I think naming the show 'Blake's 7' left them a hostage to fortune. Couldn't they have chosen something different?
Blake's 7 on Blu-ray!
- Thread starter Turbo
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Terry Nation's titles as described in the first draft of the Way Back (entitled Cygnus Alpha) lists the Seven as Jenna, Vila, Avon, Gan, Tone Selman, Arco Trent and Brell Klein (ID cards read by a computer: No Cally, and Blake and Zen not counted). Reading between the lines, the problem with the Big Seven became obvious during writing of the original episode four (Locate and Destroy: It's on the record that Time Squad is a replacement commissioned at the same time as Breakdown).
Wikipedia's article on the show's history clarifies this:
History of Blake's 7 - Wikipedia
It confirms that these changes happened during the initial writing process before shooting began, as I expected. After the pilot, when they gave the series a go-ahead, they commissioned more scripts from Nation, and it was during the writing and revision of those scripts that the characters were reworked. (Vila was originally more like Simon Templar/The Saint, and Avon was the cowardly sidekick to the scheming Arco.) But I guess Nation wrote the early drafts of the scripts before the final decisions were made, which is how Arco and Selman had a residual presence in "Cygnus Alpha." Maybe it's also why Vila kills one of the bad guys in "Cygnus," a leftover bit from his original characterization.
The article also says that Nation was so overworked that he delivered little more than story outlines, or at most first drafts, and Chris Boucher actually wrote nearly all the dialogue. Boucher was also largely responsible for creating Cally, drawing on the same inspiration he used for Leela, which is why Cally is so much like Leela in her debut episode.
I would guess they wanted to homage The Magnificent Seven to some extent, given the Western influences. But yeah, they would've been better off coming up with a less specific title.
So at what point was Vila's character background settled because that's not a physical description that would match a cowardly thief?
Umm, this planet has had a bunch of handsome, athletic types who think everything is a joke and make a career of cowardly thieving.
Since the excerpts are followed on the page by "Ronnie Marsh approves Terry Nation's pilot script," I would presume the descriptions are from the pilot script.
At least in my book, the story goes that Terry Nation was told that 'Softly Softly Taskforce' was being canceled by the BBC, and they wanted a show created by Terry to fill the slot.
Terry had a meeting with the BBC, where he pitched ideas for a series, all of which were turned down.
The last one he pitched was 'Robin Hood meets the Dirty Dozen in space', which the BBC liked.
Asked what the name of it was, Terry blurted out 'Blake's 7'.
The name was never really meant to be more than a placeholder, but, it ended up sticking.
Deep Space Nine was the same way. Nobody really liked it, but they used it for lack of an alternative, and once the name got established in the press, they were kind of stuck with it.
I think Liberator would've been a good alternative title for B7. It carries a double meaning, both the name of the ship and a description of Blake (or at least his view of himself). Though it wouldn't have fit Series D any better.
I read the commissioning records at the Script Unit just before it shut down in 1991 (mainly reading Doomwatch scripts, but got some extras). Time Squad (or rather ep4.2) is commissioned around the same time as Breakdown and Bounty.Wikipedia's article on the show's history clarifies this:
History of Blake's 7 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
It confirms that these changes happened during the initial writing process before shooting began, as I expected. After the pilot, when they gave the series a go-ahead, they commissioned more scripts from Nation, and it was during the writing and revision of those scripts that the characters were reworked. (Vila was originally more like Simon Templar/The Saint, and Avon was the cowardly sidekick to the scheming Arco.) But I guess Nation wrote the early drafts of the scripts before the final decisions were made, which is how Arco and Selman had a residual presence in "Cygnus Alpha." Maybe it's also why Vila kills one of the bad guys in "Cygnus," a leftover bit from his original characterization.
The article also says that Nation was so overworked that he delivered little more than story outlines, or at most first drafts, and Chris Boucher actually wrote nearly all the dialogue. Boucher was also largely responsible for creating Cally, drawing on the same inspiration he used for Leela, which is why Cally is so much like Leela in her debut episode.
Reading between the lines, Nation was told to get on with ep5, and they'd think about a new ep4 later. Before shooting started.
The surviving first draft of The Way Back features Blake, Vila, Jenna and Arco (his lines largely go to Vila, which is why Vila is more sinister than usual in that), plus a non-speaking role for Gan and one line for Avon (in the transmitted version it's delivered by the American guard). It would be interesting to read a first draft of Space Fall.
Absolutely. Though it's interesting that Zen took the name of the ship from something Jenna was thinking, not Blake. She wasn't gung-ho about fighting the Federation at the time, so was her mind on what Blake might be?
