The winner of this week’s ‘Write Blake’s 7‘ Lottery is… well, let’s hang on a minute, for Trevor Hoyle (the man responsible), while not an established writer on the show, is the fellow responsible for writing the three Blake’s 7 novelisations accompanying the series (covering the bulk of season one and three early episodes from season four). In the days when VHS or DVD releases were by no means routine, these book adaptations had a special magic of their own, as many a nostalgic old git will happily tell you. The Dr Who novelisations of Terrance Dicks gave many young fans a new appreciation for reading; while the Blake’s 7 novelisations of Trevor Hoyle gave other young fans a new appreciation for how good Terrance Dicks was at writing novelisations.
Well, perhaps that’s a bit unfair, for the Blake novelisations are solid enough. You can see why the makers of the TV show, looking for people who were familiar with the format and characters, might get Hoyle on board for a script – but it almost looks as if they forgot to specify they wanted a Blake’s 7 script. Well, again that’s possibly a bit unfair, as – and we have noted this repeatedly – the third season significantly abandons the idea of the series as the story of insurgency against the Federation in favour of slightly tacky pulp SF. This is certainly what Hoyle delivers with Ultraworld.
The episode opens, once again, with the crew doing nothing in particular but being distracted from this by the plot-of-the-week, which initially takes the form of a strange signal registering on the detectors. ‘Pulsar?’ wonders Avon, getting the episode’s genuine-science quotient in early. It isn’t, nor is it a Federation beacon, even though it’s implied these are starting to pop up again (this is the first episode to refer to the reinvigorated and aggressively-expansionistic Federation which forms the backdrop to the final series). The signal turns out to be coming from an artificial planet (not the last one we’ll see this season), one which looks a bit like a Christmas decoration.
Avon comes over very Spock and gets very interested in the artificial planet. ‘You’ll be telling us next we can learn a lot from whomever built it,’ says Dayna. ‘We certainly have nothing to teach them, unless it’s how to remain ignorant,’ replies Avon. Meanwhile Vila is teaching Orac jokes and riddles, for no particular reason. Having been taken over by an alien influence last week, not to mention on at least one previous occasion, this week Cally gets taken over by an alien influence from the strange planet and teleports down without telling anyone (or so it is implied: most of this happens off-screen).
Avon, Dayna and Tarrant teleport down after her and find themselves in a warren of tunnels and corridors (which the cast take every opportunity to hurl themselves down at high speed), which according to Avon resemble the interior workings of a computer. (They more closely resemble the deep-level underground shelters beneath London, much seen in BBC SF and fantasy shows of the late 1970s, mainly because this is where the episode’s location filming took place.) Here they meet a trio of aliens who call themselves the Ultras, who appear to be in charge; they resemble the Blue Man Group with just a dab of glitter.
The Ultras are the masters of Ultraworld, which they initially claim is essentially benign – a data acquisition and storage system, albeit on a planetary scale. However, when they discover that Cally’s brain is being drained and most of the work is done by remote-controlled zombies, the others quite properly suspect this is a load of old hooey. It duly proves to be the case that Ultraworld is a cross between Wikipedia and the Borg Collective – all data it encounters ends up getting stored in its vast memory banks, while biological specimens are either converted into zombies – ‘Menials’ – or rendered down to nutrient paste and fed to the core of the planet.
Yes, there is the core, a huge ever-growing pulsating brain which rules from the centre of the Ultraworld. And if you think that description trips off the tongue, so did the BBC, which used it as the title of a track on BBC Sound Effects #26: Sci-Fi Sound Effects. (Other crucial cuts on this release include the dance-floor banger ‘Black Spaceship Oscillates’, the moody ‘Time Winds’ and the classic family favourite ‘Machine Monster with a Black Sense of Humour! (Who Chases our Heroes Around, Winking). Needless to say I am not making any of these up.) And so did ambient house beat combo the Orb, who used it as the title of their debut single in 1989. Who says Blake’s 7 hasn’t left its mark on the culture?
Having put the ‘fluence on Cally, the Ultras proceed to do the same to Avon, and with Vila stuck on the flight-deck set talking to Orac, it’s down to Tarrant and Dayna to carry the rest of the episode. This they do by running around a lot, stoically, albeit with a brief pause for a scene in which the Ultras promise to let them and the others go if they let Ultraworld record the pair of them having sex (this being pulp sci-fi from 1980, the Ultras dignify this by calling it ‘the human bonding ceremony’, but it’s obvious what they’re after). Maybe Ultraworld is less Wikipedia and more like the internet in general. Luckily Dayna keeps a bomb in her mouth, which they use to escape before things get any more tacky (this is one of those BBC love scenes where everyone keeps all their clothes on).
Ultraworld was directed by Vere Lorrimer – later the producer of the final season, presumably because he knew the show and was available – one of whose previous contributions was the second-season opener Redemption. I mention this because the script for Ultraworld basically turns into a reprise of Redemption in its closing stages: the ship has been brought on board a vast, alien space construct which runs on slave labour, overseen by a slightly prissy elite (Altas there, Ultras here). Luckily Orac is able to screw with the systems of the place and allow everyone to make a run for it – just through being clever in Nation’s script, through the slightly corny device of jamming the core’s operations with Vila’s bad jokes and riddles this time around. Everything blows up. (Though some of the model work is better this second time around, by which I mean there actually is model work.)
And in the end, it’s never slow, and has clearly had much more money spent on it than Sarcophagus, and possibly even Rumours of Death (even though those were two much better scripts). The location filming and some of the effects also help proceedings be less irksome than they might have been (the pulsating ever-growing brain is impressively icky when it blows a gasket towards the end). But it’s not what you’d call deep, more a collection of tropes than anything else. Nevertheless, of all the bad pulp SF episodes from Blake’s 7‘s third season, this is probably the least annoying (so far, anyway).
No Chic. Just Geek. 
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