Jenna’s Big Day Out

Blake’s 7 heads into Star Trek territory again with Duel, although on this occasion the homage is handled a little more adroitly. This time it’s a whole plot which the American show donates, although it was hardly original even the first time around.

We find ourselves on a bleak alien world covered in enigmatic statues, which eventually turn out to be grave markers. You can tell the script is aiming for ‘creepy and atmospheric’ but not quite getting there; this is more the fault of the episode’s low budget (the planet is largely styrofoam, and filmed on VT in a not-very-capacious studio) than director Douglas Camfield (another of those great talents who has been largely forgotten due to his working in mainstream TV). Floating about the place are two aliens named Sinofar (Isla Blair) and Giroc (Patsy Smart); Sinofar is one of those very serene aliens, while Giroc is a cackling old crone (Patsy Smart largely specialised in these in the 1970s and 80s). Both of them have clearly ascended to a higher plane of existence, forgoing the need for traditional embodiment – not to mention support undergarments in Sinofar’s case, although she very clearly still feels the cold. (Having done a bit of reading around, commenting on the prominence of Isla Blair’s nips seems to be virtually obligatory for anyone reviewing this episode and I apologise for not being more imaginative.) They are both funny shades of blue and green in this initial scene, which is not the case later on – whether this is down to odd lighting effects or a decision to change their make-up mid-story isn’t clear.

I feel any comment from me would be superfluous at this point.

Anyway, the duo are observing the activity of three starships which are holding station near the planet – these turn out to be the pursuit squadron commanded by Travis, who is lying in wait for Blake to arrive (it seems like the Federation have mobilised significant forces in pursuit of the Liberator, although a line about how Blake has been pushed ‘into this galaxy’ we must assume to be a slip on Travis’ part).

Sure enough, Blake turns up: the Liberator is low on power and needs time to recharge, so the crew park the ship over the planet and get ready to relax for a bit. As Jenna and Gan have barely been allowed to beam down for ages, they accompany Blake to the surface and explore the graveyard for a bit, Gan catching a glimpse of their watchers before a more pressing issue emerges: Travis’ ships closing on the Liberator.

What ensues is about as close to an exciting space battle as you’ll find in Blake’s 7 – for all of its much-vaunted size and advanced technology, the Liberator is in no state to either run or fight, and the actors and director put across the crew’s desperation very well (even if no-one has yet figured out a way of running around on the Liberator set which isn’t endearingly cautious). In an act of desperation, Blake opts to ram Travis’ ship, but the aliens invoke their powers of slo-mo and David-Bowie-pop-video-effects and the participants find themselves frozen…

Yes, it’s that regular Trek trope about godlike aliens screwing with the crew, but Blake’s 7 handles the idea a bit differently: Trek‘s alien gods are usually just super-evolved tools, without any real back-story beyond that. Sinofar and Giroc get quite a long speech about how their planet was devastated by millennia of relentless warfare, which ultimately exterminated the entire population, leaving only them. (Where they got their immense powers from isn’t really addressed.) It’s a very bleak, Terry Nation-ish speech, touching on themes from his other SF scripts, and it’s quite successful in helping to cover just what a steal from the Arena and Savage Curtain episodes of Trek this is.

Sinofar and Giroc declare that Blake and Travis must learn the true nature of war, which apparently involves teleporting them to some woodland so they can fight to the death – Blake is assisted by Jenna (Sally Knyvette finally getting to go on location) while Travis is backed up by one of the crew of his ship – a mindwiped cyborg vampire called a Mutoid (played, unexpectedly well, by Carol Royle). Everyone else watches on the viewscreens. (The Mutoids are an odd throwaway concept: they turn up in a few episodes, but are never really central to the plot. Nevertheless they do add a lot of texture to Blake’s world-building.)

Well, what follows is okay and reasonably diverting, but as ever with Blake it’s the dialogue and performances that keep you watching. Douglas Camfield was a terrific director of thrillers, but you can tell he’s somewhat hamstrung here – it looks very much like the location shoot partly fell victim to bad weather and they weren’t able to get all the shots they needed: Jenna’s capture by the Mutoid is very awkwardly handled and there are a few short exchanges between her and Travis that have been done in the studio with the forest backdrop very obviously inserted behind them using CSO. That the episode is as good as it is remains a testament to Camfield’s talent.

One other notable element of the episode is the absence (so far as I can tell) of any incidental music as such; a bit of a rarity. Followers of the careers of Camfield and Blake‘s regular composer, Dudley Simpson, have made much of the so-called feud which apparently broke out between them in the mid-1960s when Camfield discovered just how much money Simpson was making and vowed never to work with him again. More recent research has suggested things weren’t quite as clear-cut or extreme as all that, but it’s certainly true that Duel‘s assortment of radiophonic and ambient sound – lots of throbbings, pulsings, clatterings and so on – add significantly to the distinctiveness and impact of the episode.

Camfield’s contribution lifts what might otherwise have been a fairly standard Nation script, in which many of the conventions of the series can already be discerned: the plot takes a long time to kick into gear, Avon (despite being confined to the Liberator flight deck for the entire episode) gets the best lines and most memorable moments – he’s at his most bastardly Spockish with dialogue like ‘I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or, indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all’ – and Blake is still a numpty when it comes to sparing Travis’ life. He breezily dismisses his opponent, when in this episode Travis comes very close indeed on more than one occasion to taking out Blake and crippling the Liberator. I know I’ve suggested that Travis is never quite as effective again as he is in his debut episode, and I stand by that, but this time around he is not far off. The episode as a whole may not shift the series’ status quo much, but it’s a good demonstration of the show’s ability to absorb tropes from pulp SF and recast them in its own style.