TV Review - Blake's 7: S1E10 Breakdown

Part of the problem with standalone episodes like "The Web" and "Mission to Destiny" was that they rapidly established that the Federation wasn't all that far-reaching considering the crew could fly beyond its' clutches with relative ease and meet people who either didn't know or didn't care about its' existence. "Breakdown" however is a largely Federation-free episode (pursuit ships and voice-overs only) that features a neutral station fully aware of all involved; the different degrees of neutrality is a theme that will be revisited from time to time. 

The episode is also known as throwing some light on Gan, though it's more about his limiter than the big fella himself.The titular episode comes about when Gan's limiter malfunctions and sends him on a crazy rampage. This is something of an embarrassing sequence, with Gan effortlessly throwing the others around like he's got superpowers. And David Jackson was by all accounts a lovely chap who fought hard for his character, kept regimental about the series even after both of its' principle writers basically told him to fuck off and resumed a decent career afterwards - Paul Darrow didn't go on to be in anything as good as Edge of Darkness, did he? But Gan being in pain is not something he can portray particularly well, as we've glimpsed in "Time Squad" and "Project Avalon" before, and the extended scenes here do him no favours. And then he gets knocked out and restrained, spending most of the rest of 'his' episode unconscious apart from a blatant section of padding when he gets free, rampages around and is sedated again.

After all of this the limiter is repaired but left in place, which seems like spite on the part of the writer. After this - and occasionally before - the limiter doesn't actually limit Gan when the script needs him to do something; he can throw mooks around happily enough in "Deliverance" and "Redemption" while he's taken on away teams and given a gun in "Shadow" and "Pressure Point" so it's more symbolic of his lack of a future as a character that it's not removed. Would it have hurt to take it out? Really? 

However, while it's not much help to Gan the episode isn't too bad. There's one of those "travelling across a dangerous sector of space" bits to kill time, with the need to rush Gan to the neutral XK72 station for an operation to repair the limiter. This is a bit tedious though there's some interesting stuff with Avon, who gives up knowledge of XK72 - a potential bolthole where he has allies - in order to help Gan. Before and after this episode he has a habit of throwing insults rather than simple banter at Gan's lack of intelligence (which Gan uniformly fails to react to) so what's Avon's motivation here? That on some level he trusts Gan as an ally? That he sees his use as a blunt instrument or human shield? That he'd rather not see someone die when he can help? That it's the first glimpse of a sense of responsibility that would lead someone apparently only out for themselves to protect all sorts of crewmates at his own risk over the next three years if there wasn't a logical way around it? It's written too well to be a scripting flub; Avon's precise motivation is difficult to discern but it does make him nicely enigmatic. Really the human computer who quibbled at everything seen in the first half of the season had limited mileage, especially with one actual computer in the cast, so this is a watershed moment for the character.

A lengthy space sequence means Jenna gets to do piloting but little plot-wise, though her (almost certainly Boucher-penned) put-down to Renor wins her line of the episode. Vila gets a smashing scene where he threatens Kayn when the surgeon is stalling over Gan's operation while Cally is once again on nursing duties, though I do like the way she's caught out by Kayn. The professor himself, a nominally neutral surgeon with distinct Federation sympathies, is a great character played with the perfect amount of sinister arrogance by Julian Glover, with Christian Roberts good as his bouncy assistant and Ian Thompson decent as the bureaucratic Farron, head of the station. The ending is maybe a little pat but at least lets Avon deliver the second-best line of the episode; in two years' time the end titles would roll on that sardonic remark but for now there's a chirpy coda with Gan.

So while it takes a while to get there "Breakdown" is actually pretty decent in the end, and certainly better after dropping the awful originally scripted storyline about Gan being cloned by an alien; instead the stuff around XK72 was extended. There's a tendency with B7 to credit good stuff to Boucher and bad stuff to Nation which might be unfair but certainly seems to be the case here, especially given the boost given to Avon's character and the little scenes given to everyone else. Too blatantly padded to be really great but a pleasant surprise.