Murder on the Neutrotope Express

I’m starting to think that my whole thinking on the which-early-episodes-of-Blake’s-7-are-filler issue has been somewhat coloured by the collected works of Trevor Hoyle, the (one suspects) main writer of the Blake novelisations that appeared around the time of the series’ original transmission. This was not a comprehensive project: there were only three, two covering the first season and one the opening episodes of the final year, and even then Hoyle was selective in which material he covered – not The Web, and not episode seven, Mission to Destiny. (Breakdown and Bounty likewise go un-adapted from this first year.)

You can kind of see why: these episodes don’t link into the rest of the series particularly, and they’re not concerned with either Blake gathering his crew or their various clashes with Travis and Servalan. Still, this isn’t to say that Mission to Destiny is a bad episode as such – it’s a little atypical, for sure, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Much of it occurs on the spaceship Ortega, where right at the top of the episode a crewmember played by Brian Capron (later a sympathetic Grange Hill schoolteacher and a less sympathetic Corrie serial killer) is murdered by a bang on the head. The Liberator later comes across the ship, which is going round in circles and not responding to their hails. As Jenna is still not allowed to do anything interesting, Blake teleports over with Cally and Avon to see what’s up.

Well, all the crew are asleep, thanks to someone putting knockout gas in the air supply, but Blake overcomes the urge to have a nap and sees to it that everyone wakes up. The controls have been damaged and the ship will be stuck on its circular flight-path until someone can fix it. The ship is under the command of one Dr Kendall (Barry Jackson) and they are heading home to the planet Destiny, an independent world noted for its voluminous collars, which is currently experiencing a grave crisis. The problem can only be solved using a neutrotope, an immensely valuable and important plot device which they have just spent all of Destiny’s money on.

The sabotage of the ship and the murder of the pilot are clearly connected to one of Kendall’s Seven wanting to nick the neutrotope and retire to a life of luxury. Avon is supremely unmoved by the plight of Destiny, but does confess to a desire to see this mystery solved – which is just as well, because the damage means the Ortega can no longer travel at superluminal speeds, meaning someone else will have to deliver the neutrotope if it’s to be there in time to save the planet. Naturally, Blake volunteers and zips off in the Liberator, leaving Avon and Cally behind to complete repairs and ponder about the times and velocities implied by the script and their implications for the rest of the series.

(The shade of Terry Nation will probably rise screaming from the grave if I even start down this route, but: we are told that, travelling at sub-light speed, the Ortega is five months from home. The Liberator, apparently, can do the trip in four days travelling at ‘standard by six’ (which seems to be, as the name suggests, a fairly standard speed).

Assuming that ‘sub-light speed’ is a fairly high fraction of C, some fairly basic maths reveals that the Liberator can travel 971,327,563,920 km a day at standard speed. This means that the trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri, at four light-years only a hop and a skip in astronomical terms, would usually take the Liberator roughly five weeks.

This meshes fairly well with the long flight times indicated in some of the other episodes of the series – the eight month trip from Earth to Cygnus Alpha mentioned a couple of times – but it does seem a bit on the long side, all things considered. The characters fly from one planet to another fairly casually, after all: Travis goes back and forth between Kentero and Servalan’s HQ multiple times in one episode, and this is on a Federation ship which is slower than Blake’s. I think we are obliged to assume that there are some other factors in play.)

Yes, we are in Agatha Christie pastiche territory here – an area which, I should say, Blake script editor Chris Boucher had previously displayed considerable aptitude for. The main downside to doing this kind of story is that, obviously, you need a fairly extensive guest cast for the whole whodunnit angle to have any interest to it – which means that many of the regulars get less to do than usual; Vila, Gan and Jenna are all minimally served in this episode.

‘You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you all here today…’

The upside, however, is that Paul Darrow gets to play Inspector Avon and crack the case aboard the Ortega, which he does with his usual sardonic panache. Darrow is clearly having great fun throughout the episode; you can almost see the writers and production team waking up to what a felicitous combination of character and performer they’ve stumbled upon here. He gets all the good lines, up to and including the unacceptable-but-still-great-the-way-Darrow-delivers-it ‘You’d better get her out of here, I really rather enjoyed that’, after punching out the villainess of the piece.

The exigencies of time mean this is only really a vague wave in the direction of an actual whodunnit – only a couple of characters are properly developed, the only motive Avon discusses (correctly, as it turns out) is financial gain, there’s only one red herring worth mentioning. It’s also notably a whodunnit in an SF setting, rather than an SF whodunnit – by which I mean a story where the murder is achieved or the killer’s identity obscured by some science-fictional means. SF whodunnits are tricky to do at the best of times, and attempting one inside fifty minutes for a BBC 1 audience would really be a big ask.

Nevertheless, it’s a solid episode that hangs together rather well – mainly around the central armature of Paul Darrow’s performance. This first appearance of a dominant Avon may be its main significance in the history of the show, but that doesn’t stop it from being rather engaging, even if many of the regulars hardly appear and the actual murder-mystery is only handled with the broadest of strokes. It’s hardly essential, but it’s hard to dislike, too.