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Blake's 7
Downward spiral that happened this weekend:
First of all, someone on Tumblr linked to some B7 vids on AO3 that were restored from old VHS tapes, which I decided to watch for the fun of it.
Blake's 7 is one of those shows that I like (for rather mixed values of liking) and could always tell that it had a strong fannish draw for Things Sholio Is Into, but I feel that I never really got into it because the feels weren't right for what I was looking for at the time - I was into other things, or I wasn't in the mood for something that dark. Most of the episodes I saw were back in the early to mid 00s anyway.
So I watched those, and then I fell down a rabbit hole and watched a bunch of Maidavids' Blake's 7 vids. (FWIW, she's a very old-school vidder with an old-school vidding style, lots of very long clips and characters talking and so forth. It works well for something like B7 with its pacing and long shots, rather less well for recent canons with faster editing. Anyway I like her vids for older canons and she has a ton of them.)
The thing that drew me to it this week in particular was recalling that the Blake-Avon dynamic is extremely Biggles & von Stalhein, so I then got to wondering if the episodes were streaming anywhere and if it would remind me of that.
*six episodes later*
1. Oh god, it does.
2. Oh no.
For anyone not familiar with the show, it's a fairly bleak 1970s British SF spaceship show (with an f/x budget of two shoestrings and a roll of tinfoil) about a group of rebels/criminals who steal a highly advanced ship and go to war against the fascist dictatorship they live in. Avon is the vocally-out-for-himself criminal among the more true-believer-ish rebels; Blake is their idealistic, charismatic leader, who Avon seems to be magnetically drawn to in a very von-Stalhein-ish way.
As an individual character, the similarities are mostly superficial: Avon is competent and suave, yes - the actor is incredibly good at getting across "incredibly suave, very good at things, vaguely untrustworthy*" - but he's not an Honorable Enemy, he's sort of the opposite of it, at least theoretically, according to him.
*He has this way of somehow managing to be endearing while also looking at people as if he's pricing out how much he could get for their organs on the black market.
Then he met Blake.
So basically things with Avon typically go like this:
Avon: I would sell all of you people for 3 space dollars and a shiny object
also Avon: *goes out of his way to save their lives a lot, including putting himself in danger*
Avon to Blake: You're not the boss of me and I'm definitely not part of your crew
also Avon: *does everything Blake tells him immediately, saves Blake's life a lot, looks pleased when Blake says nice things about him*
.... Yeah.
The interesting thing about watching this show now, 15-20 years of life experience after I first saw it, is how much Avon seems to want to belong to something, in a way I never noticed before. EvS's reaction to being repeatedly betrayed and disillusioned was evidently to double down on his own sense of purpose, whereas Avon's was to just throw his hands up and decide to cheat the system and look out for himself first and foremost. But it's interesting how fast he goes from genuinely trying to cheat/betray them, to actually going out of his way to help them, while continuing to be the voice of cynicism at all their idealistic plans. (I mean, he's really not wrong that they're going to get themselves killed.)
And he and Blake are undeniably Weird about each other. I don't think I had remembered how quickly it becomes clear that they evidently like each other, and in particular that Avon really likes Blake, despite all of the Everything.
The last episode I watched last night, 6 episodes in, before going O NO and deciding to stop for a bit, included all of the following:
- Avon flinging himself at Blake, who is about to get blown up, and knocking him out of the way of danger, which was followed by this verbatim exchange while they're still lying on the floor tangled up together:
Blake: Why?
Avon: Instinct. I'm as surprised as you are.
Blake: I'm not surprised.
(One of his consistent things, Biggles-like, is insisting that Avon actually is trustworthy, isn't going to betray them, and is a better person than he thinks he is. Naturally Avon tries to live up to this, complaining the entire time.)
- Blake, right before trusting Avon to safely beam him to an alien planet to try to free the ship from (sob) ALIEN SPACE SPIDER WEBS, telling Avon that if he doesn't come back, it's up to Avon to get everyone else to safety - and Avon's little smile at this.
- A bit later, Blake completely flipping out when he realizes that Avon beamed into danger before Blake could warn him not to. Another verbatim quote: That's my friend out there!
- Blake, after coming up with a plan to prevent one group of aliens from completely genociding another group on their world, abandoning his plan and caving completely after 0.5 seconds of the aliens torturing Avon. (seriously, they touched an electricity thing to his HAND. He didn't even really have time to scream. Blake: "here are the power cells I hid, I'm cooperating, don't hurt him any more!")
