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Deliverance (112)
AKA the one with Lord Avon, Mad Meegat, and Apollo 18. ; :-)
Nitpicks (let's get them over with)
They landed on the moon in 1969 so how come the SFX people don't know what a liveable planet looks like from orbit? People need water to live and it would be blue from space, but Cephlon looks like Mars.
Meegat's people speak English or whatever the rebels speak (though I'm not sure Jenna's captors do). Star Trek had translators, HHGTTG babel fish, and Farscape had translator microbes. It seems that B7 needs something like that so I'm going with the microbes from the Farscape galaxy via a wormhole or two. Well hey, they might also explain how Avon, Vila, and Gan understood how to activate Mission Control so easily.
A chemical rocket would take a lot longer than 500 years to reach another star. Eh, maybe it was just the next system and it was really, really close.
Marryatt
I liked what I saw of Marryatt and the very succinct way in which his character was shown and another little piece of Federation society was revealed: deserters' families are sold into slavery on a frontier world. From their point of view, it's an effective deterrent and another way to tame new worlds, and from ours yet another reason for us to want Blake to take them down. Travis's reaction to Marryatt's death and the fate of his family also shows us that he has a vestigial conscience which is quickly suppressed.
Ensor
Ensor seems sympathetic at the start--"I'm a very nervous pilot." --but his wanting to kill one of his rescuers and leave several of them on Cephlon to get irradiated so that he can to save his father had me cheering his death. Bastard. Of course, he spent most of his life on Aristo with an irascible father, Orac, and some fish of unknown temper, so he would be severely unsocialised and lacking in empathy for anyone but his father. That still doesn’t make me like him though.
Vila and Gan and rocket science
Both of them seem pretty up on the technology of Mission Control--and Avon isn't surprised. Where did they acquire knowledge of ancient tech, or are they clever enough to understand it at a glance? Vila would have acquired a lot of knowledge of electronic security systems, but where did Gan pick his up? All three of them immediately begin talking about manual overrides, output control, alpha scales, and taking it to level two. I've always thought Vila was a lot brighter than he likes to let on, but so is Gan here--and Avon accepts it without question--and they all work very well together.
Vila and Gan and friendship
I love the looks these two give each other when Avon is having his ego inflated, and the way they stand together at the end looking amused. I think this episode, followed by 'Spacefall', has the most evidence for their friendship which features a lot in fandom.
The God Blake?
I'm not entirely sure why Blake would be considered a god. Who is supposed to see him that way? Certainly not his argumentative crew, and probably not the Federation citizens who know about his first trial, his recantation, and the trumped-up charge at his second one, regardless of how they view his cause.
Orac
100,000,000 for the bloody-minded little paperweight? Daylight, well, space robbery!
Hitty-fighty
This might be Gan's best episode. He gets to have some fisticuff fun--and even be funny:
VILA: There's hordes of them! And they don't seem to like us much!
GAN: How can you tell?
Vila is really not good at it though, yelling repeatedly and giving the show away when he's grabbed. He makes up for it in Mission Control though with his competent and knowledgeable techiness..
Meegat
I wonder what she did with herself afterwards. Became a priest who bored everyone silly with ceremonies and reminiscences about the Lord Avon and his faithful followers?
This isn't a favourite but it does have some nice character bits in it. It feels like a standalone episode but when you see 'Orac' you realise it's really part one of a two-parter; not something done much back then as far as I know.
And now that I'm fairly up-to-date, I'm taking myself off to bed.
Nitpicks (let's get them over with)
They landed on the moon in 1969 so how come the SFX people don't know what a liveable planet looks like from orbit? People need water to live and it would be blue from space, but Cephlon looks like Mars.
Meegat's people speak English or whatever the rebels speak (though I'm not sure Jenna's captors do). Star Trek had translators, HHGTTG babel fish, and Farscape had translator microbes. It seems that B7 needs something like that so I'm going with the microbes from the Farscape galaxy via a wormhole or two. Well hey, they might also explain how Avon, Vila, and Gan understood how to activate Mission Control so easily.
A chemical rocket would take a lot longer than 500 years to reach another star. Eh, maybe it was just the next system and it was really, really close.
Marryatt
I liked what I saw of Marryatt and the very succinct way in which his character was shown and another little piece of Federation society was revealed: deserters' families are sold into slavery on a frontier world. From their point of view, it's an effective deterrent and another way to tame new worlds, and from ours yet another reason for us to want Blake to take them down. Travis's reaction to Marryatt's death and the fate of his family also shows us that he has a vestigial conscience which is quickly suppressed.
