They could have taken the entire crew on board and left the crime scene intact (indeed, leaving all the people there risked tampering with it). And in any case, I think that saving a planet took precedence.
Yeah, but then the murderer would've been on board the
Liberator in a position to sabotage it. If the priority is to get the neutrotope to Destiny, best if there isn't a murderer on the same ship. (Although Blake really should've looked inside the case first.)
What I meant was that leaving their weapons was a purely symbolic gesture: both Cally and Avon could wander freely around the ship and go to the armory to get what they wanted.
Of course it was symbolic. The point was that Blake intended to come back for them rather than running away with the priceless MacGuffin. It wouldn't matter if Avon and Cally were armed if Blake just abandoned them there, since the ship wasn't going anywhere.
It gave me the impression that they were in "normal" space, especially since it would be absolutely insane to race through an asteroid field at relativistic speeds.
Well, hyperspace would have nothing to do with relativistic travel anyway. But yeah, the whole asteroid sequence is poorly thought out. It's just an excuse to give the rest of the cast something to do.
I mean the character: either she already had it with her but given how she was dressed it's impossible, or she had already hidden it in the room (but why would she have done that). Or she had gone to the armory, taken the weapon and returned while everyone was turning their backs on her. None of the explanations make much sense.
Given that she's a murderer who's being actively hunted, it makes sense to me that she'd prearrange to have a weapon close at hand just in case. And my point was that, since the scene was recorded effectively live as a continuous take, what applies to the actress also applies to the character, i.e. that the weapon had to be already on hand for her to get hold of while the scene played out. Yes, it's possible that a stagehand gave it to her while she was off-camera, but it could also have been stashed under the cushion of the chair where she was sitting, say, or hidden behind her back. She spent the entire scene in that armchair until she drew the weapon, which suggests there was a reason for that.
Maybe it's my mistake because I thought that weapon was like a phaser (i.e. to eliminate a room full of people in an instant).
No reason to assume that. Heck, even the
Liberator's super-advanced wand weapons can only shoot one person at a time. For that matter, even phasers can't do what you say, as far as we know; the only times we've ever seen them fire wide-field have been on a stun setting.
And for all they knew it was just a spaceship passing by and wanting to help.
The odds against
two interstellar spacecraft accidentally coming within range of a ship in distress within a day or two of each other are literally astronomical.
By the latter I mean things like "Murder, She wrote".
"Mission to Destiny" was probably inspired more by Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Although
Murder, She Wrote was a pastiche of Christie's Miss Marple. The series title was a reference to
Murder, She Said, the first movie in MGM's 1960s Miss Marple film series starring Margaret Rutherford, and Angela Lansbury had played Miss Marple in a 1980 movie that was meant to begin a series but flopped (as well as having a supporting role in Peter Ustinov's first Hercule Poirot movie two years earlier).
A murder... IN SPACE! I suppose people in 1978 were in awe for such a concept!
