directions written before the modelwork was shot, presumably. I see no silo.)

‘Think of it - we go on to Right Move, and set search to UNLIMITED bedrooms!’

Another line that passed me by comes from Avon, who after tipping out his supermarket fruit bag of all the riches of the universe, enthuses to Jenna that ‘We could buy our own planet!’ I’ve never noticed that before but this time it made me laugh out loud. I have visions of them filling in a space mortgage application, choosing curtains, arranging a time for space Pickfords to unload. I assume Avon was speaking figuratively, as we might say ‘if I won the lottery I’d buy the moon!’ But in sci-fi dialogue it can be dangerous to do that.

Mission Possible

The theft of the Federation’s cypher machine from the communication base on Centero, and the cunning cover of the theft by blowing the heart of the installation sky high - well, fairly sky high - is the first proper outing of Blake’s full crew.

The Liberator picnic was planned down to the very last detail

Appropriately, it is the first - and indeed the only - occasion when each member of the team does their particular ‘thing’. So - Blake plans and leads the mission. Zen provides the info, and covers their back. Vila breaks the lock to get them in (this is accompanied by a rare use of the theme tune over live action footage in the score, to underline the point) Avon does the tech, identifying and removing the key component - which Gan then wrenches out ‘with his teeth’. Cally is in charge of combat and hostage management. Jenna, er .., works the teleport, and more significantly keeps the crew dynamic focussed.

To add to the impression that this is the finished team doing what they’re going to do from now on - and this episode is all about solidifying the series’ format and how it will work - the crew are now all (Jenna apart, she’ll get her parka later) kitted out in different-coloured ‘surface gear’. It’s perhaps to be regretted that this Liberator ‘uniform’ disappears after series A, as it gives the surface missions a pleasing unity and, like many uniforms, makes our heroes shine out more as individuals. Terry’s series B scripts still talk of ‘surface gear’ and getting ‘kitted up’, so he understood the subtle importance of this.

Against this, we might follow David Maloney’s likely thought process, which was probably that the parkas made Blake and co. look official rather than individualistic. The arrival of June Hudson at this point changed the entire feel of the series, but that will get our attention at the correct point.

The production in the opening minutes of this episode is doing its usual mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. The matte painting of the Centero background is so well done you don’t even really notice it, but then this is immediately followed up by the security robot. Robotics/cybernetics is a sticky point in the tech of the series. The Federation can produce highly convincing and very mobile androids, though at cost, but they’re also apparently reliant on these slow, motorised dustbins. The robot is not a bad design in itself, and loses out mainly because of the slowness of its reflexes.

It’s very slowly gaining on us!

The mission to Centero (and what a nice name for a planet that is, the hard C getting over the slight Hartnell-years Terry naffness of calling a planet after its chief characteristic) runs almost like clockwork, despite the customary squabble of a postmortem afterwards. With one obvious exception.

It is implied that the others don’t notice they’ve left Cally behind because A. She’s the quiet one, B. She’s a girl, C. She’s the newest, and D. Because she’s a foreigner. Vere does the best he can with covering up for their dimwittedness, playing up the tension and spatting after the return to the Liberator, but even so, this sequence really will not do.

We don’t see the moment the other four return to the teleport section of the Liberator, which is a fudge, and more than a bit of a cheat. This omission calls attention to the thing it is trying to gloss over. If we had seen Jenna run for the flight deck the moment after pressing the recall controls, and then the others had burst forth mid-squabble, with Blake rushing straight after Jenna … maybe, just maybe, we could accept it. As it stands, they all look like clots, and Jenna worst of all. She must’ve been facing them as they teleported up. Counting them all out and counting them all in again is surely one of the key parts of teleport duty.

But nobody on the production is thinking very hard about how to sell this regrettable incident. None of the others turn to Jenna and say ‘How could you miss that!?’ It’s the attempted fudge, the grinding of fictional gears, that makes the forgetting of Cally an irritating dud. It makes our heroes look like fools.

Cally Is in the adjoining stock room on Centero at the moment of teleporting up, which is another factor in why she is not missed. Hang on. Why is she there?

Line up with your hands up against those racks filled with throwable objects

Because of Blake’s unusually gentle approach to terrorism. When they break into the cipher room, our heavily armed desperadoes … round up the technicians and the one guard on duty and march them down the corridor to the stock room. This is strangely thoughtful behaviour for people whose intention is to, shortly afterwards, to blow the installation to pieces.

This kind of family-friendly terrorism will reach epidemic levels in ‘Pressure Point’, where Blake and friends edge out of the empty Central Control room, leaving Travis (armed, literally!), Servalan and a couple of mutoids unharmed. They run away, knowing that they have an arduous climb to get out of the complex, and Travis will be right behind them.

Cally would never have been forgotten if they’d just shot the technicians and the guard. The alarm outside would never have been sounded if Vila had shot the guard.

The explosions tear through the code room - ‘total destruction so nothing can be recognised’ says Blake, though this total destruction leaves the walls standing and the theft is discovered anyway. But when they realise Cally is missing, the others assume that Cally, last seen in the stockroom, must be dead in the explosion. So, they assume the bombs would have blown the staff in the stock room up. The question remains, why didn’t they just shoot them and save themselves a lot of trouble? Travis will later ponder why Blake moved the technicians to the next room, but never even stops to question why he didn’t just shoot them.

Yes I know the answer is that it’s 7:20 on a Monday evening and they are heroes In a BBC1 TV show being watched by kids. Shooting unarmed technicians wouldn’t set a very good example. This is one of the unwritten rules of this kind of television. Direct killing of villains by heroes is not acceptable, but blowing them to bits from a safe distance … oh yeah, that’s fine. There was no squeamishness about totalling the Saurian Major complex in a massive nuclear explosion, and that presumably had a staff of thousands. We can see this in other similar shows of the period - Dr Who cheerfully plants a bomb on the Graff Vynda K a few months later.

Within the fiction of the series, is the corralling of the ‘prisoners’ (as Blake describes them) done out of a moral code, or just squeamishness? Avoiding bloodshed if possible? Presumably the Federation, if it does spacecast reports of such things, would lie about the death toll and tactics anyway. So this must be a personal strategy of Blake’s.

But.