TV Review - Blake's 7: S1E13 Orac

One of the Blake's 7 trademarks - along with often not having Blake or a 7 in it, being cheap as chips and lots of people dying - was the big end of season cliffhanger. At the time it didn't really happen much in TV, let alone British TV - a mix of the need to make narratives as loose as possible for overseas markets where episodes might be shown out of order or series might not be ordered in full, and that quite often even popular and successful shows wouldn't be commissioned for a further series until after the current one was written, filmed or even broadcast. So ending the first series on a cliffhanger might not have been a first but it was certainly innovative and unexpected in 1978 and still a long way from being de rigeur for most ongoing TV shows. 

B7 does seem to have been confirmed for a second year quite early on, possibly because it was so cheap and because the regular cast all seem to have been put on two-year contracts from the start due to the strength of Terry Nation's pitch - Sally Knyvette for one wanted to leave before the end of the first series but was locked in, so it probably would have cost more to pay everyone off than to just film the thing. So "Orac" ends on a cliffhanger as the titular computer makes the prediction that the Liberator will be destroyed. Even against the competition of the other three seasons having fantastic endings it's a bit of a weak one totally devoid of any context and thus wide open for a smart, smug answer - the only way any sort of resolution would be surprising would be if the Liberator was in any way destroyed.

But to get to Orac's prediction we've got to get through "Orac", and really the episode underlines my two main thoughts about "Deliverance". Firstly how little anything in the preceding episode contributes anything to the story is laid bare when all of the relevant information from it is recapped in a super-clunky minute-long recap narrated by Blake when he and Avon silently watch the video playback. It's much more forced than the similar sequence in "Cygnus Alpha" and just goes to show how awkward BBC drama was about stuff like this. Secondly, just as "Deliverance" felt like the expanded first half of one episode "Orac" feels very much like the second part, once again hugely padded.

Basically the episode boils down to the Liberator going to Aristo, meeting Ensor Sr, picking up Orac and leaving after a brief showdown with Servalan & Travis, then finding out what Orac is and getting their prediction. To make that last fifty minutes there's a crash-course in spinning things out. Firstly (and fair's fair, how radioactive Cephlon is was mentioned often in "Deliverance") last week's away team have come down with radiation poisoning and the Liberator has no drugs onboard. The latter is actually not as contrived as it sounds - remember that it's an alien ship, though to be honest it might have been worth picking some up. Avon makes them sound like Nurofen though, and to be fair I never have any in the cupboard when I need them.

But this means lots of slow scenes of people lolling around sweating and much gnashing of teeth until the crew decide to just go to Aristo and hope Ensor Sr has some. When they get to the planet (which like many planets in the B7 universe seems to consist of a base complex and nothing else, with an inhabited section about the size of a street) Orac takes over the ship and beams Blake and Cally down, where they put up with Ensor's old duffer behaviour (I do love Gareth Thomas pissing himself at Derek Farr) and find out what Orac is. Ensor's already been established as the creator of the tauriel cell, a key component of every Federation computer, and Orac can hack into any of them. It's actually not a bad bit of kit ideas-wise for the show or Nation, prefiguring bluetooth and wireless internet.

The trouble is that Servalan and Travis are there first. I'm not sure if I missed something but this really doesn't add up - their plan was to wait for Ensor to expire, so why they suddenly decide to set out and how exactly they get to Aristo first when Liberator's faster than any of their ships, had a headstart and the element of surprise is anyone's guess. It also involves an absolutely dreadful scene where Servalan is briefly left alone in an underground tunnel by a Phibian (one of the resprayed Sea Devils that live on Aristo) and screams out for help. When Travis arrives to help she does this silly little domination-reaffirming strop about how she shall lead and he shall follow which is just weird. It's badly scripted and Jacqui Pearce just doesn't pull it off. What were they going for? is she really a flapping damsel without her muscle? Pass. Even Travis just lets it wander off into bewilderment. 

Blake and Cally get to Ensor first but with the baddies hot on their tail, with Stephen Greif famously replaced by a body double shot from the neck down after spraining something trying to pretend he was leaving the show because the character was stale instead of because they wouldn't pay him more money. It really is quite difficult to miss, in conjunction with his over descriptive looped-in dialogue. Ensor conveniently expires to avoid taking up a slot on the Liberator (leading to what I think is the first instance of Earth Mother Cally, the compassionate doppelganger who replaces the fanatic picked up in "Time Squad" around this point).  While it's necessitated by the plot of the radiation sickness this makes it three episodes on the trot Blake and Cally have been paired up, which is interesting. Blake's a given as he's still the undebated lead for the time being (isn't it lucky that the one time he stayed on the ship the away team came down with something debilitating?). You wonder if by this point Sally Knyvette's whining had annoyed the production team. The rest mainly get to be sick, though Michael Keating again makes the best of a few good lines for Vila, who's hilarious even when dying of radiation. At the other end of the spectrum Gan is especially pathetic - why is he hiding in the teleport room? 

There's time enough for another confrontation on the surface where having left Servalan & Travis behind a blocked corridor our two heroes emerge to find the despicable duo pointing a gun-hand at them. How? They took a shorter route, presumably the same Narrative Convenience Bypass that got them to Aristo in record time. Anyway, this time Travis is totally going to shoot Blake this time, totally. You're for it now, Blake, he's lifting his arm up and pointing it at you. Fuck Blake, they've even gone to the special shot of the prop arm that actually fires, you're for it now mate. And then Avon shows up and blows it up before quoting Britt from the Magnificent Seven and then there's time for one last "no, let's not bother killing Travis, it's not like he's going to kill one of our crewmates and sell the whole race out or anything moment", one last "you're in a lot of trouble, Travis!" ticking off (seriously love, call Dev Tarrant, Dev Tarrant gets shit done) and it's back to the ship.

It turns out Orac is not only a supercomputer but a bit of an arsehole too, having assumed Ensor's personality. It's actually funny in the same way Farr's UKIP-voting "bloody kids with their bloody radiation drugs" take on the old scientist is, though obviously Peter Tuddenham will refine it even more, and I actually like the design in a way. It might be a fish tank full of bulbs and old perspex offcuts but it's quite smashingly retro in that K-Tel album cover way and wouldn't look out of place flashing away in time to "Like to Get to Know You Well" on the Top of the Pops stage, perched on top of Howard Jones' synthesizer. For the cliffhanger after a little goading Orac predicts the destruction of the Liberator (or does he?!?). Which is odd, looking back, because he never does anything like that again. Later he'll calculate the odd mathematical probability here and there to make a well-educated guess but here he straight-up slaps a video of the future up on the viewscreen. What?

It's a famous episode and in many ways an important one, introducing two big things for the rest of the show in the end-of-season bomb drop (even if it's a bit of a dud) and Orac (even if he's odd here) but really actually watching it is a tedious affair. "Deliverance" and "Orac" could easily be compacted into a single episode and more than anything this tells the story of Terry Nation's burn-out towards the end of the year. The odd thing is I always remember the quality sagging in the middle and rallying towards the end but really it's more of a gradual decline across the year. But that's the hardest part of much of the whole series out of the way. The run-in for the second year will see Nation take more of a back seat and Chris Boucher (and, shock horror, other writers) work on his foundations, leading to the two best seasons of B7. But yeah, in the meantime "Orac" is piss.