Blakes 7. Series B, Episode 11: Gambit

We’re in a bar somewhere in space and a man named Zee limps in looking for a man named Klein, a dishevelled, somewhat drunk surgeon. Zee (he’s only Blake’s bloody defence lawyer from The Way Back!) blames Klein for leaving him a cripple. Klein retorts that he saved his life. Zee tries to kill Klein but the surgeon is saved by a mysterious stranger…ok it’s Travis cosplaying Clint Eastwood. The barmaid, Chenie, asks if all Klein’s patients try to kill him, he replies that thirty of them have every right to.

Up on Liberator Blake, Cally and Jenna are preparing to teleport down to Freedom City looking for Docholli, the latest clue in their quest for Star One (spoiler, Klein is Docholli) I know, I’m shocked that the girls are getting to leave the ship too. They have fab dresses and then Cally slips the picture of Docholli into the top of her boot and…sorry…lost my train of thought there. Yes, that’s it, this time it’s Avon and Vila’s turn to be left on the ship.

Down on Freedom City it’s all gone a bit Cabaret (old chum) but look who’s here, it’s the Supreme Commander in ravishing red along with a curious new henchman. Servalan meets with Krantor, the camp yet threatening administrator of Freedom city. She tells him she’s after two men, Docholli and Travis. Krantor promises to deliver them both, for a price.

Meanwhile after just a few minutes alone with Vila, Avon has a bright idea, why don’t they take Orac and bust the casino of Freedom City? If only Orac wasn’t so conspicuous…

And so we come to Gambit. You might think it’s brilliant, you might think this is the show jumping the shark, you might wonder just what everyone was smoking, but I guarantee you this. You will not be bored!

Me? I love it. Absolutely bonkers, a gloriously surreal camp extravaganza that manages to give all the main cast something to do, plus Servalan and Travis, plus Krantor and his associate Toyze, two one off guest actors you feel are having the time of their lives, and characters you almost wish Big Finish would do a box set about.

Seriously it shouldn’t work (and maybe for some it doesn’t) but for me it’s Blakes 7 at it’s best, and occasionally its worst, but mainly it’s best.

Where to start? Probably with Avon and Vila. They’d barely spent more than a few minutes alone together in the first season and a half but suddenly someone realised that Darrow and Keating worked well together. Really well together. And whoever that person was I’d like to shake their hand.

Forget the fact that Liberator has a strong room full of millions (though Avon will remind you in just a few episodes time in Power Play) and don’t give too much thought to Orac shrinking himself, and just wallow in two masters at work.

Vila: Avon, there are times when I almost get to like you.

Avon: That makes it all worthwhile.

Really it isn’t about the money though, Avon wants the challenge and Vila is tired of being left behind whenever they go somewhere hedonistic.

Apparently Space City pales by comparison to Freedom City, not that we see too much of it. They’ve clearly spent a fair bit of the budget on this, yet conversely it also looks a little cheap, the ribbons and balloons and dry ice covering a multitude of sins. They also appear to have raided the BBC costume store and just dressed the extras up as any and everyone across time and space. A cavalier, a clown, one guy is dressed as Dracula, he even has fangs. This could all appear preposterous, but somehow it doesn’t. Maybe it’s Krantor’s reference to Mardi Gras that provides cover, though he also wishes everyone else threw themselves into it as much as he and Toyze do.

Let’s talk about Kranto and Toyze. I’ve heard some actors complain that Aubrey Woods and John Leeson (yes that’s K9) were trying to out camp one another which dented the performances. I disagree, I think it made them all the better. It takes talent to be that camp yet at the same time so threatening, but they are, and in particular Krantor’s conversations with Servalan are a joy, especially the way he keeps forgetting to add the Supreme before Commander. They clearly both detest each other and once apart both discuss killing the other. Servalan in particular appears to be a trifle, shall we say prudish? It becomes clear as well that she wants Freedom City obliterated, and has been calling for this for some time. Family values eh, Supreme Commander.