- Avon, I should point out, wasn't the one who caved. He was perfectly willing to go along with being tortured, at least at that point, not because he cared about saving the aliens, which he rather vocally didn't, but because BLAKE ASKED HIM TO HELP, in a situation that he was only in to begin with because Blake asked him to.
Anyway, so that's all ... going. And yes, I do remember the show's justifiably famous ultra-depressing ending, so, I mean, none of this is going anywhere good, but they are ridiculously engaging and fun, and I'm not even to the Servalan episodes yet!
First of all, someone on Tumblr linked to some B7 vids on AO3 that were restored from old VHS tapes, which I decided to watch for the fun of it.
Blake's 7 is one of those shows that I like (for rather mixed values of liking) and could always tell that it had a strong fannish draw for Things Sholio Is Into, but I feel that I never really got into it because the feels weren't right for what I was looking for at the time - I was into other things, or I wasn't in the mood for something that dark. Most of the episodes I saw were back in the early to mid 00s anyway.
So I watched those, and then I fell down a rabbit hole and watched a bunch of Maidavids' Blake's 7 vids. (FWIW, she's a very old-school vidder with an old-school vidding style, lots of very long clips and characters talking and so forth. It works well for something like B7 with its pacing and long shots, rather less well for recent canons with faster editing. Anyway I like her vids for older canons and she has a ton of them.)
The thing that drew me to it this week in particular was recalling that the Blake-Avon dynamic is extremely Biggles & von Stalhein, so I then got to wondering if the episodes were streaming anywhere and if it would remind me of that.
*six episodes later*
1. Oh god, it does.
2. Oh no.
For anyone not familiar with the show, it's a fairly bleak 1970s British SF spaceship show (with an f/x budget of two shoestrings and a roll of tinfoil) about a group of rebels/criminals who steal a highly advanced ship and go to war against the fascist dictatorship they live in. Avon is the vocally-out-for-himself criminal among the more true-believer-ish rebels; Blake is their idealistic, charismatic leader, who Avon seems to be magnetically drawn to in a very von-Stalhein-ish way.
As an individual character, the similarities are mostly superficial: Avon is competent and suave, yes - the actor is incredibly good at getting across "incredibly suave, very good at things, vaguely untrustworthy*" - but he's not an Honorable Enemy, he's sort of the opposite of it, at least theoretically, according to him.
*He has this way of somehow managing to be endearing while also looking at people as if he's pricing out how much he could get for their organs on the black market.
Then he met Blake.
So basically things with Avon typically go like this:
Avon: I would sell all of you people for 3 space dollars and a shiny object
also Avon: *goes out of his way to save their lives a lot, including putting himself in danger*
Avon to Blake: You're not the boss of me and I'm definitely not part of your crew
also Avon: *does everything Blake tells him immediately, saves Blake's life a lot, looks pleased when Blake says nice things about him*
.... Yeah.
The interesting thing about watching this show now, 15-20 years of life experience after I first saw it, is how much Avon seems to want to belong to something, in a way I never noticed before. EvS's reaction to being repeatedly betrayed and disillusioned was evidently to double down on his own sense of purpose, whereas Avon's was to just throw his hands up and decide to cheat the system and look out for himself first and foremost. But it's interesting how fast he goes from genuinely trying to cheat/betray them, to actually going out of his way to help them, while continuing to be the voice of cynicism at all their idealistic plans. (I mean, he's really not wrong that they're going to get themselves killed.)
And he and Blake are undeniably Weird about each other. I don't think I had remembered how quickly it becomes clear that they evidently like each other, and in particular that Avon really likes Blake, despite all of the Everything.
The last episode I watched last night, 6 episodes in, before going O NO and deciding to stop for a bit, included all of the following:
- Avon flinging himself at Blake, who is about to get blown up, and knocking him out of the way of danger, which was followed by this verbatim exchange while they're still lying on the floor tangled up together:
Blake: Why?
Avon: Instinct. I'm as surprised as you are.
Blake: I'm not surprised.
(One of his consistent things, Biggles-like, is insisting that Avon actually is trustworthy, isn't going to betray them, and is a better person than he thinks he is. Naturally Avon tries to live up to this, complaining the entire time.)
- Blake, right before trusting Avon to safely beam him to an alien planet to try to free the ship from (sob) ALIEN SPACE SPIDER WEBS, telling Avon that if he doesn't come back, it's up to Avon to get everyone else to safety - and Avon's little smile at this.
