I’ve been working on an essay about how to reboot Blake’s 7 for about a year on and off—I’ve even attempted to interview one of the people who worked on reviving the show in the past. But now that there is a new announcement that a reboot maybe in the works, I’ve decided I ought to get this thing done once and for all.
In case you missed out, Blake’s 7 is a British TV show that ran from 1978 to 1981, featuring a gang of revolutionaries and felons teaming up to fight an evil galactic empire called the Federation. It often feels like a more grown up and darker version of Doctor Who, while also exploring the underside of space operas like Star Trek. Blake’s 7 has had a huge influence on media SF, including things like Babylon 5 and, I’m pretty sure, the recent Star Wars show Andor. I wrote a beginner’s guide to Blake’s 7 here.
So it was announced the other day that Multitude Productions, a production company led by former Doctor Who and The Last of Us director Peter Hoar, had purchased the IP of Blake’s 7. They’re working on selling a relaunch. Since most of the original cast is no longer around, this show pretty much has to be a retelling rather than a continuation—which feels like the right move for a show with such deep lore and so few die-hard fans.
(As a side note, I found myself wondering if they really do have the IP, since Blake’s 7 has been tied up in so many different deals with so many different players that I wouldn’t be surprised if Terry Nation’s estate did not control all of the rights anymore. There’s a reason it’s never gotten a DVD/Blu-Ray release in the United States. Update: Apparently I was wrong about this and there is finally a US Blu-Ray release. Woot!)
So here are my thoughts on what needs to happen for a successful new version of Blake’s 7:
Try to recapture the magic of those characters
So much of what makes the original Blake’s 7 work feels like a happy accident. There’s no way Terry Nation, Chris Boucher, and David Maloney could have known that Gareth Thomas and Paul Darrow would’ve had such incredible chemistry when they started out.
Thomas plays Blake, the fanatical revolutionary who will do literally anything to destroy the totalitarian Federation. Darrow plays Avon, a cynical computer hacker who is only out for himself—but is nursing a broken heart. Blake’s idealism and Avon’s cynicism power the show, and most of my favorite moments are when the two of them are throwing off sparks together. In the final stretch of season two, there’s a moment where Avon looks at Blake and says, “I want to be free of him,” while Blake looks away. And then a short time later, Blake insists that he has always trusted Avon from the very beginning. It’s incredible stuff.
I would make the actors playing Blake and Avon do multiple chemistry reads. If you cannot nail their spiky, thorny relationship, then this isn’t Blake’s 7, it’s some other show. Blake and Avon are so attuned to each other they sometimes finish each other’s sentences—literally, this happens in the season one episode “Breakdown,” and it feels magical. Avon cannot admit how much he admires and even loves Blake, and Blake is uncomfortable with how much he depends on Avon.
And look, I’m just going to say it: This show is a little bit Our Flag Means Death, with Blake as Stede and Avon as Blackbeard. Not nearly as funny, obviously—though there is some great humor in the original show. But these two have a romance which stops short of naked make-outs, but feels every bit as hot. If I were working on a Blake’s 7 reboot, I would have actual romance between Blake and Avon penciled in for season two—with strong hints throughout season one. The original show queer-baited fans so intensely, it’s baked in to the concept.
The makers of a new Blake’s 7 are going to have three choices: make the Avon/Blake relationship boring, give them intense romantic chemistry that never pays off, or do a slow-burn romance. I strongly prefer the third option.
Speaking of happy accidents, another of the most iconic characters in Blake’s 7 is Servalan, one of the leaders of the evil Federation. There’s no way anybody could have predicted the outrageously campy and off-the-chain performance Jacqueline Pearce gives in what was probably meant to be a minor recurring role. She’s Effie Trinket, Cruella de Vil, and Divine all rolled into one, and she provides a lot of the camp energy in the show—plus, here and there, surprising moments of pathos. She’s exactly who would rise to the top in a corrupt totalitarian regime, but she’s so far from your standard image of a jack-booted thug that she throws everything out of whack.
In terms of other main characters, you just need a really good comedian to play Vila the cowardly thief, and I would introduce Dana the weapons expert way sooner—preferably in the first few episodes even. Maybe there could actually be seven characters this time around!
