Blake's 7 Review

What would you get if you turned the Star Trek premise upside down and shook it for a while? Besides some spare change and a toupee or two, you'd get a brutish, totalitarian Federation oppressing the galaxy, convicted outlaws as heroes, and shipmates more likely to stab each other in the back than talk about their feelings and give group hugs. You'd get bad guys that shoot first and ask questions later. You'd get good guys that fail, die, and don't return from the dead. You'd get the grit and chills of a well-conceived dystopia.

In short, you'd get Blake's 7.

If you've failed to see Blake's 7 on television or videotape, or at its international conventions or hundreds of dedicated sites on the 'net, then you've missed a great pioneer in arc science fiction, nothing less than the missing link between the The Prisoner and Babylon 5. Now with Blake's 7 fan activity hotter than ever and an upcoming television movie promised soon, John Kenneth Muir has chosen the perfect time to unveil the daddy of all reference sources about the show and its following.

The BBC series originally ran from 1978 to 1981. In 1986, it debuted on PBS in the United States, and soon American audiences understood why British fans were so devoted to the show. A thriving fandom grew around the idealistic and unstable Blake, a former rebel leader wiped of his memory and framed for child molestation by the tyrannical Federation, and his band of criminal followers who fought for freedom - and often against each other - as they tried to remain one step ahead of their former captors. The enigmatic computer expert Kerr Avon, the cowardly petty thief Vila Restal, and the exotic alien telepath Cally, among others, captured the viewers' imagination.

Though the settings and special effects don't stand up to time - some cardboard props, in fact, literally fall down during the scenes - the guts of the series remain impressive. The producers dared to carry the extreme odds against the small band of freedom fighters to their logical conclusions. Over the years heroes lost their balance, sanity, and, eventually, lives. The remarkable series conclusion, in fact, left only one main character standing after betrayal delivered the group to sudden ambush and terrible slaughter.

Whether you adore the dark universe of Blake's 7 or have yet to see it, John Kenneth Muir's A History and Critical Analysis of Blake's 7 provides a useful guide. It lacks the charming quotes of 1982's Blake's 7: The Program Guide by Tony Attwood and the glossy layout of 1997's Blake's 7: The Inside Story by Joe Nazarro and Sheelagh Wells, but if you're more interested in this pathbreaking series' place in science fiction history than in the shoe size of lead actor Gareth Thomas, then this is the book for you. In the volume's four major sections Muir explores the origins and history of the show, its four seasons (with a detailed and impressive episode guide), its international fandom, and its place in science fiction.

Muir is not, to be sure, Chuckles the Clown. If you're looking for a humorous read, go back to Nazarro and Wells or, better yet, look up some of the amazing fan fiction that, like Fox Mulder's truth, is "out there." But Muir does deliver the substance. The episode guide section, a joy for the initiate or the devotee, is itself 139 pages long. And, thankfully, he doesn't indulge in that horrific academic jargon that made such disappointments as 1996's "Deny All Knowledge": Reading The X-Files by David Lavery and friends and 1992's Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith doubly hard to digest.

Muir's most original contribution is his analysis of the Blake's 7 arc. As a series with a beginning, middle, and end, Muir argues, the series adapted Patrick McGoohan's vision for The Prisoner and set the stage for The X-Files and Babylon 5. Since the storyline and its message provided the needed continuity, characters could join, evolve, and leave without disrupting the series' purpose. The realism of such change only added to the show's dark mystique.

Blake is definitely back. As fans wait for Paul Darrow to reprise his role as mysterious Kerr Avon - presumably the only survivor of the series' final massacre - in the forthcoming Blake's 7 television movie, they can pass the time with Muir's new volume. For those new to the series, they can catch up on what they've missed with this one-stop-shopping resource.

With any luck, this new analysis will encourage others to examine the so-called "anti-Trek" and its noteworthy influence on science fiction television.