Rhymes with Pollocks

One is sometimes forced to wonder about just what kind of privations of time and money the makers of Blake’s 7 were forced to work under – I mean, it’s obvious just from looking at the screen that they didn’t have access to the BBC’s most prestigious facilities, but even so. Quite apart from the production values, what kind of creative team looks at a script like Hostage or Voice from the Past and thinks ‘Hmmm yes! We’ll have more from this guy, yes indeedy!’

It’s a poser. And one which we are obliged to consider as this week’s episode, Moloch – number eleven of season three, for anyone not keeping track – is another script from Ben Steed, who previously brought us the truly remarkable (in exclusively negative ways) Harvest of Kairos earlier in the year. (This is another episode I have no memory of, and also one which didn’t get a 1981 repeat – but I do remember Dawn of the Gods, which likewise didn’t get reshown. So it looks like I saw at least some of the third season on its first run.)

Your heart immediately sinks at the start of the episode, as it opens with a shot of the rather ugly spaceship Servalan’s been trundling around in all year crossing the screen while Dudley Simpson plays some tension music over the top of it. Leave yourself space to get even more despondent, however, as it turns out that the Liberator crew have been following her for pretty much four weeks without a break. Since when are they so interested in what she’s up to? Why don’t they just blow up her ship? Since when does it take four weeks to get anywhere in this series?

It turns out Servalan is literally on her way to the middle of nowhere: the concealed planet Sardos, smack in the middle of a region known as the Outer Darkness. (The surface of Sardos is initially presented as a painting, which floats the possibility of this episode going somewhere really weird, but it just turns out to be the usual quarry.) How come she’s here? Well, it turns out that a ship belonging to one of the old Federation’s most feared legions has also discovered Sardos, by crashing into it (the planet has a cloaking device). Now they have whistled Servalan up to… well, we’ll get back to that. Getting past the cloaking device without being spotted involves Tarrant and Vila teleporting onto a Federation cargo ship which is also heading for Sardos (the old London model gets dusted off one more time): it turns out the Federation officers ruling Sardos are importing convicts from a nearby penal colony. But why?

It looks very much like we’re in for more knuckle-dragging pulp sci-fi, but Steed has hit upon a genuine science fiction idea, possibly even two of them, although the results of this are rather akin to someone happening across a Steinway grand piano and then using it to play chopsticks for fifty minutes straight. It turns out the Sardoans have invented something which is a close cousin to the Star Trek replicator – it scans things and can then mass-produce them from basic raw materials like rocks and soil. (As is generally the case, replicating living things is not usually possible, although the explanation given here is a bit more bafflegabby than usual.) The Federation commanders here have summoned Servalan not so they can reaffirm their allegiance to her, it’s because they want to use her command ship as the blueprint for a new fleet created using the replicators. (The plot gets fairly involved this week, albeit in a wildly-all-over-the-place sort of way.)

But who or what is Moloch, you may be wondering? Well, initially it’s supposed to be the computer control system of the replicator, but… it turns out that the Sardoans, for slightly obscure reasons, have been attempting to predict the course of their own future evolution (a notion which Terry Nation himself will return to, more successfully, in his final contribution to the series), and the advantage of their replicator over the Trek version is that it’s not limited to pre-existing objects, you can use it like a 3D printer and make stuff up. They have managed to create a being from two million years in the future, which is Moloch (getting around the no-live-replication rule turns out to be a sort of plot point). Moloch is realised on-screen using a puppet, or perhaps muppet is more accurate, which it is difficult to do justice to in prose. (Moloch is voiced by the noted short actor Deep Roy (previously seen in Gambit), which leads me to suspect the muppet was a late replacement for what was supposed to be a monster suit.) Normally I would show you a picture of the Moloch muppet, but it isn’t even the worst special effect in the episode: Moloch has dispensed with the services of the previous Federation commander by turning him into a sort of life-sized troll doll floating in an aquarium. Here we go:

Believe it or not, it looks better in a photo than the moving image.

Well, maybe it’s a dead heat. Anyway, there’s a lot of the usual running around, some more of the appalling sexual politics which made Harvest of Kairos such a special experience (female underlings who fail the current Federation commander are given to the garrison as recreational aids, while Vila gets a new best friend who’s a comic relief violent sex offender), and an amusing, panto-style team-up between Vila and Servalan.

It’s not completely terrible (we’ve reached the point in Blake’s 7 where ‘not completely terrible’ actually constitutes a positive note), but there’s no sign of a systematic exploration of how a society with access to replicators might actually function or differ from our own (to be fair, Star Trek has always steered clear of this too, but I’m sure there’s a novel in it somewhere), and the story comes badly unravelled towards the end – virtually every guest character gets perfunctorily killed off, while the plot resolves by Moloch, genius brain from the distant future, making a very silly mistake. Then Servalan – who has almost literally disappeared out of the story – reappears in command of some rather mysteriously-acquired ships and the crew all run away. (It looks very much like the replicators are still working at the end of the episode, but they never get mentioned again, even though you would expect them to give the Federation a tremendous tactical advantage.)

What to say about Moloch that isn’t a reprise of my moaning about the duff episodes from earlier in the season? At least this one has a faint glimmer of some decent ideas in it, some mildly funny moments, and it hasn’t completely forgotten that the series is (or was) about the conflict between the crew and the Federation. But, and not for the first time this season, those bits which are not unintentionally funny are pretty tough going.