vilakins | Voice from the Past (210)

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blake's 7 - episode reviews

Voice from the Past (210)

And the award for the worst special effect ever goes to... Blake's 7 for the 'walking on the moon' scene in Voice from the Past. [rapturous applause]

OK, this is such a bad episode, it's getting a commentary rather than a review.

Bwahaha, Cally's yoga class! Cally's in a fairly dignified lotus, but Jenna's doing a cobra and Avon looks as if he's debasing himself, possibly in the direction of earth and Mecca, while Blake grabs at his feet (his own, not Avon's). Actually, Avon's pose is called 'the child' which I bet doesn't improve his mood much when he finds out. Why isn't Vila there though? Thrown out for laughing at the others, I bet.

They called a planet Del 10! Is there a Jack Prime somewhere? It's rather endearing though that the planet has a people name. Was it founded by a Tarrant perhaps?

Cut to an interminable shot of the Liberator turning ponderously in space. I suppose they have to show they're on a ship, but I know this isn't the last.

I suppose vita particles liven people up. Vila's certainly looking forward to them and the low gravity. ;-) And BTW they're not the beta particles some people think; those aren't terribly good for one.

RENOUNCE RENOUNCE RENOUNCE not to mention Nostril Cam™!

OK, they're going back to Del 10, yay! Cut to the Liberator turning slowly in space.

Space Fatigue! Blake's got space fatigue! Someone should do a count of how many times 'space' appears as an adjective in the series. And way to go, guys, leaving Vila alone with Blake when he has no idea what's going on. Don't take the pad off, don't take-- oh, you did. OK, it’s a nice thought to offer Blake some water, but don't listen to him, don't lis-- oh, you did. Why does Vila believe so easily that Avon and Cally are a couple?

They're going back to asteroid PK118. And, yes, here's the Liberator turning in space again. I suspect this episode wasn't long enough and they had to top it up with, well, the Liberator turning in space. Should I have made this a drinking game?

What, Blake's going to leave Avon and the others locked in that room for days? What a meanie! And I wouldn't trust that aluminium helmet. Blake. It doesn't look very airtight.

And here it is: the worst special effect ever: Blake walking along beside a painted curtain. AAAAAAAUUUGH! My eyes, my eyes! And why did they even bother? Why not just cut to him going in the door? AAAAAAUGH!

Ha! Jenna gets some funny lines about the barren and unattractive asteroid.

And here's the mummy and Van Glynd, strangely changed. My eyes glaze and my mind goes into idle during the mummified Shivan scenes. There will not be much commentary on those. And Shivan takes so long to talk, I could make a nice cuppa between words.

Oh come on, Cally, don't cut Vila off when he was just explaining why he sided with Blake. Enquiring minds want to know if it's true about the pairing up.

Hey, Servie's wearing a dental assistant's uniform! She wants to play with the Demented Dentist, doesn't she!

Le Grand could do with consulting Servie's makeup minion. The metallic look does not suit her, and she seems to have some difficulty enunciating around her teeth. Is the Princess Leia hairstyle a deliberate homage?

Deputy leader? Oh, Vila. And why do you bow to Le Grand? You're a rebel, dammit. Ah, Nagu kneels to her and calls her 'my lady'; governors are obviously akin to royalty in the Federation. I wonder if the position's hereditary.

And now we get a long scene of the shuttle docking. Definitely not enough dialogue in this ep (which is probably a Good Thing) and that has to be an homage to Star Wars and Lando Calrissian's city.

Come on, Avon! Smash the thing. Whack it with a hammer, stamp on it, don't just lamely lament the lack of Orac!

Oh, look! It was Travis all along! I'd never have guessed! :-P (Actually, Greg, who hadn't seen it before, did guess, and it looked rather Travissy). And of course we can see the rest coming, can't we. A precursor to S4's constant defeats.

Ah, Jenna and Vila are using a snack machine to block the door! I'm surprised Vila didn't use the opportunity and a lockpick or two to extract some Mars Bars while he was at it.

Yay, Avon smashed it!

And yes, Blake, you ought to thank them, not tell them to get back to work. Bloody hell, I hope someone put him right and they actually made it to ~~Jack~~ Del 10 and its vita particles. They deserved to, and if Blake doesn't like it, he can stay on board.

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They should lock Blake up in a room and go on to Del-10 themselves. Between Grant, Tarrant and this place, Del seems a pretty popular name in the B7 'verse.