Yes, that was the whole idea of Jenna's character. She started out as self-serving and criminal as the rest, but she was the one who was inspired, however tentatively, by the new possibilities Blake offered. He gave her hope that liberation might be possible -- and taking control of an incredibly advanced and powerful battleship amplified that hope, hence the name.
or Blake had some many plans and ideas in his head that it was easier for Zen to get a read on Jenna and nothing in Blake's head made a suitable name on top of that.
Mmm, that's perhaps doing Jenna a disservice as being "less complex" than Blake. If anything, Blake is the one character hyperfocused on an objective - overthrowing the Federation - though I'll admit there are probably many competing emotions/concepts in his head around that. The ship could end up being the Vengeance, for example.
Blake's resistance to the telepathic defence system (due to his false memories) might have lead Zen to another option?
Zen didn't read Blake's mind, though. He only read Jenna's mind when her hand got frozen against the controls. "It's as though my hand was part of something. It's mixed with something else. It's ... it's in my head. Something in my mind. Asking. Answering." Zen mind-melded with Jenna and learned English from her, which is why Zen didn't speak until after the meld. Presumably anyone who'd touched that control panel would've gotten linked with that way, but it happened to be Jenna.
not say Jenna is less complex but less cluttered.
And yes Blake probably had all sorts of ideas whirling around in his head about how to use the ship to strike back at the federation.
Zen must have had to have read their minds at some point when Blake, Jenna and Avon boarded, because he projected images of Avon's brother and Jenna's mother being hauled away by Federation stormtroopers while on the bridge; and don't forget the three soldiers/guards who went across before Blake and the others. It's a telepathic ability not shown again.
I find it interesting that Zen chose to project images of family members and not boyfriends/girlfriends. Was there a stronger emotional connection to the family members he found when scanning their minds than to someone else?
You would think Anna Grant would be a stronger emotional connection to Avon than a brother who is never mentioned again.
Speaking of, meeting Avon's brother would have been a good story. What was he like? Older, younger? What was their upbringing that Avon decided to try and rob the Federation banking system? If there had been a series E, it could have been a topic to explore.
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Apparently the main other idea he had was called Dan Fog, a thriller about a former cop/lawyer who becomes head of criminology at Oxford!
Blakes 7 has been the name of the show since I was 8 years old. I don't care that it doesn't really make sense it's impossible to imagine it being called anything else.
Hell maybe Blake had a 7 point manifesto for defeating the Federation he just never shared with people
It is weird that Zen's abilities are never used again (outside of the security system being used in Dawn of the Gods)
I'm not one for retroactively changing existing footage but man, slipping Anna Grant in there would be interesting, you could even leave much of Avon's dialogue about seeing his brother in because the last thing he would want to do is highlight a genuine weak spot in his character by mentioning Anna.
Not necessarily. Since the victims were experiencing their own memories and fears, it could simply be that the defense systems triggered their brains' fear responses and stimulated them to hallucinate whatever they feared or despaired at most, letting their own brains do the work.
I also think it's likely that Zen and the defense mechanism are independent subsystems. There's precedent for this in all the times Zen refers to the ship's battle computers, navigation computers, etc. performing their own separate calculations. Zen doesn't directly perform every shipboard function, but is more like a coordinator and supervisor of a team of separate computer systems. So if the defense mechanism did read their minds, it could've done so independently of Zen, and whatever data it gathered about its victims' memories could've been scrambled when Blake blasted it, so Zen wouldn't have had access to it.
The sequence of events in "Cygnus Alpha" is very clear: Zen is silent at first, then Jenna gets her hand frozen to the controls and describes feeling her mind merge with something else, then Zen starts speaking English immediately after that, and a little later volunteers the name Liberator, which Jenna says came from her thoughts. The explicit intent in that episode is that Zen only read Jenna's mind.
Yes, but they hadn't created Anna Grant yet. Nation inserted Avon's brother as a potential story hook that might get picked up on in the future, but then either forgot about it, decided it didn't fit Avon's character as it developed, or decided it was more interesting to create the Anna Grant backstory. Story hooks are like fishing hooks (which is probably why they're called that) -- you dangle a bunch of them out there, but only some of them will get a bite.
Sure, but if they'd come up with something better in the first place, you'd be saying that about whatever that title had been. Lots of things we love have weak titles. Star Trek is a bizarre, clumsy title. Who uses the word "trek," unless they're talking about Boer settlers or mountain bikes? (I find it ironic that Galaxy Quest would've been a better title for a serious space-exploration drama and Star Trek would've been a better title for the comedy movie parodying it.)
Lots of early ideas got ignored later. The ginormous treasure room aboard Zen is largely forgotten after Series A. There's a passing mention of it in "Powerplay" at the start of C, but earlier in "Gambit," Vila and Avon felt it necessary to scam a casino in order to make a tiny fraction of what they were supposed to have aboard the Liberator already. (Although I guess you could rationalize that they wanted a private stash separate from what Blake had accounted for aboard the ship.)