- A bit later, Blake completely flipping out when he realizes that Avon beamed into danger before Blake could warn him not to. Another verbatim quote: That's my friend out there!
- Blake, after coming up with a plan to prevent one group of aliens from completely genociding another group on their world, abandoning his plan and caving completely after 0.5 seconds of the aliens torturing Avon. (seriously, they touched an electricity thing to his HAND. He didn't even really have time to scream. Blake: "here are the power cells I hid, I'm cooperating, don't hurt him any more!")
- Avon, I should point out, wasn't the one who caved. He was perfectly willing to go along with being tortured, at least at that point, not because he cared about saving the aliens, which he rather vocally didn't, but because BLAKE ASKED HIM TO HELP, in a situation that he was only in to begin with because Blake asked him to.
Anyway, so that's all ... going. And yes, I do remember the show's justifiably famous ultra-depressing ending, so, I mean, none of this is going anywhere good, but they are ridiculously engaging and fun, and I'm not even to the Servalan episodes yet!
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Also I now want Biggles in the middle of some kind of temporary-teaming-up situation informing EvS that it's his job to rescue everyone if Biggles doesn't make it back...
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Oh yessssss, I want this VERY MUCH now; it seems so Them to do this.
And yeah, it's a frustrating show, because it's clearly trying to do some very ambitious things, and some of the writing/acting is genuinely very good - and then it keeps getting the knees cut out from under it by poor writing/production values/guest actors. The good parts are too good to be able to easily roll with the cheesy, unconvincing, or ridiculous aspects of the parts that aren't. AWKWARD.
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Ahaha, he totally does! What a great description.
I watched the show for the first time in 2020, and it was very much this sort of dynamic that got me hooked (lord knows it wasn't the production values...)
Looking forward to more of this (and the Servalan episodes thoughts, too. She was also amazing.)
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and the cast overall is really enjoyable.
Yes! It took a while for the cast as a whole to grow on me (and reading a bunch of fic helped with that, I think; reading over my notes from just watching the show, I can see I ended up fonder of a lot of people, especially Blake, than I was just after watching the show.)
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BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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I can definitely see how you could get solid material for years of fanfic writing out of it; it's a very rich universe that's unexplored enough to leave tons of space for writing about. Not to mention all the aftermath and fixit potential.
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My Kalikoi novellas began with one of the last fanfiction stories I ever wrote, a short post-Gauda Prime story, though they're more an "inspired by" AU homage than a true filing off of serial numbers.
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Avon: Instinct. I'm as surprised as you are.
Blake: I'm not surprised.
That's great.
(I have never seen Blake's 7, but I have been aware of it for about twenty-five years because Tanith Lee wrote a couple of episodes, which I did not have ready access to at the time; it has now become a show that nearly everyone has recommended to me and I probably would love, but also I feel a little weird about the expectation. I almost watched it with
(Tanith Lee also wrote a novel whose main character is not, as I recall, strictly filed-off Avon, but is definitely filed-off Paul Darrow, and I have always admired this.)
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I feel a lot (A LOT) of the great dialogue on that show is due to Chris Boucher, who both wrote episodes and served as script editor. The only time I got my picture taken with a B7 person, it was Boucher (he was befuddled as to why I wanted this, which was adorable). He said, "There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There are only better guys, and worse guys," which pretty much sums up the show.
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It was unpredictably entertaining to receive this boost for Chris Boucher this afternoon, because I was writing this.
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IIRC the character was "Parl Dro" - even the name is filed-off....
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That is correct. Lee said it was drawn from the appearance of Darrow's autograph.
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Who was my favorite, which has always inclined me to think that I would like Vila, too.
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I definitely get that entire thing where you've had something recommended so many times that you're reluctant to actually watch it. I have a couple of things like that for me, too.
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Oh, cool! Which one?
I definitely get that entire thing where you've had something recommended so many times that you're reluctant to actually watch it. I have a couple of things like that for me, too.
It doesn't help that on the occasions when I have felt cautiously approachable toward this show, it has been shockingly difficult to get hold of. Like, an offer I once had of VHS rips was ridiculous, but the most plausible thing going at the time.
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Oh, cool! Which one?