As for Vila believeing about Cally and Avon, well, in my crazy A/V shipper canon, he knows Avon's taken a break from him for a while. Is this the one where Vila says, "Avon has been neglecting me a bit, lately?" Ahahahaa. (ETA: It's "Avon has been excluding me a bit lately." Ahahaaha. I love it.)

Ah, it is an awful one, but Avon looks so nice in his jacket and his hair isn't atrocious. I can't complain too much. Just FF through Shivan's scenes.

Yeah, I noticed that. I thought, Vila's upset because Avon hasn't been playing lately and he took down the "NO GURLZ ALOUD" sign they had on their hut in the cargo bay. Ooh, and this is why!

Ah yes, the black shirt and the grey leather. And Vila's in his Killer top, and Jenna's wearing my favourite outfit of hers.

Aahahahahaa. Poor Vila. I do love it though--the implied statement that they do hang out and haven't been lately, for whatever reason. However you want to interpret it, it's interesting. In my head, they have a very on-again, off-again relationship, and this is one of their off-again moments. But ahahahaaha, hut in the cargo bay, ahahaaah. I can just see it now. Good cracky fun, that.

I do wish Avon (and the rest of them) dressed down more. Vila has a lovely black shirt too, and Avon looks nice in his without the jacket, and his poloneck in Dawn of the Gods, etc. Ah well. I love Jenna's leather. :D

He's obviously very bitter. Poor Vila.

We only see Vila's black shirt once. [mourns the lack of the black shirt] I suppose they thought it was too ordinary and Not Space to have them wandering around in shirts and trouser. Yet the black shirt and Avon's white one...

poor bitter Vila. I'll pretend Avon made it up to him. Although probably not after this episode, since Vila was a bit silly in it, locking them all up. Sigh.

It was a very nice black shirt, to be sure. I know it wasn't very Space all dressed down, but, ah, they all look so much better when they're not in ridiculous clothing, ahaahaha.

I really need an icon of Vila in that black shirt.

Vila has one on his LJ. These three screencaps are good: one (http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib/html/chars/images/weapon/alone/weapn027.htm?subj=2048), two (http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib/html/chars/images/weapon/alone/weapn054.htm?subj=2048), three (http://www.framecaplib.com/b7lib/html/chars/images/weapon/alone/weapn108.htm?subj=2048).
The last one is the one I used. :-)

:D I just put on "Weapon" and made a few caps myself--and a new icon. :D Although I wish he wore it longer. Like, say, for the rest of S2? XD Ahahaahaha. "Weapon" is a good one for me to rewatch for the Tarrant fic too, since it's got Blake and Rashel. Even though I did just recently rerewatch it. XD I skipped through most of it, looking for pretty black shirt to cap. Avon in his poloneck is quite nice too. Hee. Clearly before Avon started excluding him. They're almost matching.

But he looks so sad! Poor Vila.

I know, poor sad Vila. But he does look pretty when he's sad. Sigh. I might make some more. I'm a bit too tired to fiddle with icon making right now, sadly. But sad Vila is how he looks for a lot of the show. I can . . . handle that.

Just makes me want to write fics where ~~Avon~~ people give him hugs.

Avon does look rather lovely in this episode. For me it's one of the only redeeming features of this episode. I do like Vila's suede top as well. :D

Mmmm, it's one of Avon's prettiest episodes (shallow? moi?? oh all right) and I LOVE that black shirt...

Bless you for the comments, I will go and watch only thanks to you!

Noooooo! You will regret it!

No no - I will just enjoy an application of your comments on selected situations!:-)

I hope they enhance your viewing pleasure! :-)

I think the debriefing parts of the episode are brilliant, it's just the Travis in Papier Mache parts that suck.

The pose Blake is doing is The Boat and it is NOT EASY and I think of this episode every time we get that pose in Yogalates class. I love his little gym shoes too. FWIW I told the teacher that I find it hard to breathe doing Child's Pose and she said a lot of people do, because it's associated with death.

ETA: Maybe they didn't name the planet after a Tarrant but Tarrant after a planet--maybe it's the space! equivalent of "Rocky."

Also, I bet Vila's thinking is that he knows *he* isn't sleeping with Cally, and the only explanation he can find for this phenomenon is that she's sleeping with Avon?

Thanks; I could not remember 'the boat' even though I've done it (and rocked--literally). I always found 'the child' very easy, but I did not know that about it. Why? I should get back to my yoga. It was one thing I could do well.

Rocky Tarrant! I love it!

