BLAKES 7 : Caged

The previous adventure, Cold Fury, ended on the cliffhanger of Travis on board the Liberator demanding Blake’s surrender.  The final adventure of Big Finish‘s first season of full-cast Blakes 7 adventures opens with Blake having his wounds patched up by Cally, whilst Jenna and Avon are being subjected to Travis’ will on the flight deck.

It turns out that Vila has been “turned” to Travis’ side and is now assisting him with taking the Liberator, and its crew, to “the Cage”.  The President of the Federation is there waiting to discuss Blake’s motives with him, before using him as an example to stamp out any other opposition to his tyranny.

Vila revels in the Travis’ torture of Avon, who won’t reveal the whereabouts of Orac’s key, until Vila turns the tables on Travis.  Apparently he wasn’t brainwashed at all.

Blake has a second chance at killing the President, and he takes it.

Then everyone rushes back to the Liberator and escapes, complete with Travis doing his best “I’ll get you next time” rant, and the President revealing that he’s not dead at all.

That’s it, really.

And so we reach the end of Big Finish‘s first series of full-cast Blakes 7 audio adventures.

The highlight, once again, is Hugh Fraser as the President who comes across as someone who already has everything and so sees no threat to his position.  Nicely underplayed by Fraser whilst still exuding the right sense of menace.  Gone is the irrational paranoia of the previous episode.

What we ultimately end up with, however, is a series of telegraphed revelations and disappointments.

Vila is on Travis’ side, yet the only ones who think he is are the cast.  The listener knows he is just biding his time, because otherwise Vila would have been dead in the TV series, and so we’re just waiting for this to happen.

The Federation is going to tear apart the Liberator, only they have to wait for the patrols to check it out, telegraphing that it won’t be torn apart.

Travis has captured Blake and his crew, but he doesn’t kill any of them because “there’s more fun to be had yet”, telegraphing that they’ll escape.

Blake has another bloodthirsty streak in killing the President, as he failed to do the day before, despite never being a blind killer before.  His mission is to bring down the Federation, not just make the chair vacant for the next despot.  What would be the point of throwing away his life to achieve nothing?

The previous episode featured clones, thus telegraphing that this President is a clone.  So the writers make Blake a cold-blooded killer just to then make it a futile event because the President is still alive after all.

Jenna is far too preoccupied with who might “touch her” just because she’s wearing a dress than she is with her imminent execution.  I’m not sure that too many people being led up the steps to Madame Guillotine were quite as concerned with their clothing as Jenna is here.  Why the obsession?  There are bigger concerns, Jenna!

Avon keeps Travis’ torture at bay by answering his question of “Where’s Orac’s key?” by saying “I don’t have it.”  I thought this was a piece of cunning by the writers to have Avon answer the wrong question all the time (Travis never asks if Avon has the key, and Avon doesn’t say he doesn’t know where it is) but, sadly, I read too much into it.  Eventually Avon does say that he doesn’t know where it is, so all the clever avoidance by Avon turns out to just be lazy writing.

It seems like the important bits of the story, the meat on the bones, is missing.  The previous episode ended with Travis demanding Blake’s surrender, and this one opens with Blake and his crew under lock and key and the Liberator under Travis’ control.  So we don’t get to see any kind of resistance from Blake or his crew, the very thing they’re famous for. Why not?  It’s odd that everyone from Jenna to the President recognises that Blake and his crew are expert resistance fighters, yet no one actually does any resisting.  They talk the talk, but never walk the walk.

It’s just like in the last episode where we get no sense that Vila is being brainwashed/turned by Travis.  A couple of brief scenes of Travis asking him a non-question, then the next time Vila turns up he’s apparently been brainwashed.  Why didn’t we get any of the brainwashing scenes?  We might have been more convinced of Vila “being turned” if we had, or at least we’d have an understanding of how he’d resisted the brainwashing.  Instead, we just have more meat missing from the bones.

“The Cage” has apparently been set up purely for the benefit of the capture of Blake and his crew, yet it’s discarded as an irrelevant plot point almost as soon as we’re told what it is.  With two episodes to fill, it would have made more sense to focus more on how this “cage” came about, and how the President got it set up in the first place.  What we end up with is, like the ice planet in the previous episode, a throwaway line used to justify the episode title.

Michael Keating clearly has fun playing the rogue Vila, even though we all know he’s only faking (much as the writers don’t want to tell us this) and so we’re just waiting around for the “big reveal”.  The location of Orac’s key is probably the only clever thing in the entire episode.

In the final reckoning, nothing actually happens.  I appreciate that the writers have, as they say in the interview, to put everything “back in the box” to slot the series of six adventures in between the TV series but, by acknowledging that they can’t do anything “big”, it seems folly to bring the President into it only to make his presence a matter of no consequence.  In fact both of these episodes are episodes of no consequence.  They bring in something big that they can’t do anything with.  What’s the point of that?

It would probably have been better to keep the main drive of these episodes as something more low-key, such as the “Fed-Orac” macguffin of the earlier episodes.  That may have a been a macguffin, but it was low-key enough to provide for some great episodes without having to cheat the ending so as not to ripple the waves of the TV series in the way that this final episode has done.

In all, this has been a relatively good series of adventures.  Most of them fit in well with our memories of the original TV series (except for Blake’s irrational and odd obsession with killing the President) and, for that, they’re worth listening to.  I can’t help but feel that more could have been done with the overall arc and the ending, however.

Season two of Big Finish‘s full-cast Blakes 7 audios takes us into the realms of the TV series’ third season, beginning with Scimitar.