BLAKES 7 : Drones

The third adventure in the first series of Big Finish‘s Blakes 7 full-cast audio adventures, Drones by Marc Platt, follows on directly from the previous adventure, Battleground.  Released in March 2014, Drones features all surviving members of the original Blakes 7 cast ably assisted by Alistair Lock as Orac and Zen.

Before Blake can act on the information Avon got from Michelov in the previous adventure, he has to deal with an ailing Liberator.  The damage is vast, and even Zen is shut down so that auto-repair can start working, therefore offering no help.  Orac acts as an intermediary between the crew and the ship, taking the lead and devising a plan for survival.

Avon becomes suspicious of Orac’s motives, but Orac reveals that the Liberator will do whatever it can to ensure its survival.  The auto-repair systems will not operate quickly enough whilst they’re in space, and the imminent arrival of Federation pursuit ships makes it necessary for them to attempt a planetfall.

The ship isn’t designed for planetfall, but Orac devises a safe landing – in the sea.  The crew are trapped underwater, in compartments that the ship hasn’t flooded for the sake of submergence.

Blake decides to teleport back to Garmon to get him to join them on the Liberator, and he gets Orac to find out where he is.  Instead of landing back in Zone 9, Blake and Vila find themselves in the middle of another battleground.  This one isn’t a training zone for Federation troops.  It’s an experiment.

Tiny drones, dubbed “biters” by the rebels they find, inject chosen targets with a pyrogenetic virus designed to replicate in its host before causing all body cells to vibrate at an increasing rate.  The target effectively burns up from the inside out.  When Vila is bitten, and the drones locate the Liberator, the race is on to find a suitable cure.  Orac could help, but he’s obsessed with locating Garmon.

Avon tries to discover what is distracting the computer, only for Orac to request defensive upgrades that includes weapons.  Orac is becoming increasingly concerned that he cannot access Federation computers as easily as he once did.  Avon deduces that there must be some other computer that the Federation are using to counter Orac’s attempts.  He further deduces that the abandoned project described by Michelov wasn’t abandoned at all.  Instead, they must have a new, modern, more advanced version of Orac – hence, the code name “Fed-Orac”.

This is the second excellent Blakes 7 adventure from Big Finish in a row.  The story perhaps isn’t as intriguing as the previous one, due largely to the foundations having already been established, but the regular crew are used a little more effectively than before.

The “zones” of the planet do give the listener a similar feel to Doctor Who‘s The War Games, in which the characters just switch to another battleground on the same world and controlled by the same people.  Many people don’t like that aspect of the Doctor Who story and so may probably feel the same way about these Blakes 7 adventures.  Personally, I think it works.  By not having to spend too much time “world building”, the adventures can focus on the story, the characters – regulars and episode-specific – and can keep the story continuing from one episode to the next.  In short, it plays on the strengths of Blakes 7.

Once again, I have no hesitation in recommending this adventure.  Next time out, Mirror, in which we discover if Orac has found the location of Fed-Orac and, if he has, how Blake and his crew deal with it.