That makes sense. :-)

*grin* I love your commentary on this one. It's almost as good as sitting next to you and throwing popcorn at the screen. There are so many wonderfully bad moments in this episode, it's great for a chuckle.

Le Grand trying to look tragic in overdone makeup and poorly secured dentures *always* makes me giggle.

I said to Greg before we put the DVD in, "This is so bad, the only way to watch it is to laugh at it." Even so, he went to sleep. :-P

Should I have made this a drinking game?

Yes! Yes you should have. Even though I don't drink, I might make an exception for this episode.

Great commentary. Really cheered me up. Thanks :-D

It cheered me up writing it, which I needed! I've decided this is how I will handle other turkeys like HoK and Animals. Actually anything by Ben Steed would be good for a game: take a drink for every sexist comment.

Ugh. Yes. All of those sexist ones we can do without, along with the icky Animals and the implications between Justin and a way too young Dayna.

The only thing I like about Animals is that it shows Avon is researching and actively seeking out ways to synthesize the Pylene-50 antidote.

'Animals' has little to recommend it--not even the glycolene tank scene is funny--and B Stard's eps can only be treated with the scorn and derision they deserve. B7 did so well with having good woman characters, esp for their era, and they blackened their rep by hiring that bastard not just once, but three times.

Ohhh you terrors! And I was all worried about posting nasty comments about this episode in case I got told off. It's had me in stitches, really, especially the goggle/dolly eye stuck on the side of Travis's bandage. I mean...WHY?

'Space Fatigue! Blake's got space fatigue! Someone should do a count of how many times 'space' appears as an adjective in the series'. Brilliant! I forget- do they actually refer to 'Space Monopoly' or do they just play the game? (Even Avon plays it! With suitably nasty comments, true - but SPACE MONOPOLY? All the fics have him playing chess.)

No one will tell you off about disliking an episode, though they may disagree. It's pairings some get upset about.

No, they don't actually name the game; it's fanon that it's Space Monopoly. I called it Galactic Monopoly in Vila's E-mails and I think I was corrected. :-P Avon and Vila do play chess in 'Gambit', so that's where that comes from. I think I've seen chess in other eps too. [looks it up in the Sevencyclopaedia (http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/SevenCyc/index.html)] Here you go:

Chess appeared in several episodes. An abandoned game was found on the Ortega in Mission to Destiny. Carnell carried a computer chess game which he gave to a young officer before going into hiding. Defeating the Klute at Speed Chess on Freedom City offered a prize of one million credits. Avon and Vila produced a chess board when Blake, Jenna and Cally teleported up from Freedom City. Colonel Quute was seen to play chess or a very similar game with the duty tracer on Helotrix. Belkov in Games appeared to play a multi-tiered chess-like game with his Gambit computer, as did Orac in order to ascertain the nature of Gambit's logic. Lastly, Egrorian and Pinder played what seemed to be the same game as Quute and the duty tracer, and Pinder explicitly used the term "checkmate".

Wow! That's so thorough. I'd forgotten about Carnell giving that chess set over - it seems that the writers use it for a bit of a strategy metaphor. Ah well, Space Monopoly aside, they had a lot of time to kill on the ships. Which is, of course, where the fanfun begins...

LOL! Very funny commentary. Loved it.

Yes, that comment at the end by Blake is the same kind of attitude you see from him in Horizon and makes me wish that Jenna had not stopped Avon from leaving him on Cyngus Alpha. Or that circumstances had not prevented Avon from leaving on those occasions when he was going to.

It does makes Vila look sort of...shall we say, less than intelligent...

I do love the implication that Vila gives that he and Avon have a close enough relationship that Avon seems to talk to/confide in him regularly.

As for Vila easily believing Blake when he says that Avon and Cally are connected somehow, (or even that Blake would have this as part of his delusion), says to me that they all notice that Avon and Cally are more than just crewmates or casual friends. Avon's relationship with Cally is the least antagonistic and he shows a tenderness, a level of personal honesty and easy teasing humour with her that he doesn't have with anyone else on the ship.

Not that I'm biased in any way....LOL...

I do love the implication that Vila gives that he and Avon have a close enough relationship that Avon seems to talk to/confide in him regularly.

They seem to, given how many scenes we see of them passing time together. :-)

I can believe Avon/Cally, but I'd like to know what Cally would have said had Vila explained, but he wasn't allowed to.

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Voice from the Past (210)

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Gonna Fly Now

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