Rodents of Unusual Velocity

This is what you get for not staying in touch with the specialist press. I feel quite bad enough for not referring to the recent death of Stephen Greif in this voyage through the complete Blake’s 7, and now it turns out that Chris Boucher, whose praises I have been regularly singing for the best part of a year, passed away before Christmas and I’ve only just found out about it. It’s impossible to imagine a Boucher-free Blake; Terry Nation may have come up with the premise, but you could easily argue that it was Chris Boucher who ensured the show is still remembered nowadays.

Of course, we’re potentially looking at quite a long run of episodes by other people now (typical), the first of which is Stardrive by Jim Follett. Follett’s previous contribution was the horrendous Dawn of the Gods from series three, so you could be forgiven for adopting the crash position before the opening credits even roll.

One of the nice things about the previous episode was the sense of the crew genuinely putting themselves into danger: the Scorpio, we are frequently told, is still essentially a pile of old junk despite Dorian’s modifications, and not capable of mixing it with Federation combat ships. Apparently it’s even in danger of running out of petrol, as this episode opens with the crew planning to sneak into the Altern system to secure a new fuel supply.

This is where I propose my new thesis: which is that the various traumas at the end of the last season and the beginning of this (Blake’s apparent death, Cally’s actual death, the loss of the Liberator, humiliation by Servalan, etc) have driven Avon round the twist and he is now properly mad. Quite apart from his new-found resolve to stop the resurgent Federation’s advance in its tracks, he has now hit upon the scheme of avoiding the Altern system’s patrols by hiding in the sensor shadow of an asteroid – even though this will involve going within fifty yards of a lethally massive chunk of space rock (interesting to see that they still haven’t gone completely metric even in the Federation’s era).

Inevitably things go wrong and the ship gets a massive ding, sufficient to invalidate its No Claims bonus for quite some time (if Dorian had taken out a policy). Luckily Vila comes up with a cunning plan to effect repairs (especially cunning considering he manages to avoid all labour and risk himself) – but this seems to have happened in vain as a patrol turns up while Tarrant and Avon are fixing the drive.

But what’s this? The Federation ships appear to spontaneously blow up before they can do anything too unfriendly. The crew head back to base to ponder this (this seems to be mainly an exercise in filler as the Xenon base set is not used; everyone stays on the flight deck for the handful of scenes while they’re there). Luckily they have made a remarkably detailed recording of the patrol ships exploding – if the dialogue is to be trusted the frame rate is extraordinarily high, which may explain why the special effects are not entirely convincing.

At Orac’s prompting they review the tape in detail, which reveals a tiny spacecraft moving at extraordinary speed buzzing past the patrol ships and destroying them – the implication is that this thing can move even faster than the Liberator could (this is made explicit in the novelisation – this was the final episode to be novelised). Because the recording is detailed to a credulity-strangling degree, they are able to deduce it belongs to a cult of interplanetary speed freaks called the Space Rats, who have somehow managed to lay their hands on the revolutionary new photonic space drive. Avon decides he wants this very badly and the Scorpio is soon blasting off for the Space Rats’ last known address…

Well, it’s better than Dawn of the Gods, I’ll say that for it – quite appropriately for an episode concerned with speed and movement, it doesn’t hang around, with the trip back to Xenon being the only real piece of padding in the story. It’s never dull and there’s a pretty good chase through yet another sandpit at the end of the episode. There’s even a quality guest star in the shape of Barbara Shelley, although it is extremely obvious that she didn’t turn up for the location sequence in which her character appears (but has no lines) – the person doubling for her in these scenes might as well have a bag over her head, it’s so obvious her face is being deliberately concealed.

One of the criticisms thrown at the fourth season when it was new, I seem to recall, was that Servalan wasn’t in enough episodes and that even when she was, she didn’t get enough face time with Avon. Vere Lorrimer’s public response was that a) Servalan knew of Avon’s determination to kill her and would therefore stay out of his way and b) the Federation had by this point become predictable punchbag villains, hence the choice of a more diverse group of new heavies across the season.

Possibly I overstated things when I talked about the gritty naturalism of season four.

Including, presumably, the Space Rats (I first saw this episode as a rather small child and was a little disappointed when the Space Rats turned out not to be actual monsters, but men in silly costumes and wigs). They’re certainly different, but also a wildly cartoony bunch and not particularly credible on any level (the brightly-coloured costumes and ridiculous hairstyles don’t help – how the hell do they get their crash helmets on?). The least you can say about Damien Thomas, playing lead Space Rat Atlan, is that he has figured out the appropriate level to pitch his performance at as a guest Blake’s 7 baddie.

The end of the episode inaugurates a bit of a tradition where the crew spend the episode looking for a scientist or invention and end up losing them or it, although at least on this occasion they do get to keep the stardrive of the title, which is conveniently plumbed into Scorpio’s systems. One does have to wonder about the thinking going on here – saddling the crew with an old and substandard ship was a dramatically interesting choice and a worthwhile change to the format, so why put them back into the fastest ship in the galaxy only three episodes later? Never mind. This is a fairly silly episode but it knows to move fast enough to keep that fact from really registering.