Ensor
Ensor seems sympathetic at the start--"I'm a very nervous pilot." --but his wanting to kill one of his rescuers and leave several of them on Cephlon to get irradiated so that he can to save his father had me cheering his death. Bastard. Of course, he spent most of his life on Aristo with an irascible father, Orac, and some fish of unknown temper, so he would be severely unsocialised and lacking in empathy for anyone but his father. That still doesn’t make me like him though.
Vila and Gan and rocket science
Both of them seem pretty up on the technology of Mission Control--and Avon isn't surprised. Where did they acquire knowledge of ancient tech, or are they clever enough to understand it at a glance? Vila would have acquired a lot of knowledge of electronic security systems, but where did Gan pick his up? All three of them immediately begin talking about manual overrides, output control, alpha scales, and taking it to level two. I've always thought Vila was a lot brighter than he likes to let on, but so is Gan here--and Avon accepts it without question--and they all work very well together.
Vila and Gan and friendship
I love the looks these two give each other when Avon is having his ego inflated, and the way they stand together at the end looking amused. I think this episode, followed by 'Spacefall', has the most evidence for their friendship which features a lot in fandom.
The God Blake?
I'm not entirely sure why Blake would be considered a god. Who is supposed to see him that way? Certainly not his argumentative crew, and probably not the Federation citizens who know about his first trial, his recantation, and the trumped-up charge at his second one, regardless of how they view his cause.
Orac
100,000,000 for the bloody-minded little paperweight? Daylight, well, space robbery!
Hitty-fighty
This might be Gan's best episode. He gets to have some fisticuff fun--and even be funny:
VILA: There's hordes of them! And they don't seem to like us much!
GAN: How can you tell?
Vila is really not good at it though, yelling repeatedly and giving the show away when he's grabbed. He makes up for it in Mission Control though with his competent and knowledgeable techiness..
Meegat
I wonder what she did with herself afterwards. Became a priest who bored everyone silly with ceremonies and reminiscences about the Lord Avon and his faithful followers?
This isn't a favourite but it does have some nice character bits in it. It feels like a standalone episode but when you see 'Orac' you realise it's really part one of a two-parter; not something done much back then as far as I know.
And now that I'm fairly up-to-date, I'm taking myself off to bed.
no subject
Blake and Avon are fairly ratty to each other in this episode. Towards the beginning, when Blake asks if Avon is sure about going down to the planet, Avon says (paraphrased): "Why, do you think I'll do a better job than you would?" Poor Blake can't win for losing--even when he shows concern, Avon twists it into a power struggle. Then Blake gets a little revenge in later, when Avon says he's going back to look for Jenna. Blake's "I think you'd better," is delivered with such anger, as though what happened were Avon's fault.
Avon's behavior towards Meegat makes a fascinating contrast. He's very gentle with her, and he clearly enjoys being worshipped, but somehow it makes him less arrogant. He's able to step back from his usual ferocious self-defense and say, with apparent sincerity, that he's not much of a reward for all Meegat's waiting. It says a lot about Avon that it takes a Meegat to get his defenses down.
Moving on to other stuff: the business about the two Ensors' name was handled confusingly. For the first half of the discussion between Servalan and Travis, it's "Ensor and his son," then halfway through, they start talking about "Ensor and his father." It makes me wonder if it was a mistake, somehow--if they weren't meant to have the same name, but there was a screwup through a hasty script revision or something. Or if Jacqueline Pearce just got the name wrong during the take and everybody decided it wasn't worth a reshoot!
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Perhaps Avon regards assumptions of equality as threatening. He certainly seems kinder to those weaker than him (Meegat, Nebrox, Piri for a while) so I wonder what the basis of his insecurity is. I do rather tend to the idea that he was a Beta promoted for his brilliance and doesn't feel he quite fits socially. He doesn't have the easy confidence that Blake and Jenna have.
As for the Ensors, I think they changed from 'and father' to 'and son' to show which one they were talking about. It's a problem with family surnames, but I can't imagine Servalan or Travis referring to Bill Ensor and Ted Ensor when they don't seem to have first names themselves. ;-)
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*facepalm* I wasn't thinking of Ensor as a surname, for some reason, but of course it must be. It's a bit confusing to have some characters whom we know only by surname (like Servalan and Travis) and others who really only have one name (like Cally).
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To die will be Bill and Ted Ensor's Awfully Big Adventure!
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