He didn't stop completely until after Series C, for which he wrote episodes 1, 2, and 13. He dropped out of writing the Series B finale because he had other commitments.
Blake's 7 on Blu-ray!
- Thread starter Turbo
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He didn't stop completely until after Series C, for which he wrote episodes 1, 2, and 13. He dropped out of writing the Series B finale because he had other commitments.
Here's a challenge for anyone in AI and image creation - see what it comes up with designs for the Liberator and Scorpio (interior and exterior) if the show was made to today.
(I refuse to use AI on the grounds it's biggest contribution is it's making lazy people lazier).
(I refuse to use AI on the grounds it's biggest contribution is it's making lazy people lazier).
This is a good quote:
A quote from Human, All Too Human
Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity-I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen...
www.goodreads.com
I'd much rather see what a person would come up with given that challenge. "Challenging" an artist to use AI is like challenging a marathon runner to take a cab to the finish line. It's the opposite of a challenge.
Apologies if this has been brought up before — if anything, I imagine it must have been! — but I didn’t remember/realize they’d been on the London for four months. Usually whenever we saw the prisoners on the ship, iirc they were stuck in those rows of “airline seats”; were they literally stuck in those seats night and day for that long (presumably with bathroom and circulation breaks), or were they marched out from a bunk every day for some reason? Has there ever been any sort of explanation about that?
after launch they were allowed out of the seats and there was a small accomodation/recreation area in the adjacent seat.
Misbehave you're in your seat for a long time as Blake found out.
When Blake convinces Avon to go along with his escape plan instead of making a private deal with the crew, he says "You've had four months to think about that." Although everyone is wearing the same clothes and their hair is the same length, so it's easy to overlook.
The problem is that the complete trip to Cygnus Alpha was stated in both episodes 2 & 3 to be eight months long, but the bulk of episode 2 takes place four months into the journey, and episode 3 explicitly picks up only hours later at most, yet begins with the London arriving at Cygnus Alpha. So there's a four-month discrepancy in the timing that none of the writers or producers caught.
So your solution to AI making lazy folk lazier is... to ask other people to do the work FOR you?
If you were going for irony, well done. If not...
Not really.So your solution to AI making lazy folk lazier is... to ask other people to do the work FOR you?
If you were going for irony, well done. If not...
I'm not going to lose sleep or give a dam if it doesn't happen cos there's now expectation for it - merely tossed out the idea because some people like that sort of thing.
Plus chosing not to something because of an objection to it is different from those who can't take a fucking hint and look something up for themselves (as happen in other places).
Yes, there is a big problem between the stated trip of the London, and the fast thing between Space Fall and Cygnus Alpha.
I know that when Blake's 7 first began airing on my local PBS station in the early 80s and they ran Space Fall, then Cygnus Alpha the following weekend, it was glaringly obvious the travel discrepancy between the stated time in the second episode and the start of the third and my teenage self was wondering how they missed it.
We have no idea whether Gan was a decent man or not. We know so very little about him. He's gentle and friendly, but is that Gan or the limiter? I'd be tempted to say it is his real personality, albeit that he has a propensity to anger and violence (which doesn't make him a vile criminal). In Breakdown he's incredibly sly, and I don't see how a malfunctioning limiter would have that effect.
Unless it was pure experimentation there must have been a reason the Federation popped the limiter in his head.
I do think there was a place for him, but you would have been cutting lines from someone else. When he got something to do it was because he acted as nurse or the conscience of the crew, and those are things Cally did. Everyone else had a defined special skill. The leader, the computer expert, the pilot, the telepath, the thief. Gan? Well I guess in some respects he was the muscle, but muscle that can't fight isn't much help, although obviously the limiter wasn't that effective, stops him fighting the aliens in Time Squad but has no problem with him beating up natives in Deliverance.
It might have been cost saving, but I do think they realised the show didn't need such a big crew. Hell you only have to look at how badly some cast members were treated some weeks even when they were down to five regulars! Boucher was very good at giving everyone their moment in an episode, but he was the exception not the rule sadly.
It's made worse by the same writer having written both episodes of course, and while he'd be submitting sparser and sparser scripts as the season went along, I think he was putting in detailed scripts at this stage.
There could have been a fix, instead of having Leland do his "last time on Blakes 7" at the start have include a line that says the only bit of good luck they've had was catching some solar winds (or some such ridiculous reason) which helped us make great time.)
Of course back then there weren't a lot of video recorders out there, no streaming or iPlayer so I'm guessing the majority of fans didn't pick up on this.