Don’t just try to be Andor
As I mentioned, there are a lot of similarities between Blake’s 7 and Star Wars: Andor, and comparisons are inevitable. Making a new Blake’s 7 now is not unlike making a John Carter movie after Avatar and Star Wars: everyone will think you’re copying the thing that actually copied your source material.
That said, Blake’s 7 is not Andor. It’s often a lot campier, as I mentioned a moment ago. It encompasses a range of tones, in fact, from sitcom to drag show to gritty dystopian drama—and all of those tones are important, because they provide the emotional range of the show.
Also, Blake’s 7 is full of well-intentioned liberals who work for the evil empire—or are nominally in a leadership position—and who really believe that the system works and that we can accomplish justice if we only do things the right way. You don’t see this as much in Andor.
Yes, Andor has Syril Karn, who believes the Empire is a force for good and becomes disillusioned by the Ghorman Massacre. But Syril is always a bit of a fascist who believes that order is necessary and that dissidents ought to be crushed. He simply comes to understand that the Empire is going beyond even that level of fascism.
Meanwhile, in Blake’s 7, you have people like the attorneys who represent Blake at his show trial, who really believe that the system isn’t rigged. You have the many Federation leaders and military officers who protest vociferously when Servalan appoints a war criminal named Travis to lead the hunt against Blake. At every turn, Blake’s 7 takes pains to show us that there are people working within the Federation who truly believe in the rule of law and civil society—and those people are fools.
The Federation is utterly evil, using drugs and propaganda to control its citizens and exploiting countless worlds—but if you live inside its comfortable bubble, you can believe the rule of law still matters. That any abuses are an aberration and that “this is not who we are.”
The other way that Blake’s 7 is different from Andor is that Blake himself is a war criminal, and the show knows this. Nobody in Andor, not even Luthen, is ever willing to go to the inhumane extremes that Blake chooses.
Most notably, Blake spends a lot of season two plotting to destroy the central computer that controls much of the Federation, reasoning that this will deal a devastating blow to his enemy. Destroying this computer, however, will also cause mass starvation among civilians on countless inhabited worlds—Blake knows this perfectly well, and sees it as acceptable collateral damage. Imagine Andor if Andor was helping to build the Death Star on purpose.
Blake also explores the possibility of teaming up with drug dealers and human traffickers, whose networks might help him to outsmart the Federation—and he’s only deterred by the realization that the criminals already work for the bad guys.
Star Wars is very American, whereas Blake’s 7 is quintessentially British. It’s about having suffered through the Blitz and the long struggle against fascism within living memory—Terry Nation was utterly obsessed with Nazis—and also about the memory of the cruel, horrific British Empire. The Brits were the evil empire, and then they were nearly crushed by another evil empire—and people who were alive in 1977 could remember both things. Only a deeply repressed culture with powerful memories of being the oppressor and the oppressed could create something this weird.
In fact, I would argue that the show’s technicolor campiness is what buys it permission to have so much moral complexity and such shades of gray.
You’re going to have to make a lot of changes
Up till now, I’ve mostly talked about what works in the original Blake’s 7, and how hard it will be to duplicate. (Or to come up with something even half as good.)
But along with those happy accidents I mentioned, there are some bizarre narrative fumbles. In season one, the most advanced starship in the galaxy and an unstoppable supercomputer both drop into Blake’s lap, more or less through pure luck. When Blake is put on a show trial in the pilot episode, he’s wrongly convicted of being a child molester, which ought to be an ongoing problem, but is never mentioned again. The early episodes introduce a lot of other subplots which go nowhere.
There’s a ton more. For example, the alien invasion from beyond the galaxy that shows up and is summarily dismissed without us ever even learning anything about those invaders.
But the biggest problem is that Thomas, the show’s star, quit after two seasons, apparently because he thought Blake was too much of a goody-two-shoes and it was boring to play. (Really. He said this in a bunch of interviews that I found online. It is baffling to me.) The show does an incredible job of handling Blake’s absence, but it really hinders a lot of the ongoing storylines. In particular, I’ve always thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like when Blake starts winning: how he tries to create a better society after shedding so much blood.
