Characters of note: Kerr Avon and Roj Blake

Sometimes, you just wish Blake’s 7 would pull itself the hell together.  Its own writers patronized it half the time, and the whole tone of the thing changed from season to season. Characters were rewritten weekly. The universe always seemed to be getting smaller; remote political villains became the cast’s personal adversaries, and the effects of, say, an intergalactic war didn’t seem to have much effect on daily life.

And yet it rose above this, pretty much to the point where it’s my favorite science fiction series ever. There are better shows, but there are no shows in my experience more full of interesting lacunae, melancholy atmosphere, enormous sleeves, and that special kind of camp which is inextricable from the best drama.

Paul Darrow as Avon; Gareth Thomas as Blake.

Part of its appeal is certainly its BBC-in-the-’70s patina: fantastically excessive costuming, stage actors thoughtfully gnawing on scenery with an intelligent look in their eyes, and a permanent air of sweaty, half-tearful exhaustion. There is no money. What money there was was spent on leather pants ages ago. The guns look like hair dryers. We never see a Liberator hair dryer, but presumably they look like guns.

The men wear upholstery fabric. They’re much too human even to appear on Roddenberry’s Star Trek — their bodies are emaciated or pint-softened, their faces prematurely careworn and cast, as the faces of the English Seventies often seemed to be, from molds of minor Roman emperors. The women have an exaggerated quality to their features, like silent-film queens — particularly Jan Chappell, who has bigger eyes and longer arms and thinner cheeks than anybody. These are attractive people, but you might plausibly see them at the DMV. That sets the tone somewhat.

The series is initially about a revolutionary called Roj Blake, a rebel leader bent on overthrowing the fascist Federation (name no coincidence; Blake’s 7 takes a good deal from Star Trek, but refuses to be grateful about it). In a brilliant casting, Blake is played by Gareth Thomas, an actor capable of selling the worst dialogue and elevating the best, and also a man with a powerfully complicated and malleable face. In the space of a single scene, Blake can look anything from imposing to fiery to goofy, which is important when so much of the series’ subtext depends on his companions’ inconsistent faith in him.

Blake and Orac (in the background: Zen). They had a lot of computer friends, all of them voiced by Peter Tuddenham.

The rest of the initial cast are reluctant, world-weary criminals. In such company, Blake’s revolutionary spirit sometimes comes off as bleakly compulsive and dogged. In this group, he’s the one who must account for himself — indeed, in the early episodes, being a revolutionary is his quirk, like Vila’s cowardice or Gan’s strength. While he eventually seizes the group’s hearts and minds through sheer moral gravity, there remains a lack of automatic heroism to him, and a sense even of madness.

It stems partly from Thomas’ performance, partly from the writing, and certainly partly from the episodic nature of the series, which forces Blake to wrestle with the group every week as if the last week didn’t happen, and usually to have some distracting new scheme in mind — something, anything, that will lead to actually overthrowing the government, that will allow Blake to become something more than a shallow folk hero. Blake has more than a touch of self-aggrandization in him (“We did it! I DID IT!”), but there’s something in the semi-official idea that he was originally an engineer. Totalitarianism is narrow and thus wasteful, and so are heroes, and Blake doesn’t really believe in either. It is ultimately his concrete and even somewhat plodding thought, his distaste for the Federation, that makes him a good revolutionary, one who knows the dangers of getting caught up in the drama and hype.

One example of the Federation’s fundamental wastefulness is the way it creates men like Kerr Avon, Blake’s friend and foil. Initially, Avon seems to be the Spock of the series; he’s actually the Kirk, but it’s a little more complicated and sad than that.

Avon's first appearance; a less-than-imposing computer scientist desperate to cut a deal for his life.

Avon is the sort of character — antisocial, cynical, what TV Tropes calls a “Deadpan Snarker” — who becomes a fan favorite. This sexy archetype is played, however, with unusual realism. His disdain for humanity is not cute. He really doesn’t get along with the other characters. They critique him as crushingly as he critiques them, and often more aptly — he calls Vila stupid, which Vila plainly isn’t; Vila tells Avon he doesn’t understand people at all, which is true.

Avon becomes increasingly powerful as the series wears on. He rises from crew techie to Blake’s second-in-command, and eventually becomes the leader of the group. As his power grows, he acquires more trappings of sci-fi badassery — leather, studs, shooting people, kissing people who didn’t ask to be kissed.

Yet Avon can’t pass for an action hero. His basic appearance of fragility plays a role; difficult to be Han Solo when you look so clamped and glum. But so does the actual evidence of the eyes: despite his insistence that he ought to be in charge, Avon really takes any opportunity to follow, right up until the moment when he finally collapses into the captain’s chair. When someone else else shows even the slightest inclination to lead, Avon insults him ritually and then retreats to his corner, where he tinkers quietly with machines. He also invents new defenses for the ship. And meets intelligent rocks. And pursues personal vendettas. And solves murders. And plays board games, though he’s not alone in that; the crew of the Liberator spend a lot of time playing board games. Sometimes Avon seems to be the only crew member who does anything. Look at a first- or second-season battle sequence sometime. Dude is always running around. He works at least two stations. Blake just sits there.

And one of his last. I wish he were dual-wielding, but that's Tarrant's hand. One of the many great things about Paul Darrow in this role is that his expression is the same.

So there’s a sad, terrible irony in Avon. Leave him alone, and he’ll be a useful and rather happy man. But he lives in a dystopian space opera, and in a world split between the regimented/brutal Federation and the chaotic/brutal criminal world, there are only so many ways to get securely left alone– all of which are closed to him. There’s no way he’ll get anywhere in the Federation, which runs purely on charisma, glamour, birth, and social connections. And though the criminal world is better, it’s still rather similar, at least in that you need a personality gimmick to get anywhere. And what could Avon’s gimmick be? He’s not empathetic or humble enough to be a likable clown like Vila. He’s not politically engaged or martyrdom-prone enough to become a revolutionary like Blake or a zealot like Cally; he lacks Gan’s inoffensive nature, Jenna’s hard charm, Dayna’s or Soolin’s prowess in war.

What Avon is is subtle, frustrated, computerlike. His iconic first-season line is “I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or, indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all.” People with that kind of brain don’t do well in a world in which everybody is shouting.

So he becomes a brute, and a massively unsubtle brute. I’m not saying he’s a better brute because he has an excuse. On the contrary, he’s much worse; because he was not born a brute — because he was born a rather sensitive and retiring man, and learned brutality by imitation, out of desperation, at an early age — he becomes unstable and dangerous, and fucks it up for everybody. He’s too tone-deaf to brute right.

Blurry shot of the cast talking it out over coffee. This kind of thing happened a lot. Once they had margaritas.

In this way, he’s as odd a duck as Blake the rebel engineer: Avon the killer/programmer, a poseur among badasses, who becomes the biggest badass of all through sheer force of recognition that badassery is the only game in town, and promptly implodes, helpless, desperate. Cue cheery fourth-season end-credits theme.

And as above, there are a million reasons why a lot of this is accidental, inconsistent, and the happy result of sloppy writing, but that’s life. It might involve recycled monster costumes from Doctor Who, but it’s still a tragedy.

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