Let's Talk January: Blakes 7!

[mithen]

navaan asked me for some Blakes 7 thoughts!

First, a quick introduction to Blakes 7. B7 was a BBC science fiction show that ran for four series in the early 1980s. It was a dystopian show about a rebel against the oppressive Federation named Roj Blake, who steals a super-high-tech spaceship while being transported to a prison planet and escapes along with a motley group of smugglers, burglars, and embezzlers, who he then drags into his rebellion. It is most notable for being witty, sardonic, morally gray and bleak while also managing to sport some of the most utterly insane costuming choices known to humanity.

Blakes 7 was the first fandom I ever wrote fic for, and I entered it in the most roundabout way possible: I was in a graduate-school class on media theory and there were readings on fandom, something I had never heard of in my life. I found and read Henry Jenkins's "Textual Poachers" and Camille Bacon-Smith's "Enterprising Women" (both highly recommended, by the way, although the fandom they describe is pre-Internet and thus very different in some ways) and both of them mentioned Blakes 7 as a key text, so I decided to find and watch it, and I was hooked immediately. The relationship between passionate idealist Blake and the cynical, cold-hearted Kerr Avon was so very interesting, and their tug-of-war about trust and friendship was completely enthralling. It didn't hurt that they spent a lot of time staring intently at each other or saving each others' lives by throwing their arms around each other.

Here are some images of Avon and Blake Being Intense together (the images and text are taken from this page:






Ooooh, pretty pretty white outfits.


Blake has a nervous habit of biting his fingers; Avon has a habit of staring at him while he does it.


[Avon saves Blake from an explosion and they end up holding on to each other a Really Long Time]
Blake: Thank you. Why?
Avon: Automatic reaction. I'm as surprised as you are.
Blake: I'm not surprised.


Avon: First of all let us examine the nature of prediction. The human mind is capable of seeing into the short range with reasonable accuracy. For example, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff.
Blake: As long as you're not standing behind me.


Blake: Avon, concentrate on Zen. Give priority to the detectors and the navigation systems. And then see if you can get us some scans.
Avon: Is that all? What shall I do with the other hand?
Blake: I'll let you know.


[Avon is shot by Travis and Blake runs to hold him]
Blake: Let me look.
Avon: Leave me, watch yourself.
Blake: We've got to get you back to the Liberator.
Avon: Leave me.
Blake: Come on.


Avon: And I want it finished. I want it over and done with. I want to be free.
Cally: But you are free now, Avon.
Avon: I want to be free of HIM.
Blake: I never realized. You really do hate me, don't you?

But for me the real clincher was when Bacon-Smith's book completely spoiled me about the ending of Blakes 7: in the final episode (which aired just before Christmas Day), through a series of tragic miscommunications and psychological flaws on all sides, Avon ends up fatally (and quite messily...the actor playing Blake slipped extra blood packs into his outfit and results are pretty spectacular) shooting Blake, then stands paralyzed over his body in horror as the rest of his crew is massacred all around him. As soldiers surround him, he gazes into Blake's dead eyes, then raises his own gun with a feral grin...cut to black over the sound of blaster fire. The end.

(Yes, Merlin and Doctor Who fans, the BBC has a long and noble history of killing characters for Christmas!)

You'd think an ending where one member of a pairing straight-out murders the other would be a bit of a discouragement to shipping, but instead I found it utterly irresistible, for reasons discussed off and on this month, but mostly in this post. It gave everything that came before so much agonizing weight, such terrible meaning: these two lives smashed together by fate that end so bloodily and inexorably. The fact that I yearned for them to have a happy ending and knew, canonically, that they did not meant that every time I wrote a happy story I was, in some way, saving them from their fate, stepping in and rescuing them from themselves. The unhappy ending was necessary for my enjoyment: without it my participation wasn't so imperative.

As a person who tends to get fixated on OTPs, it sounds like this was entirely the Blake/Avon show, and it comes off that way in a lot of the fic written for the fandom, despite the fact that Blake isn't even in the show for the last two series (he shows up only in the finales). But the rest of the cast is also wonderful, even if some of them suffer from agonizingly inconsistent writing (Cally starts off as a kickass warrior and quickly becomes a platitudinous pacifist type; Tarrant swings wildly between "preternaturally young charismatic leader" and "cocksure bully"). Vila Restal, thief and scamp, perpetual whiner and coward, turns out to be endlessly fascinating, and his improbable almost-friendship with Avon is one of the more compelling (and also entirely tragic) parts of the later series. The female characters are nearly always short-changed, and yet still manage to glint intriguingly with more depth than maybe their writers realized.

In fact, one of the interesting parts of the show is just how little nearly anyone involved in it seems to have truly understood it. Many of the actors and writers hardly remember it at all (Stephen Pacey, who played Tarrant, charmingly admits he has absolutely no memory of the two years he spent on it), while others get it amazingly wrong, somehow. Paul Darrow, the actor who played Avon, is infamous for perhaps one of the most spectacular failures to understand the character he himself plays. He insisted constantly that Avon was a badass, ruthless psychopath, causing many fans to goggle--not because he was a secret fandom woobie (though of course he often is)--but because even the canon Avon comes across more as a desperately awkward dork who's trying way too hard to be cool and macho as events spin increasingly out of his control. That's a big part of what so many people love about him!

Blakes 7 fandom produces some of the most consistently excellent, dark, witty, intelligent, heart-wrenching fic I've ever read, by the way. I haven't written anything for it for far too long, but I'm writing something for Blakefest and am very excited!