I also think that a reboot could lean a little bit harder into the core concept of Blake turning a group of mostly escaped criminals into his guerrilla force against the Federation. One of the ways the show pulls its punches slightly is that Blake’s crew miraculously does not include anybody who’s done anything terribly bad. Avon tried to rob the Federation Treasury, Jenna is a smuggler, Vila is a petty thief, and Gan killed someone who was attacking his wife. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have one actual violent offender in the mix, as an easy way of heightening the ethical conundrum of recruiting felons to join the revolution.
Hire at least one sitcom writer
My final tip is just that the writer’s room absolutely should include some sitcom writers. A huge part of Blake’s 7’s winning formula is Chris Boucher’s uncanny ear for sharp, funny dialogue. The man was unrivaled at writing razor-sharp lines: cynical, goofy, profound, deeply moving. Terry Nation, too, began his career as a comedy writer and always kept that sense of comic timing. As a result, Blake’s 7 is a drama that is very much written like a comedy, and there needs to be at least one sitcom writer punching up all the scripts…
Or just steal the lines that Boucher already put in there, which are iconic for a reason.
Of course, some folks would find similarities to Firefly.
Paul Darrow himself did
Well, there are similarities to Firefly.
There were seven characters! Zen was absolutely a character in their own right, if they weren’t that episode wouldn’t have hit so hard.
Well, we did get “Slave” (what a name!) on Scorpio in later series as a sort of replacement, but even though it was voiced by the same actor, it. just. wasn’t. Zen. (Tuddenham did a much better job with Orac.)
Quite. However, when I started watching mid season 2 with no background information, it was really confusing!
The rights can’t have been that difficult to acquire. Big Finish has been making Blake’s 7 audiobooks and audio dramas for years (probably some of the last projects Gareth Thomas and Paul Darrow worked on) though they do have a business relationship with Nation’s and Boucher’s estates through their Doctor Who-related properties. Anyway, I am very interested in seeing how this turns out (assuming it actually happens). With regards to the characters of Blake and Avon, I don’t think the options are limited to either “boring relationship” or “romantic relationship,” but I know there’s a portion of the fandom that would be delighted if it were the latter.
I wholeheartedly agree that this reboot needs a really good writer or team of writers. After 50+ years Terry Nation still casts a long show across UK SF. His knack for creating disturbing plots was one of the drivers of BBC serials of the 60’s and 70’s. Most of his output was successful – Dr Who, Blake’s 7, Survivors, The Avengers – at least from this viewer’s POV.
Reboots of the SF of that period tend to fail because the producers want to “tell the story their way” or “put their unique stamp on it”. Which seems to be shorthand for “we haven’t a clue how replicate that original success”. Case in point would be the 2008 reboot of Survivors which should have been significantly better than it was. How could they have failed given the original premise (lifted from Wikipedia):
It concerns the plight of a group of people who have survived an apocalyptic plague pandemic, which was accidentally released by a Chinese scientist and quickly spread across the world via air travel. Referred to as “The Death”, the plague kills approximately 4,999 out of every 5,000 human beings on the planet within a matter of weeks of being released.
Terry Nation seems to have occupied the same headspace as authors such as John Brunner. Whilst not totally pessimistic he seems to have had a significant dose of cynicism. Chris Boucher seemed a little more positive, which may not have been ideal for Blake’s 7 but was appropriate for Star Cops (IIRC it was set in the future of 2027 or thereabouts).
The new guy on the block, Peter Hoar, has some good stuff in his resume; Wire In The Blood, Daredevil, and the ‘Long Long Time’ episode of The Last Of Us. For the latter he gets an open mind. As with most reboots, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope. My fervent hope is that they don’t pitch it as a modern A-Team in space.
Final comment. There were seven in Blake’s 7. The seventh was Zen, the ship AI. The loss of whom was a massive blow to both the crew and to the young fans watching. The Liberator was arguably the coolest spaceship design of all time but as a plot device it was too effective and sadly had to go :(
In the Series A finale and the first five episodes of Series B, there were actually eight regulars counting Orac, the second computer character, but then it dropped down to five humans and two AIs, a balance that continued for the rest of the series, because paying Peter Tuddenham to voice two AI characters was cheaper than paying two more on-camera regulars. (Though I hesitate to count the Scorpio‘s computer Slave as a full team member, as it didn’t seem to have nearly the intelligence of Zen or Orac.)
