TV Review - Blake's 7: S2E03 Weapon

Chris Boucher's second consecutive solo script saw the reintroduction of Servalan and Travis to the series. The pair, trapped in their Saturday morning villainy loop with Blake always getting away while Travis swore he'd get him next time while Servalan rolled her eyes, had signified the staleness of the tail end of the first season but the episode makes a fair fist of redirecting them. This was also notably the episode that saw Brian Croucher debut as Travis, Stephen Greif having apparently decided the character had ran out of steam but more likely tried to bluff for a bit more money and been told to fuck off back to RADA.

It's a great decision to be honest and many sources seem to agree with this despite Season 2 on average losing about 2-3 million viewers compared to Season 1, which might explain the perception that Croucher was less successful or popular in the role. While Croucher is as capable of a bad performance as Greif he's such a different bloke to Jacqui Pearce that the cliquey campy double-act which occasionally cropped up is finished. He's also a thug - a big bruiser with no time for clever lines or much of anything really, a much more worldly threat than the ballet dancer physique Greif had. You really can believe that he massacred civilians and his body language is always poised to massacre anyone else in the room at a moment's notice. He's simply more dangerous.

There's some vague dialogue about him coming out of a sinister-sounding bout of retraining therapy but once again there seems to have been no consequence from the pair's extra-curricular attempts to secure Orac. Still, at least here it's simply to touch on the status quo for the viewer before the duo finally start evolving. And Travis gets to shoot a clone of Blake and - in quite a shocking statement of intent - grab Servalan by the throat, though she's got better at this and Pearce nails it, not even breaking eye contact and somehow coming out of the exchange with her dominance in their relationship even more absolute. Incidentally much has been made of Croucher's rocky relationship with director George Spenton-Foster but I'm really not sure how much it affects his performance, at least not here.

The whole Clonemasters thing is quite mad, though. Cloning's such a big sci-fi staple it was bound to come up (and who could resist penning that Blake death?) but the execution is bizarre. Maybe it's an attempt at subversion that instead of being made by guys in fabric tunics in Battersea Power Station and Servalan does point out what a pile of shit it all is in an aside to Travis but really it's a bit Star Trek, a bit pompous and campy. Are the Clonemasters aliens? Some Federation department that's gone off in the deep end like the penal colony on Cygnus Alpha? Dunno, don't care. It's too silly, too arch and even hanging a great big fucking lampshade on it doesn't help - it's not okay to do something shit and go "hey, isn't this shit?", especially not when you're B7 and you're trying to sell us that a character has gained twenty pounds of muscle and shrank his eyepatch on a therapy course. Clones are a crap thing to have to have out in the wild in any universe too, who's to say the guys getting gunned down on Gauda Prime aren't all clones, apart from Soolin because who'd bother to clone Soolin? Nothing. Lousy.

The worst thing about it is that it's a lot of effort to go to to fool Coser, who is an idiot. The inventor of the new IMIPAK system has gone rogue, grabbing a slave girl and hiding out on some planet with the device and planning to only hand it over to Blake. Cloning Blake is an incredibly complex way of doing things; why not just send him a girl? Or use a sniper? Or anything other than clone your greatest enemy so well that he keeps the same basic principles? Argh. IMIPAK doesn't work either - it basically does nothing that a gun can't do - why would you want to shoot someone and then have to jab away at a keypad to kill them? It's even highlighted when the pair are menaced by a stage hand with a rubber claw glove, while you need line of sight on anyone you're going to mark anyway. Despite the script's best efforts there really are no practical scenarios in which it would be beneficial and operating it to blow the head off the guy who'd flown into the quadrant of space you'd told him not to would be a convoluted sequence which would almost certainly involve accidentally blowing up the cat you'd marked for a joke three weeks ago.

It's possibly the most cartoon supervillain plot of the show, both for the overcomplicated clone plot and for having Blake, Avon and Gan surrounded with troopers and Travis and deciding to IMIPAK them rather than just killing them with proper guns. And then at the end Rashel and the Blake clone crop up just in time to save the day then decide to hang out on the planet and mix guarding IMIPAK with fucking, with the same problem of it being basically impossible for two people to guard something like that. No-one bothers coming to get it off them the same way no-one bothers to check what Sarkoff or Bek are up to but maybe the Blake clone gets bored with Rashel and heads off to become a bounty hunter? Thankfully Trevor Attwood was stopped by apathy before he could pick that one up.

However, somehow against this tide of tripe "Weapon" is weirdly fun. Croucher is smashing as this hulking, seething East End gangster with a crap eyepatch and a silly ring who's fed up with complicated plans and just wants to shoot Blake in the face and the clash brings the best out of Jacqueline Pearce - her naughty girl smile as she marks everyone and their dog with IMIPAK works because she's the only one doing stuff like that this instead of having Stephen Greif prancing around like her gay best friend. And while Boucher can write a script as nonsensical as anyone else he always has something of value in there and in this case it's the two main guest characters. Coser builds a little on the territory touched upon with the Cosa Nostra (maybe could have come up with another name for back-to-back episodes, Chris) in that while he's an enemy of the Federation he's not in the least heroic. A genuine mad scientist played pitch-perfect by John Bennett despite wearing a dress that Jacqui had clearly rejected as too crazy, his only interest in Blake is because he's too limp-wristed to actually use IMIPAK to fulfill his pathetic revenge fantasies on those who overlooked his intellect. He only takes Rashel with him so he's got someone to talk at, all his claims of wanting her to break out of her slave behaviour being instantly undermined by him treating her like shit.

The other is Carnell, the Federation psycho-strategist. He's not even particularly needed for the plot but there he is owning scenes left right and centre, played with a glint in his eye by Scott Fredericks. He gives a brilliant little turn and is a brilliant little character, it being no surprise that Boucher revisited him in his Kaldor City universe. His relationship with Servalan is amazing, I especially love the way she's charmed even by him failing her and running off at the end. Fair play, girl, I would be too. Like Coser, the actual acting and dialogue is good enough to stop you from asking questions.

It's fast and well-acted enough to get a lot of the stupidity past on the first viewing and there are worst episodes out there. Indeed, it might actually have the two stupidest plots of the whole series but lots of good little bits (while most of the crew bar Blake don't really have much to do they all get to snap away at each other nicely) actually make it feel better than it is and make it a lot more enjoyable than your frontal lobe tells you it should be. I feel bad marking it low but I'd feel just as bad marking it high.