The Annotated Blake’s 7 - ‘Time Squad’ 1

Aliens. Plus Cally, Sally, Jan and Jenna.

Alien Autopsy

We meet our first aliens in this episode. ‘Gan, help Jenna keep an eye on those aliens,’ Blake says very casually - like you might remind your spouse to put the bins out - about halfway through, referring to the two (or so they think) very clearly human men thawing out in the Liberator’s basement. Down on Saurian Major, Blake meets Cally, who is from Auron - which is enough to make her equally as alien, at least in Jenna’s eyes, at the end of the episode.

Ooh you want to put some cream on that dear

What makes a person count as an alien in the Blake’s 7 world? And why does it have aliens at all?

They are an odd addition to this fictional universe. Paul Darrow certainly thought so, confessing to interviewers that he was baffled by their presence in the series. I can recall that back in 1978 when I was 9 I was rather taken aback by the alien threats in this episode and the next - I was slightly surprised, as I didn’t think this was that kind of show. We are already a long, long way from the judicial cover-ups and grubby realities of ‘The Way Back’ and ‘Space Fall’, though thankfully there’ll always be lingering echoes of them.

Aliens in Blake’s 7 generally feel, to me, a bit wrong. They’re just there because it’s sci-fi, and sci-fi - well, sci-fi has aliens in it, doesn’t it? I can’t help thinking that the revelation of the alien invasion fleet at the climax of season B would be an even bigger and more exciting deal if we’d never heard of such creatures before, except perhaps in whispers and legends.

The casualness of aliens does, however, fit in with the series’ general tone towards space and its wonders. Space in Blake’s 7 is not wondrous, in and of itself. Apart from the opening shots of several Vere episodes, with their stock shots of nebulas and spectacular stars, we are very, very rarely encouraged to feel awe about it. There are, thank God, no stirring Picardian speeches about humanity and pioneering or mystic vastness.

Okay, so Dayna sings about ‘this endless midnight sky’, but that is rather undercut by Avon pulling the plug out of an advanced but still mechanical piece of alien tech about ten minutes later. See also his ridiculing of Cally’s hippyish moon disc communion, and Servalan openly acknowledging the ‘awesome’ nature of the Clonemasters as an aesthetic deliberately chosen to intimidate.

Wonder is for schmucks

There is nothing poetic or transcendent about space, life, death, and the universe. Such things are generally portrayed as dated (the commentary in ‘Death-Watch’) or vulgar (the syrupy commentary on the passing galactic wonders on the Space Princess, which aren’t even actually there). Even the lived-in universe of Star Wars is to be boggled at, at least by us in the cinema if not the participants on the screen. But most of the time in Blake’s 7 space is just the place where the story happens. This is obviously influenced by the series’ low budget. Similarly, the Rome of I Claudius is never a spectacle in itself, as the production cannot afford it to be.

Against this backdrop, there are three distinct varieties of alien in Blake’s 7. (Do please write in if you think I’ve missed any.)

CATEGORY 1 - Alien animals - Here we have the Phibians, the big-claw monster that attacks Coser in ‘Weapon’, the living planet Host in ‘Trial’, the crunchy kairopan insect, and possibly Cancer’s crab (which certainly squishes when Tarrant shoots it, even if it appears ‘magically’ like a machine). We also hear of things like the aphrodisiac-emitting lizard on Pharo, and the rodents on Cygnus Alpha and in Sarkoff’s garden. The fauna on Terminal - the Links and giant snakes - are artificially induced, so reproducing and redesigning Earth animals is obviously doable. Sarkoff’s lines about ‘natural history’ suggest that no animal life survives on Earth, but there are certainly rats everywhere.

CATEGORY 2 - Alien humans. We meet two lots in this episode - the time squad themselves, and the Auronar in the shape of Cally. There are many, many more to come, from the people of Amersat in ‘Duel’ to the reverted primitives on Cephlon to the ‘natives’ of Horizon.

But do these people - pretty much exactly the same as us as far as we can tell - originate on distant planets? Or did they - as Vila suggests in passing in ‘Traitor’, though from Soolin’s response it’s clearly a contested point - all come from Earth if you trace them back far enough?

Let’s take the Auronar as an example. Avon says they ‘cut themselves off from ‘the rest of humanity’. The Series B writers’ guide says they are ‘Basically human and presumably originating from Terra’. Cally refers to the Links as ‘our ancestors’ in ‘Terminal’.

The humans of Chenga and Xenon are stated to be descendants of Earth colonists. But then, the people of Cephlon and Keezarn fell from their technological glory millennia before we meet them, and ‘Killer’ tells us explicitly and repeatedly that the first deep space ships left Earth only seven hundred years before the time of the series. The population of the galaxy seems far too high, and far too widespread, for it to have been as recent as that. I will return to this vexed question later, but the spread of human beings suggests that we are actually thousands of years ahead of our own time.

Some of the time, the word alien seems to mean the same as ‘foreigner’ does to us today, and at other times to mean outside the Federation rather than outside the human race. We can see this categorisation, maybe, in the wariness of Jenna to Cally at the end of ‘Time Squad’ - though this, added by Boucher, is played as inspired by what’s she’s just been through with the frozen fiends rather than actual racism. And perhaps just a soupçon of envy for this new girl that’s seemingly turned Blake’s head a bit.