Krantor guesses that Docholli has information that Servalan needs and plans to get the info before he hands Docholli’s corpse over to Servalan. Servalan has planned this however, and boy there is a fair bit of exposition, which luckily Jacqui delivers so wonderfully that you don’t care (And Harry Jones as Jarriere helps by looking as perplexed as possible, allowing the Supreme Commander to explain her plan so that everyone understands!)

I do love how tickled Krantor is that Travis has an eyepatch. Given how ridiculously everyone is dressed, is an eyepatch really that radical?

Blake Cally and Jenna try to find out more from Chenie in the bar, apparently there were some changes to the script as originally it was even more obvious that Jenna and Cally might be looking for work as ladies of the night! Jan and Sally’s catfight is wonderful (I saw them both in a Q&A just a few weeks ago and they both still cite it as one of their favourite moments in the series) calling each other slut and throwing drinks in each other’s faces to cause a distraction. I used to be a bit sniffy about it and felt it was beneath them, but now it’s so obviously wonderful. Sally has apparently called the scene ‘us against the BBC.’

The only person not having a jolly jape down in Freedom City is Blake who’s just a mite dull and stoic here. Loosen up, Roj.

Croucher is having fun as Clint Eastwood and get’s some decent lines. “Oh, I’m a hero too” “I went to be a better school”. And calling Jarriere a powder puff. The only real problem is that neither Servalan or Travis can seem to decide if they’re working together or not since he escaped at the end of Trial!

Denis Carey is decent as Docholli, though he never quite convinces as the Federation’s top cyber surgeon, and Nicolette Roeg was clearly told to play Chenie as the hooker with a heart of gold. She and Carey have nice chemistry though.

At the age of 70 Sylvia Coleridge also has a blast as the croupier, joyously rolling her eyes every chance she gets.

But let’s talk about Deep Roy. Come on, you didn’t think I was going to forget about Speed Chess did you? Robert Holmes apparently contrives to get chess into every script he writes, but I doubt he’s ever done anything quite as bonkers as he does here as foolish and desperate gamblers take on Deep Roy’s Klute at computer chess. They get a million credits if they win or draw and all the Klute gets is the right to electrocute them (he seems to quite enjoy it.) Roy is wonderfully malevolent, but you wonder if he’ll ever get over losing to Vila. Talking of which Vila sobers up very quickly when he’s in the hot seat, and you have to love Avon telling him it’ll be ok. Easy for you to say, Kerr.

It’s a bonkers notion in a bonkers episode, all capped off by Avon and Vila acting like naughty schoolboys caught out at the end and not convincing Blake for a moment with their innocent looks.

Let’s leave the camp of Freedom City behind for the grit and grime of the tents of Goth!

Blakes 7. Series B, Episode 10: Voice from the Past

On the Liberator everyone is relaxing, with Blake, Cally, Avon and Jenna enjoying some meditation, although Blake doesn’t look too relaxed, he looks more like he has a bad migraine. Cally asks what’s wrong and Dr Avon diagnoses hypertension. Blake heads off to the flight deck where Vila attempts to engage him in conversation about the current destination, the planet Del 10 and about the miraculous properties of vita particles (whatever they are).

Blake’s a trifle rude and doesn’t respond. He then orders Zen to change course to a played out mining asteroid named PK118. When the others find out they ask Blake why he wants to go there, and he just explains that it’s a “Priority Mission”. Soon after he again seems to be in pain, and now appears to be having waking nightmares that link back to the conditioning he received on Earth many years ago. The others consult with Orac who prescribes something called Duel Therapy, which will entail Jenna sharing Blake’s nightmares, but in the lull between sessions Blake convinces a gullible Vila that Cally and Avon have teamed up (in all manner of ways judging by what he says) and plan to throw him off the ship. With Vila’s help Blake locks the others away and sets course back to PK118, what he’ll find there is an unexpected reunion with one of the men who sent him to Cygnus Alpha, and a plot to overthrow the Federation once and for all.

