The Annotated Blake’s 7 - ‘Star One’ 4

On with the final batch of annotations for ‘Star One’. That meticulously structured Terry storyline ripples like a line of toppling dominoes; from about the halfway point it’s payout, payout, payout. So there are fewer questions as the knot unwinds.

‘I’ve got the detector shield up’ Jenna tells Avon from the Liberator. The last time we heard of this wonder was in ‘Hostage’, in which it was implied that the Federation had reverse-engineered their own version of it. We’ll never hear about it again; apart from its initial use in ‘Trial’, where it is essential to sell the credibility of the Liberator’s strike on Space Command Headquarters, it’s a bit of a story-killer. Presumably the Federation plugged whatever technological loophole in their defences that was exploited by Avon. A good thing too - it is one invulnerability too many. This advantage would have ended most stories of Series C and D by page 4 of their scripts (including, significantly, ‘Blake’).

Everything Avon says this week is solid gold, but mention must be made of his reaction to Lurena pointing at a heap of corpses and saying they’re trying to kill her - ‘They have a novel approach to the job’. Of course the character who can say things like that is now the star of the show. Of course he is.

Why do the aliens keep the bodies of the Star One technicians about? They seem unblemished, apart from their empty eyeballs. How were they killed? Maybe, in fact, they are still alive? They seem to have been arranged with care in this cupboard, not just dumped any old how. Do the aliens need the originals to sustain the pattern of their copies?

It’s lucky for the aliens that none of the surviving human technicians ever went into the cupboard to get a broom or a bucket in the last two months. Or perhaps that was how they were nabbed - maybe Parton or Leeth was sent to fetch a mop by Andromedan Stot, and a blob was waiting for them,

What is the exact nature of Travis’s treachery? The Stot alien describes it later in the episode as Travis giving them ‘the means to destroy your entire species’. I assumed this meant that he’d told the aliens the location, but as I mentioned way back in my initial look at this episode. that can’t be it. They’ve been on Star One for at least two months, and it plainly hasn’t been two months since Travis left Goth.

When did Travis contact the aliens and pass this information, whatever it was? Trevor Baxendale has, of course, answered these questions very satisfactorily, showing that they can be answered. This was something that was quite beyond my powers. His solution is that Travis obtained the security codes necessary to deactivate the defence zone.

The slight fuzziness in the script about what Travis has actually done suggests to me that Chris Boucher realised this was a confusing tangle - in fact, a bit of a logical cock-up - and thus kept it vague on purpose. It doesn’t really matter; the character through-line is clear enough.

We need to talk about that defence zone and matters arising, though. Jenna sets Orac to dig up all he can about it, and he replies. ‘A cursory examination of the relevant Star One systems indicates that this defence zone is one of a number of such zones located at strategic points on the rim of that section of the galaxy colonized by mankind.’ (Thankfully. Peter Tuddenham can read this off the page. Poor Sally has to rely on cue cards for her own marathon speech later.)

First question, then …