I can't remember what I thought, and I was 7 when B7 started? I do remember that when I saw Orbit I had completely blanked that Avon was absolutely intending to kill Vila, I'd convinced myself that Avon had known all along about the neutron matter.
As I said, it's made clear in "Time Squad" that the limiter only kicks in if he has homicidal thoughts, and then it incapacitates him so that he can barely move or talk. So since Gan is usually able to function normally, it follows that he doesn't routinely have homicidal thoughts. "Breakdown" explicitly stated that his violent behavior was caused by the limiter sending disruptive pulses into his brain, not simply by the limiter shutting down.
Sure, you could concoct a hypothesis where the limiter has a less aggressive mode that alters his personality, but there's not a shred of evidence for that in the actual show, so it's just fanfiction. Conclusions should be based on objective evidence, not on unsupported conjectures.
Behavior is shaped by multiple interacting factors. It's been shown that some forms of brain damage can alter a person's sense of ethics, without altering other aspects like their intelligence or creativity. All the malfunctions have to do is provoke enough anger or paranoia in Gan to drive him to violence; figuring out how to do it cleverly would come from his own innate intelligence.
Yes, because they're a totalitarian state and they want to control people, obviously. It was established in the very first episode that they drug the population to keep them docile. Mind control is standard procedure for them -- so why would you find it the least bit surprising that they'd use brain implants to control people too?
They're also not above falsifying criminal charges against rebels, as they did with Blake. It would be perfectly in character for a totalitarian state to claim that Gan's retribution against the Federation guard who murdered "his woman" was a symptom of innate violence or mental illness -- blaming the victim, as bullies and abusers always do -- and sentence him to the limiter as punishment.
It also seems self-evident to me that they put in the limiter because it was the only way to control someone so big and strong. They probably figured his strength made him useful as a laborer, but they wanted to make sure he couldn't rebel against them. So they did the equivalent of putting a shock collar on him.
Okay, now you're bringing in a whole other problem. When Chris Boucher developed Cally, he based her on the same inspiration as Leela from Doctor Who. She was supposed to be a tough, seasoned warrior, the only experienced resistance fighter in the crew besides Blake. Redefining her as the "nurse" was pure sexism, relegating her to a traditional feminine role in contradiction of what she was created to be. So there was no good reason to put her in Gan's place as the nurturer and conscience.
Characters aren't just defined by their jobs. They're defined by who they are as people, how they interact and relate. Gan's basic decency made him an interesting contrast to the others. There was plenty of story potential in that, if they'd only bothered to explore it more.
Besides, there are other things a strongman can do besides fighting -- just ask Willy on Mission: Impossible. Look at the scene in "Seek-Locate-Destroy" where they needed Gan's strength to rip off the panel that was keeping Avon from extracting the code machine.
As I already said, that's a failure of the writing, not the fault of the characters. Plenty of shows have successfully balanced larger casts.
I guess that when Space Fall was rewritten to drop Arco, Selman and Klein (a name reused for one of the London's crew), maybe the eight month thing was missed. It should have been spotted, but...
As said earlier, it would be interesting to read an early draft of Space Fall.
Yes, it was a weekly thing so we didn't pay attention in the way that watching episodes now make this clear.
I guess that I simply didn't think of it because, while my parents could be fighty, they looked after us. However they argued, they tried to not let it hit their children.
In the Mark of Kane, we go with Gan the cat-killler, but that was something Alan was very determined on. My main contribution was that for sensible sound designs everyone should have a different gun sound. Blake has the Liberator zap, Blossom had a Federation phut, Kane had a laser, so Lafyattte and his trekkers had machine guns. I improvved the business about mail order from Outer Gal to explain it, and the writer went with it, and got more out of it.
If you listen to Alan Stevens, Gan is definitely a killer. Once Alan has made up his mind, it is real, even if the people who wrote the episodes think "Interesting, but not what I thought."
For me, it's a good idea. But not definite.
Who's Alan Stevens? I see no one of that name in the show's production credits. If he wasn't involved in the show, I don't see how his opinion is any more relevant than any random fan's.
I still say it requires misinterpreting how the limiter works. There's nothing in the show to suggest it's anything so subtle as personality alteration; it's simply a shock collar installed in the brain. It's a crude, brutal tool of a dictatorship, a boot on the neck of someone they fear because he's strong enough to stand up to them. Gan is a victim of the Federation's tyranny, as much as his lover that they killed. Believing that he's the real criminal is blaming the victim and excusing the abuser.
It's also really cynical to want to believe that the most decent person on the show is secretly a violent monster and that his kindness is artificial.
