I have mixed feelings about Blakes 7. I have to admire the BBC for making this quite dark (at times) space opera/adventure but in my humble opinion it started to get a bit silly from season 3 onwards.
The pilot episode is quite amazing. It is a really dark and disturbing story of a man (Roj Blake) who is a political prisoner, has his mind wiped, rediscovers who he was and when he is sentenced to life on a penal colony on cooked up charges of child molestation (see, i told you it was dark), takes advantage of a huge slice of luck that comes his way during transportation to a prison planet to turn the tide of the corrupt regime that not only sentenced him but murdered his family and his political followers. In fact i'd be curious to know if Terry Nation, who wrote the first season, had ever read Philip K Dick's 1966 short story 'We can remember it for you wholesale', which was made into the 1990 film 'Total Recall', such are the story parallels .
That said, the series is a real hotchpotch. A strong idea with a decent cast is sometimes let down by the hammy dialogue and low budget. The props look cheap, the special effects are anything but special and every location shoot looks like it was done either in a Welsh slate mine, on a beach in Kent or in the grounds of a very 20th century power station. Terry Nation's vision needed a decent budget but didn't get it and this is a shame, but it is also typical of its time that sci-fi shows were made on limited budgets.
The first season had enough ideas to get the viewer hooked and sustain the second series. By the third series though Gareth Thomas (Blake) had had enough and left the show as had a couple of other actors. That the series carried on for two more series is a testament not so much to the storylines but the interesting characters that sustained it, Paul Darrow's enjoyably sadistic Avon and Michael Keating's Vila in particular. The effects did slowly improve too although the props still looked poor.
Despite some criticism in the press, the show proved popular with the public but started flagging by the third series and had well and truly run out of steam by the fourth. Having said that the final episode was highly memorable and neatly wrapped up the whole saga.
If you've never seen B7 before, then its worth a watch as it tries to do something different .
The pilot episode is quite amazing. It is a really dark and disturbing story of a man (Roj Blake) who is a political prisoner, has his mind wiped, rediscovers who he was and when he is sentenced to life on a penal colony on cooked up charges of child molestation (see, i told you it was dark), takes advantage of a huge slice of luck that comes his way during transportation to a prison planet to turn the tide of the corrupt regime that not only sentenced him but murdered his family and his political followers. In fact i'd be curious to know if Terry Nation, who wrote the first season, had ever read Philip K Dick's 1966 short story 'We can remember it for you wholesale', which was made into the 1990 film 'Total Recall', such are the story parallels .
That said, the series is a real hotchpotch. A strong idea with a decent cast is sometimes let down by the hammy dialogue and low budget. The props look cheap, the special effects are anything but special and every location shoot looks like it was done either in a Welsh slate mine, on a beach in Kent or in the grounds of a very 20th century power station. Terry Nation's vision needed a decent budget but didn't get it and this is a shame, but it is also typical of its time that sci-fi shows were made on limited budgets.
The first season had enough ideas to get the viewer hooked and sustain the second series. By the third series though Gareth Thomas (Blake) had had enough and left the show as had a couple of other actors. That the series carried on for two more series is a testament not so much to the storylines but the interesting characters that sustained it, Paul Darrow's enjoyably sadistic Avon and Michael Keating's Vila in particular. The effects did slowly improve too although the props still looked poor.
Despite some criticism in the press, the show proved popular with the public but started flagging by the third series and had well and truly run out of steam by the fourth. Having said that the final episode was highly memorable and neatly wrapped up the whole saga.
If you've never seen B7 before, then its worth a watch as it tries to do something different .