Regular readers will know that my re-watch has often led to me revaluating an episode, and several have been better or worse than I recall. In this instance Voice from the Past is better than I remembered it, which maybe isn’t saying much given how rubbish I recalled it being.

Not for the first time this season we get a picture of the wider galaxy and the scope of the Federation. In this case we discover that many governors of the outermost colonies aren’t that enamoured of the Federation and one of them, Le Grand, the governor of Outer Gal, is planning to denounce Space Command and the Administration at an upcoming governors’ conference.

The loose alliance of Le Grand, the badly injured rebel leader Shivan and former Arbiter General of the Federation Ven Glynd, is an interesting idea, and the script plays it just loose enough that you’re never quite sure if their desire for freedom is genuine or whether they just want to overthrow the President and install Blake as a puppet. Their use of the course interceptor to manipulate Blake isn’t a good sign however!

Frieda Knorr is a little arch as Le Grand to say the least, and though Richard Bebb does a good job as Glynd, a character we haven’t seen since The Way Back, he never feels that familiar, probably because it’s a completely different actor! This leaves Shivan, the badly wounded rebel legend who’s wrapped up like a mummy and has an accent that feels slightly to the right of Allo Allo. Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you don’t want to know, but it does seem really quite obvious who Shivan really is.

Yes, that’s right, it’s our good friend Travis.

Quite why he had to impersonate Shivan us never quite explained, but if nothing else he is unintentionally quite hilarious, and the episode gets bonus points for the ridiculousness of the situation.

It’s nice to see references to Cygnus Alpha, to Blakes trial, the murder of his defence lawyer and his girlfriend, and to the Freedom Party, but Blake convincing Vila to turn on the others feels a little off, Vila can be gullible but he’s also more switched on than people give him credit for, and he’s never been a true believer in Blake, still I guess out of all of them he was the weakest link and we know he gets easily confused.

At least this episode there’s stuff for Jenna and Cally to do. Jenna gets to undergo duel therapy with Blake, Cally volunteers but apparently is a trifle too alien for the job (“I’m not that different” she says sniffily, which does raise the question. Is Cally an alien or not? I’ve always, perhaps incorrectly, assumed that she’s human, and that her people colonised Auron long ago and then developed psychic powers). The duel therapy sessions seem designed to waste time more than anything, tell you what though, I’m not letting Avon nurse me, his judo chop to Blake’s neck when Blake starts going crazy seems a bit much!

Oddly Jenna then seems to disappear for long stretches of the episode and I was never quite sure where she was. This does give Cally the opportunity to team up with Avon which is always nice to see, though it’s pretty obvious to all concerned that Blake isn’t acting like himself, taking Orac’s key with him when he goes down to the Atlay conference for example, and things always feel a trifle underwritten. Would Avon and co really let Le Grand et al onto Liberator so easily?

Servalan doesn’t get much to do here but she does get a great moment after Le Grand and the others enter the conference chamber (Wembley Conference Centre apparently) to find it empty and then suddenly the supreme Commander appears on the big screen to advise she’s been onto Le Grand all along. The sight of just Seravlan’s eyes on screen at one point is very 1984 and the Federation troopers killing everyone off is quite brutal.

As well as all the callbacks to the start of series A, there’s also a nice callback to Shadow, with Orac advising that he can’t intercept telepathic signals (probably because he’ll blow up!)

Ok it isn’t a great episode, but the nice callbacks, Jenna and Cally actually being allowed to do stuff, Travis’s accent and Servalan’s George Orwell moment do almost make it worth the watch.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Directed by James Mangold.  Starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Toby Jones and Boyd Holbrook.

