A Singular Moment of Brutal Competence

Seek-Locate-Destroy hardly gets off to an impressive start, with another Federation installation that looks like a gasworks, guarded by such a naff security robot that the director feels the need to put a tannoy announcement in the story confirming that this is indeed what the wobbly prop is supposed to be. But it soon turns into pacy and involving stuff, with Blake and the gang embarking upon what is – by their standards so far – a carefully planned and crisply executed raid on the place. (We don’t get to see the various scenes of Blake persuading Vila and Avon to risk their lives in his cause, but that would get rather dull extremely quickly.)

The plan is to break into another communications centre and blow it up, but the real objective is to steal a Federation cypher unit which will allow them to monitor all the Federation signals traffic. Things go well until there is a rather contrived setback and a guard escapes: Vila has, for some reason, not been issued with a gun, and ends up having to chase the man down on foot, only catching him after he raises the alarm. Despite the this, the crew are working together with unusual smoothness and everyone fulfils their role – Vila gets them into the security zone, Avon identifies the unit and does most of the disconnecting, and Gan tears it the rest of the way out of its socket with his bare hands. Cally doesn’t get to do anything so interesting, but at least she’s allowed to beam down – Jenna’s only been off the ship once so far, and that was to another ship.

There is a bit of a prisoner rebellion and in the struggle Cally’s teleport bracelet comes off, meaning she is still there when the complex blows up. Luckily she is saved from the force of the blast and the hundreds of tons of collapsing rubble by being partly covered by some metal shelves (even in a good episode of Blake, which is what this is, the plot contrivances do pile up a bit). The others are duly appalled by their loss – although they seem more embarrassed by not having noticed they left her behind than upset at her apparent death.

So far, so capable and efficient, but the episode earns its status as a landmark by what comes next: a kind of narrative reverse-angle, as the scene shifts to Federation Space Headquarters, where the supreme commander is taken to task by a couple of politicians over exactly what she’s going to do about the Blake situation. The answer is that a senior officer is to be appointed whose sole responsibility is to hunt Blake down and eliminate him. This being a Terry Nation script, the officer in question is not called Commander Travis, but Space Commander Travis; he is played (at this point, anyway) by Stephen Greif, who makes a tremendous impression in his first appearance on the show.

We’ve talked before about Blake‘s slightly peculiar status as a partly-episodic, partly-serialised show; the format does shift, the relationships do change, some of the characters do develop – not for nothing has J Michael Straczynski acknowledged it as an influence on Babylon 5. The trap you can fall into is assuming that the series was always written with a particular end-point in mind; that it was all planned out in advance. I’ve probably been guilty of this myself in describing some episodes as ‘filler’, the implication being that others are moving on some putative continuing storyline. Nevertheless, Seek-Locate-Destroy is a game-changer for the series, in that it is intended to introduce the main villain of the series. The ironic thing is that everyone involved was mistaken about who that actually was.

Which is not to say that Travis doesn’t dominate the episode: Greif plays him as a fierce, driven, dangerously intelligent man, savage and ruthless even by the standards of the Federation military. (There’s an interesting character bit where a young officer complains about having to work alongside a man like Travis – the shades of grey in this series just keep coming.) But he’s strongly favoured by the script throughout. What’s interesting is the extent to which he finds himself obliged to share many of his scenes with Jacqueline Pearce, who is (of course) playing Supreme Commander Servalan.

We’re still in the Blake-and-Travis show, not the Avon-and-Servalan show (which is, needless to say, a much more interesting beast), but even so: Pearce takes what could have been quite a dull, transactional part, as Travis’ straight-laced boss, and finds really interesting things to do with it: she invests Servalan with unexpected glamour and sensuality. I should say that she’s helped by the script here: there’s a clear implication that Servalan is knocking off her office staff. But Pearce takes this and runs with it – lifting a supporting role and turning it into what’s as close to being a three-dimensional character as you’re going to find on this show.

Nevertheless, Servalan’s ascent to maximum power still lies some way off in the future; Travis is still centre-stage as far as the bad guys go. In this episode he’s challenging Blake for prominence. But of course it can’t last, and Travis succumbs to recurring villain syndrome harder and faster than most: the more they appear, the more reliably they can be defeated. He’s a frighteningly capable villain right up until the point where he is obliged to lose, which of course comes at the end of the episode, and from this point on, no matter what Stephen Greif tries to do with the part, he inevitably becomes a diminished and increasingly absurd figure. The seal is set on this in the moment that Blake can’t even be bothered to kill Travis – on one level this is because you can’t have the hero murdering someone in cold blood in a space adventure show that goes out early in the evening on BBC 1, but it’s also because recurring villains have to be alive in order to recur. And so Blake concludes that Travis, despite everything we’ve seen, just isn’t that much of a threat to him or the crew. If the hero doesn’t feel challenged by the villain, the audience isn’t going to feel too much concern about them either.

Up to this point, however, Seek-Locate-Destroy is probably the best episode since the series opener: not a very great deal of explicit world-building goes on, but you do get a sense of the wider universe, a setting that isn’t simply defined by the extent to which it imposes on Blake and the others. The individual set-pieces and character scenes are also generally very well handled. In a way it’s almost a shame that Stephen Greif’s performance is so good in this episode, as he’s allowed to reach peaks of competency and menace he (and Travis) are never allowed anywhere near throughout the rest of the series. But where recurring villains are concerned, this is the nature of the beast.