Liberation: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Blake's 7

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/liberation-the-unoffical-and-unauthorised-guide-...

A comprehensive episode-by-episode guide to Blake’s 7, with each season introduced with notes on the overall production context, and clear opinions about which are the best and worst stories. Originally published in 2003, so before Big Finish started to produce audios featuring the surviving members of the original crew (and then their replacements), but an appendix covers the spinoff novels, plays and audios up to that point. I don’t agree with all the judgements – I have a sneaking affection, for instance, for “City at the Edge of the World”, while on the other hand I found the skeevy gender politics of the three episodes by Ben Steed show more unredeemable. However it’s good to have a chunky reference volume to pore over. show less

Having enjoyed Fall Out, Stevens and Moore's guide to The Prisoner, I decided to pick up their Blake's 7 book and watch it alongside the parent show during the third and fourth seasons, going back to read the entries for earlier ones as I did. The book is necessarily less detailed than Fall Out (The Prisoner ran seventeen episodes to Blake's 7's fifty-two), but suffers more in that, when it comes down to it, I like Blake's 7 a whole lot less than The Prisoner. I think that there's a huge disconnect between the show Blake's 7 thought it was (a hard-hitting drama about revolutionaries) and the one it actually was (a show by Terry Nation). So a lot of their analyses just engendered eye-rolling in me, especially when they refer to episodes show more building on each others' themes when in fact they mean that the show recycles a lot of plots. But it's not all the book's fault; I felt the same way reading the Telos guide to Torchwood, a show I also don't like very much. That said, they are good at teasing out more subtle moments, and they can often build compelling arguments for interesting interpretations-- such as with the hidden backstory of Gan, who the show never did much with. On the other hand, sometimes they feel like they're reaching; when Series Three's inconsistent about the details of the war that happened just before it, it's probably because of bad writing, not that there were two wars. And sometimes their reviews are just weird, such as one that tells you an episode is primarily worthwhile for the draft scripts that reveal the original setup for Series Four. Only to those of us who sit around with draft scripts of Blake's 7 episodes; the rest of us had to suffer through "Traitor"! Their list of shows inspired by Blake's 7 are a stretch, too-- Farscape, I believe; Red Dwarf, not so much.

The thing that aggravates me most is that the appendix covering spin-offs has no room for officially-sanctioned comics... but plenty of room for the fan audios made by co-author Alan Stevens. Really? I'd stick to The Anorak Zone; even if the website is gone, you can still access its much-less-serious reviews of Blake's 7 on the Wayback Machine. He, at least, can admit that the show actually had flaws. show less