In 1944 Indiana Jones (Ford) and his fellow archaeologist Basil Shaw (Jones) are captured by Nazis as they try to retrieve the  Lance of Longinus (the spear that was supposed to have pierced Christ’s side) An Astrophysicist named Jürgen Voller (Mikkelsen) says the lance is a fake, but amongst the looted treasures being loaded onto a train he has found half of the Antikythera, a dial like device built by Archimedes two thousand years ago. He claims the device may identify fissures in time. Indy frees Shaw and the two fight their way through a train full of Nazi soldiers before eventually escaping, and they manage to grab hold of the dial piece before they go.

We shoot forwards to 1969 and Indy is an old man living in New York and is about to retire from the university where he’s been working. He finds the noise and frenzy of the modern world disturbing and is living alone after splitting up from Marion. Then he’s visited by Helena Shaw (Waller-Bridge) Basil’s daughter and Indy’s goddaughter. She claims to want to research Archimedes’ dial and needs Indy’s help.

Voller is in New York as well though, and he’s still searching for the dial, which he plans to use to travel through time and change the outcome of World War 2. Can Indy survive one final adventure?

And so we come to Indiana Jones’ final adventure, fifteen years after his last final adventure, so never say never right?

There’s been a lot of negativity about this film flying about but you know what? I really quite enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong it doesn’t stack up against the franchise at its best, and it’s not even the best film I’ve seen at the cinema this year (John Wick 4, Guardians 3, Dungeons and Dragons are all better) but it’s still a perfectly acceptable summer blockbuster (better than most in fact) and given our titular hero is in his early seventies (and the man playing our titular hero is 80!) the action ain’t half bad.

Ford is excellent, he’s always had a world weary quality but now he has the age to match. In Raiders he said, “It’s not the years it’s the milage”, well now it’s the years and the mileage, but he still convinces as Indiana Jones, once he’s been woken up from his ennui by Helena.

Casting Waller-Bridge was a stroke of genius if you ask me, but I’ve always been a fan. Yes, maybe she’s a little too amoral, and yes maybe they could have dialled back the pithy remarks a little (but she delivers them so well) but overall she’s a good character, capable of holding her own in most situations and able to drink a heck of a lot and still function (I mean she kinda sounds like Marion).

Contrary to what you might hear she doesn’t become the film’s lead, that’s only ever Indy, he’s our POV character and that never changes, Waller-Bridge just gets to do some of the heavy lifting, and gives Ford someone to bounce off.

Talking of heavy lifting I think John Williams timeless score certainly helps as well.

Mikkelsen makes for a solid bad guy as the Nazi scientist who’s been helping the Americans land a man on the moon but now wants to get back to the business of helping the Third Reich win World War 2. You feel like he could have been given a bit more to do though, and he certainly deserved a better denouement than he gets. Holbrook is even more poorly served and never rises above the role of henchman.

Toby Jones is fun in what’s really an extended cameo, and on the subject of cameos there are several which I won’t spoil, even though I think everyone knows. One of them manages to get quite high billing despite only being in the film for about five minutes.  

The pacing is slightly off, the opening sequence on the train in 1944 is a lot of fun and the finale is quite a surprise, even though it’s obvious time travel shenanigans will feature. There are plenty of other decent set pieces scattered throughout, but the film does sag a little in the middle and it feels a little too long. Other downsides include Helen’s sidekick, who’s no Short Round, and the death of one henchman is exceptionally cold blooded and out of step with the rest of the film. Oh yes and there’s the off-screen fate of Mutt which could have been handled far better.

There’s a fair amount of CGI, but it wasn’t as noticeable as it had been in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and for the most part I thought the de-aging of Ford in the 1944 segment worked really well (and I saw this in IMAX). I’ve heard some people complain about Ford’s 80 year old voice coming out of a younger Indy sounding off but again I didn’t really notice. It didn’t spoil my enjoyment.

The script and direction are better than people are crediting, and I do think this is a film that will reward multiple viewings. It’s superior to Kingdom Skull and a better than average action adventure film in its own right. All in all a decent send off for Indy.

