Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Blake's 7 3.7: Children of Auron

Roger Parkes goes a considerable way towards redeeming himself for the slop that was Voice from the Past with his second script for the series, and newcomer Andrew Morgan shows promise as a director that never really fulfilled itself in his work on Doctor Who (but was evident in Knights of God, the 1987 TV series featuring Gareth Thomas).

Blake's 7 3.6: City at the Edge of the World

After three episodes delivering variations on “It’s so bad, it’s good”, Season Three finally pays off on the promise of the first couple of stories. This is Chris Boucher’s first of the run, and like any good script editor he focuses on areas that other writers would be unlikely to consider. The “area” in this episode is the much misused character of Vila, and you have to wonder if he hadn’t made a mental note that there’d been far too much “Vila the idiot” creeping in. Certainly, this redresses the balance. Perhaps Keating had been whispering for a while that he’d like a Vila-centric episode too (edit: apparently Keating had suggested this to Boucher).

Blake's 7 3.5: Harvest of Kairos

There’s something so awesomely shit about Harvest of Kairos, I have to wonder how much of it is intentional and how much is Ben Steed just being a straight-up terrible writer. Whether it’s Jarvik – hands on hips - extolling the virtues of manliness, the Liberator crew being made fools of and getting boarded (again), Tarrant flying a lunar landing module or Servalan acting like a completed idiot (the odd line aside) the script is as holey as a Swiss cheese. And that’s even without the terrifying insects menacing Dayna. But... In its favour Avon spends a whole episode fascinated by a rock, completely disinterested in Tarrant’s bout of piracy. Perhaps Chris Boucher was suffering from Space Madness when he commissioned this?