WARSHIP
Writer: Peter Anghelides
Director: Graeme Harper
Guest Stars: Terry Walsh, Pat Gorman, Mr. Blobby (Andromedans), Roy Skelton (Alien Voices), Harry ‘Aitch’ Fielder (General Howells), Walt Disney (Barni Stafford)
Opening Shot: The Liberator facing the alien fleet in stock footage from the previous episode.
You Just Described the Story:
Blake: After what we saw on Star One, I wasn’t expecting that.
Random Insult:
Cally: No one would want to read your mind, Vila.
In A Nutshell: Star (One) Wars. With Alien Suicide Ticks!
Story: The Liberator is joined by a fleet of civilian ships to face off the Andromedan invaders at Star One, but the Federation refuses to join the battle. Servalan has discovered that the dwarf planet Megiddo is an ancient doomsday weapon that will soon blow up the alien fleet and the expendable civilian ships as well. When the aliens blow up Star One and enter the galaxy en masse, Jenna performs a nifty slingshot orbit to lure the Andromedan fleet straight towards Servalan’s forces just as Megiddo detonates. Both space fleets are blown to smithereens but although the Liberator rides out the shockwaves, it is crippled by the damage from Alien Suicide Ticks and the crew are forced to abandon ship – perhaps forever.
Information:
Blake’s acting damned peculiar, isn’t he? After being shot through the heart, confronting an alien invasion and then being forced to put Avon in charge he decides to sit out the battle sitting on the Liberator’s verandah recording a self-pitying Captain’s Log.
Cally’s probably right to question Blake’s fanaticism, but why didn’t she do that during the search for Star One rather in the last minutes before they start fighting an intergalactic war?
Unlike all those Star Wars fans lionizing Han Solo, Blake’s 7 is always brave enough to admit that Avon fires first. Every single time.
Stress makes Vila recite his BBC character profile in an annoying high-pitched whine.
Orac can’t interface with the Andromedan ships because they don’t have Tarial Cells or the Megiddo systems because they were built before Tarial Cells were invented. Gosh, you wait ages for something Orac-proof and then two come along at the same time!
Vila wisely tells us how much he hates working on the hull in hull suits, something never seen on screen before, and then Avon tells him to put on a hull suit and work on the hull.
What’s all this stuff about Cally’s telepathy being boosted by an area of space? It doesn’t help her communicate with Jenna, or the aliens, or even allow her to read the thoughts of Avon and Blake telling her to focus on fighting a space battle. All it does is let her spot the human ships are human. They could have just had Zen say that for all the difference it makes. That said, she somehow knows to put on a thermal suit before she decides to travel to a freezing cold planet. But she still acts surprised. Silly Cally.
Blake uses his Liberator gun as a sonic screwdriver to open a locked door.
For his first episode as the man in charge of the Liberator, Avon spends the whole time sitting on the flight deck arguing with Zen and acting as an IT support phoneline.
No wonder the Federation changed their logo. That old one would be murder to get the fingers right.
One of the frozen Megiddo crew is named ‘Stafford Johns’. Stratford Johns would play Belkov in the Season R episode “Games” and the froggy Monarch in Doctor Who: “Four to Doomsday”.
If Megiddo pre-dates Star One by centuries… what was it protecting before? And why did the Federation give Star One a suitably nondescript name but gave their oh-so-secret doomsday weapon a name blatantly derived from “Armageddon”? This isn’t a cryptic crossword challenge!
Blake defeats an exploding Alien Suicide Tick by… shooting it. So it explodes. OK, that’s thinking outside the box, you’ve got to give him that.
This week’s plot seems to be either Cally or Vila pointing at things and screaming that they’re bombs.
Cally’s plan to hold her breath doesn’t prevent her from speaking aloud. Is that coz she’s an alien?
Matt Irvine must have paid off his mortgage with all the explosions in this episode. No sooner has Vila told us that a small explosion has happened off-screen than a whole planet is blown to smithereens.
Servalan is drinking a cocktail of GREEN while directing an intergalactic war. That’s pure class, that is.
When Zen says sixty per cent of the Federation fleet has been destroyed, is that overall or just the sixty per cent of the fleet Servalan was keeping to one side? Is it sixty per cent of that sixty per cent? What about the other forty per cent? What happened to that?
Avon is clearly struggling not to quote MacBeth in his final conversation with Blake.
Having flown the Liberator through an atomic explosion, hijacked an alien ship, slashed open a space monster’s throat with a screwdriver, and crushed the puny egos of all men in her path, it’s hard not to think Jenna’s done more in this one episode than all the episodes previously. It’s hard not feel sad this is her last appearance, especially as Tarrant turns up in the next story.
Blake stops talking to himself so he can listen to a tape recording of his own voice. Egotist, much?
Closing Shot: Blake’s life-capsule tumbling away from the Liberator into cartoon space.
Delightful Dialogue:
Avon: Is this where we embrace and make up?
Blake: Not while I’m in this sling.
Avon: That wasn’t what was stopping me.
Vila: We’re surrounded by alien suicide ticks!
Avon: You’d better know what you’re doing with this smuggler’s stunt, Blake.
Jenna: Don’t worry, Avon. He knows someone who does.
Amateur Hour:
The Alien Suicide Ticks are clearly just old Cybermat props with tiger stripes painted on them.
Despite the Liberator being constantly shot at, bombed, and sent spinning through space Orac never falls off the table. And then Avon makes a big thing about getting Cally to put it in a protective case?
When Blake opens the cryo-tube and the body inside turns to dust, he gets covered in the stuff but it disappears between camera shots.
Vila’s space helmet cracks open when he takes it off in the airlock.
Jenna’s angry Cally ruined her cunning trick to steal an Andromedan ship and fly out to the mine field. Why? If the aliens hadn’t blown her up, she would have been targeted by every human ship including the Liberator. What exactly was she planning to do if the others didn’t rescue her?
The Alien Suicide Tick doesn’t so much as singe the teleport controls when it explode, making Jenna look ridiculously overzealous with that fire extinguisher.
The wobbling Andromedan pilot watching the plasma explosion acts like a happy little Tellytubby.
Despite being told that Servalan is now President and Star One has been blown up by aliens, Avon doesn’t remember these facts in the very next episode. Either all those bumps on the head he gets cause amnesia or else he won’t believe it until Servalan herself tells them to his face.
ADDITIONAL SCRAPS OF KNOWLEDGE
Planets: Megiddo, Harnup, Maron plus a bunch of others (the frontier of the galaxy’s a crowded place).
Space-isms: sub-atomic probes (which can be dangerous), plasma wave explosion, portable medi-packs.
Dumb Guard Alert: That Andromedan pilot really should learn to lock his spaceship doors.
Special Mention: this is the only episode of Blake’s 7 with a pre-credit sequence. It’s filled with such pointless info-dumps and recycled model shots that you can see why they never tried it again.
Important Fact: Ian Levine, in revenge for the BBC strike that scuppered the Doctor Who story “Shada”, stole all the master tapes of this episode of Blake’s 7 which had actually been completed. It wasn’t until 2013 that this episode was finally tracked down and we got to finally see if it was good or not.
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