By the Light of the Moon

By Dean Koontz

Dylan O’Conner, an artist, is travelling through Arizona with his autistic brother, Shep. While staying at a motel Dylan is knocked out and when he wakes, he’s tired to a chair and a crazy man, who claims to be a Doctor, injects him with a golden liquid, telling him that the substance has unpredictable effects and warning him that operatives will soon arrive who’ll want to kill him for what now runs through his veins.

Comedian Jillian Jackson makes the mistake of staying at the same hotel. She’s chloroformed and injected by the same ‘doctor’.

By chance Jillian meets with Dylan in the car park and they realise they’ve both been injected with something by the doctor, who they take to calling Frankenstein.  When a number of SUVs turn up, they realise Frankenstein wasn’t joking and after Jillian’s car is blown up the three leave town.

Running from unknown pursuers Dylan and Jillian will soon begin to realise that there are changes going on inside of them, manifesting as powers that could almost be termed superhuman. Can they stay alive long enough to figure out what’s been done to them?

I bought this second hand a few months ago despite being 99% sure I’d read it before. I haven’t read too many new Koontz novels in the past few years but there was a time when I was obsessed with them and I hoped I’d have forgotten enough of the plot to still enjoy a re-read and, on the whole, I had and I did.

The novel isn’t without its flaws. Mainly this is down to verbosity, Koontz is a good writer who has a real talent for coming up with inventive plots, but his prose can be long winded, and there are parts of this novel where I really did want to scream at him to get on with things. One segment in particular involving Dylan, led by his new found ability, entering a house where something unpleasant is on the verge of happening goes on forever. Ratcheting up the tension is fine but this section should have been relatively quick, instead Koontz spends chapters having Dylan sllloooowwwly search the house.  

Luckily the novel isn’t always that drawn out, and there’s fun to be had as our heroes discover their newfound abilities. The leads are engaging, even if they’re stock Koontz characters- all suffering past trauma- and given her occupation you would expect Jillian to come across funnier than she does. Shep’s autism is handled reasonably well and there’s no miraculous cure or anything like that.

The pacing is a little off, and Koontz has to keep remining you that most of the story takes place within thirty-six hours, because sometimes it feels like our protagonists have been on the road for weeks and because our POV is always with at least one of the three, it means that we can forget they’re being pursued until such time as faceless goons show up, which leaches drama out of the story.

Also I can’t help but wonder what impact the film Unbreakable, which came out two years before, had on this book’s development. There is a lot of crossover.

As well as loquaciousness another recurring issue with Koontz is his endings, many of his novels have inventive plots that kept me hooked right to the end where the finale doesn’t live up to what’s come before (a problem for any fiction reliant on mystery box plotting to be honest.)

The ending isn’t bad, but is a little bit of a damp squib, and also feels rushed (ironic given how many words it took to get to the finale). Not a Koontz classic but still engaging and enjoyable.   

Blakes 7. Series B, Episode 9: Countdown

A battle is being fought within the corridors of a Federation base on the planet of Albian. Federation troopers are fighting a desperate rearguard action against unknown attackers. There’s gunfire and a lot of hand to hand fighting.

 In a central control room three Federation officers are assessing the assault. A sergeant is saying his men can hold the attackers off. Space Major Provine (this is a Terry Nation script, so everything has Space in front of it) is not so sure and tells him to spare him the propaganda. He says they should activate “the device”. The sergeant is somewhat horrified. “Is there nothing else we can do? It means the death of millions.” He seems awfully squeamish for a hardened Federation trooper. 

Provine and the sergeant leave the third man behind to activate the device. Before entering an escape tunnel, they tell him to give them several minutes before he activates the device and then follows. In the tunnel there’s a cave-in. The sergeant is killed. Unable to reach their escape rocket Provine goes back, presumably to stop the device being activated. Unfortunately, the control room is breached, attackers swarm in but they somehow let the badly injured third man activate the device, which sets a countdown running. One of the attackers (we’ll later discover his name is Del Grant) apologises to his comrades. “Sorry, I won you a battle but lost you a war.”

