Arctic Light

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.

( More of this nonsense )