Season 3, episode 9, "The Sarcophagus." (I'm currently jumping back and forth between season 1 and season 3, in which the character dynamics are very different and the cast has gelled in a considerably different way than their season one versions.) It was mainly an accident due to wanting to watch the previous episode and then continuing on to this one to see if there was any noticeable character continuity - which the show *does* do on occasion, though not in this case. However, it wasn't a bad choice! I am consistently surprised by how this show manages to surprise me with the outcomes of the episodes; it's not at all predictable. And this one also had some very nice character work and surprisingly good use of f/x given the show's serious budget limitations; it did a nice job with staging and use of color to compensate for f/x they would probably have liked to have but couldn't afford.
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Dammit! I was hoping for YouTube.
I've ended up having to subscribe to a service called Britbox in order to watch it.
On the bright side, I've heard of it, since it seems to be where a bunch of TV programmes have bounced that were previously more accessible to me, but on the other side about the last thing I can afford right now is another streaming service. I knew I should have taken those VHS rips when I had the chance.
Season 3, episode 9, "The Sarcophagus."
I read a script for that online years ago! I am glad it works in three dimensions and real time.
I am consistently surprised by how this show manages to surprise me with the outcomes of the episodes; it's not at all predictable. And this one also had some very nice character work and surprisingly good use of f/x given the show's serious budget limitations; it did a nice job with staging and use of color to compensate for f/x they would probably have liked to have but couldn't afford.
I recently watched an episode of Doctor Who where almost all of the special effects were different colors of light, so I can respect that.
(Seriously, it does sound good.)
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ME TOO. Actually, though, it turns out that a few episodes are on there (only a bare few), and Sarcophagus is one of them, if you were interested in watching it without the context of the rest of the series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzL8fBU1ifU
On the bright side, I've heard of it, since it seems to be where a bunch of TV programmes have bounced that were previously more accessible to me, but on the other side about the last thing I can afford right now is another streaming service.
Yeah, I definitely get that. You can get a week-long free trial, which is what I'm currently in the midst of, but those obviously come with the risk of having to give them your info and then cancel with all due haste. Having it available in a more accessible location would be better! I do not approve of this gated-gardening that is happening with streaming services and I wonder how long it's going to be sustainable. Nobody wants to subscribe to 15 different streaming services just to watch one or two shows on each.
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I've got to tell you, this feels like being gently proffered the abyss.
(I appreciate it.)
You can get a week-long free trial, which is what I'm currently in the midst of, but those obviously come with the risk of having to give them your info and then cancel with all due haste.
Yeah: my family got stuck with Apple TV+ after forgetting about the due haste part, which worked out in the long run of being able to watch the excellent and otherwise inaccessible Slow Horses, but has made me wary of trying the temporary freebie route myself.
I do not approve of this gated-gardening that is happening with streaming services and I wonder how long it's going to be sustainable. Nobody wants to subscribe to 15 different streaming services just to watch one or two shows on each.
Agreed! It's terrible! I keep waiting for it to stop and there keep being more services!
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But part of it's appeal was the terrible f/x, though the main draw for me was Vila. I did very much like Avon too! And Blake, and Cally, and... well, all of them (I even warmed to Tarrant in the end), but mainly Vila. I found his relationship with Avon interesting, though I'll admit that of all the characters, Vila's character was a bit mixed. Lack of a coherent team of writers, which was common back then. So he's either a complete coward/coward who can be brave, a total idiot/idiot who can be smart etc and so on, depending on which eps you go by!
Anyway, sorry, you're more Avon and Blake, which I get. They have an interesting dynamic going on. But yeah, I adored that sneaking little thief (and often wondered what a WC/B7 crossover would have been like, lol!! I mean, Mozzie and Neal with Avon and Vila, well, the world's valuables and banking systems would never be safe) :D :D
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I note that I’ve only seen 2-3 eps, which were extremely Blake-light, including one where he was a very robotic stick of wood, so my impression of B7 has always been that Blake was a nonentity and the actual star was Avon.
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I still have the complete DVD collection that the BBC put out years ago...
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Servalan is just a joy, a scenery-chewing joy. LOL
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I was in a club where we watched video made from video (made from video) from a PBS station that broadcast them. The quality was so poor that it was hard to tell just how bad the sets and effects were when I first watched them! My head filled in everything in much higher quality.
I love Blake and Avon. And Vila and Avon. And Cally and Avon. So you know that multiple points in the show just about killed me, the series finale worst of all.
I got an autograph from Paul Darrow at a con! I don't even know where it is; I didn't really care about autographs as much as getting a few seconds in front of some cast members, even if they weren't looking at me. My friend brought a London theater program for him to autograph, and he just stopped dead when he saw what it was, and then he smiled at her and asked her about it. It was a lovely moment.