Coincidentally Liberator is on its way to the planet Albian. Blake wants to get hold of Provine because rumour has it he might know where Control is. He’s planning a quick hit and run attack when Liberator gets a message. There’s been fighting on Albian and now a general message is being broadcast asking for technical assistance.

Blake, Avon and Vila teleport down to find that the Federation have activated a Solium Radiation device that will kill everyone on the planet unless it can be defused. Blake and his crew must not only stop the bomb going off, they need to find Provine as well, oh and there’s the small matter of Del Grant who kinda wants to murder Avon.

I’ll get to the good stuff, and there is a lot of good stuff here, but let’s start with the unconscionable first. Blake teleports down to Albian with Avon and Vila and yet again Jenna and Cally are sidelined. There’s a moment later on, when both women are sat at the teleport controls (they might as well be glued into place by this point), and Jenna gets annoyed because Cally is tapping her nails against the console. That’s pretty much all they get to do this episode. What makes it worse is that this is by Nation, and he’s written great stuff for both of them in the past. Hell, look at Bounty, the first half of which has Cally being a bad ass, the second half of which has Jenna playing a cunning double bluff and being a bad ass. Yet all he has for either of them to do here is operating the teleport?

Rant over.

It’s always good to see Blake and co make a difference against the Federation and they do so here, even though they miss the fighting, without them millions on Albian would have died and the Federation would have just swept back in and repopulated the planet with only a minor inconvenience to them. Blackmailing a planet into submission is cold, but the Federation has done terrible things before and will do much worse by the time we reach Series D with the Pacification Program.

Nice to see the commandos on Albian count one woman amongst their numbers (yes, she gets knocked out for a large part of the episode but still gets more to do than Jenna or Cally) and of course many revolutions in history have relied on mercenary help, so Cauder hiring in Grant to help plan the attack makes perfect sense, interesting to note that Grant has apparently masterminded several such rebellions so despite being a mercenary he definitely appears to be one of the good guys.

Tom Chadbon plays Grant well and his animosity towards Avon is clear, and understandable, as is his volte-face once he knows what really happened. Grant is a good character, one you’d hope we’d see again but sadly we don’t (though we will hear him again in the Big Finish audios at least).

Provine is a nasty piece of work, he shows no compunction in sentencing the populace to death and is happy to kill anyone who gets in his way as he tries to escape before the bomb goes off, you do wonder why he didn’t kill Ralli when he had the chance though. He isn’t a blind patriot, which seems to be his only redeeming quality. It’s a nice guest performance from Paul Shelley who throws himself into the role.

The base isn’t very interesting, but they must have spent most of the pyrotechnic budget for the season on this episode. Plenty of explosions, lots of gun play and quite a bit of hand to hand combat. The commando assault on the base is quite gritty. They save money by reusing the spaceship from Time Squad, yet again.

Dramatic bomb disposal is a well-worn trope, and you never feel like Avon and Grant are going to fail, especially once they take their bracelets off, but it’s still nicely done, and the arctic setting that floods as the room heats up helps, as does having them talk about Anna Grant while they’re working on the bomb.

An action packed episode with meaty stuff for Avon and lots for Blake and Vila to do. If Countdown has a flaw (aside from its treatment of you know who) it’s that the episode is perhaps more important for what it sets up than its own story. Provine provides Blake with the name of Docholli, the next clue in the search for Control, and also reveals that Control is now called ‘Star One’.

Just as important is the backstory we get about Avon, and the mention of Anna Grant, laying the groundwork for an episode that’s still a season away (and, spoiler alert, an episode I count as my favourite Blakes 7 ep of all time.)

Rumours of Death is some way off though. Next up, who could possibly be under that mask?