Really, they would’ve had more flexibility if they’d called the show something less specific than Blake’s 7. They managed to get by without Blake, but they still tried to stick with having technically a seven-member regular cast most of the way through.
Aye. The second season had a variable number of crew, to mixed success really. Dayna was positive in terms of representation and lively personality. Soolin was the Jenna replacement for the dads. Tarrant was an annoying wannabe. The Avon-Villa odd couple became a central pillar for the show and that relationship will have to be replicated carefully in reboot. ORAC worked as a foil for Avon (they got a lot of mileage out of that plastic crate).
Blake was always the weakest link. Hardline do-gooder is a less interesting character schtick than hacker or thief. I’d anticipate any reboot will involve reworking Blake with a developing through line. That will be challenging to balance without falling into emo/angst cliche.
Way back when I always felt that they had chosen seven as the number because of the Magnificent Seven. Western analogies in Blake’s 7 were obvious to me even as a nipper. On a rewatch even more so. I wonder how much of that influence will be present in a reboot.
Dayna was the Jenna replacement; Soolin replaced Cally. And if we’re talking the “for the dads” factor, Dayna tops the list for me, followed by Jenna, Servalan, and Cally, with Soolin last.
As for Tarrant, I think he was cast “for the mums” in much the same way.
By the way, Josette Simon (Dayna) went on to become the first black member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and had a long and illustrious career with them. Part of the reason Gareth Thomas left the show halfway through was because he was offered a gig in the RSC (and because they didn’t let him direct an episode).
“ORAC worked as a foil for Avon (they got a lot of mileage out of that plastic crate).”
It’s interesting how close Orac was in shape and size to a typical desktop PC tower from the ’80s-’90s.
Agreed you’re going to need good chemistry between Blake and Avon. And after Heated Rivalry and Our Flag Means Death networks won’t be afraid of a gay romance.
The antagonists need to be as interesting as the protagonists. Whoever plays Servalan will need to be able to handle that – and the costume designer as well.
Blake is going to need to be a monster – a hopeful monster, but a monster nonetheless. And I suspect that most of the suits are going to wimp out on that.
Having a killer among the crew – yes. Make them either a mob hitter or a Federation assassin that had a job waiting at the prison planet or got crosswise of high level politics and dropped into the ship. The other option is to make Blake that killer.
I think the reason for so few die-hard fans was Blake.
He is so damn arrogant and self righteous
… But will you have it end the way Blake’s 7 ended?
I firmly consider that episode to be an all time classic.
Didn’t Thomas request (demand) that his character go out in some sort of scene like that?
Well, he did insist on making his death scene bloody enough to leave his fate unambiguous.
Any reboot would almost have to treat the women better. Jenna was set up as one of the “big three,” but she was marginalized pretty quickly, even though she should’ve been the biggest badass on the ship. IMO, a reboot should have Avon be a pure computer geek with no physical skills whatsoever, but focus purely on his genius and ambition, and give Jenna some of Soolin’s characteristics. And if they include Cally, they need to settle on how her telepathy actually works, as that was hilariously inconsistent from episode to episode (when they even bothered to remember she was telepathic).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Re: Cally…yeah, you’re right. But in the halcyon days of my yout’, she was was my main crush on the show. Neither Jenna nor Soolin held much appeal for me. Now, Servalan (later Commisioner Sleer(sp?) was just a plain badass. Did anyone else figure that she and Avon bedded?
Chris Boucher was opposed to the idea of Avon and Servalan getting together (their kiss in Boucher’s “Death-Watch” was the actors’ improvisation), so he had “Sand” rewritten to replace Avon with Tarrant. I think it works better that way, as I can believe Tarrant is capable of genuine empathy toward Servalan more than I could believe it of Avon.
Also portray Auron better. We were led to think it was a planet of telepaths, but then in “Children of Auron,” it turned out that only the younger generation were telepathic, only one of whom (Zelda) we actually saw, and they were also a generation of clones, which had never been hinted at before. So it was a spotlight for the Auron that had virtually nothing to do with anything previously established about the Auron. (Also, they forgot after Series A that the demonym was supposed to be “Auronar.”)
Blake and Avon were more of a bromance than a romance. Two characters that started out not liking or trusting the other grew to be friends and allies. It is tiresome that friendship has to be pushed into romance. Cally an Avon however ….
Ironically, after spending most of the series trying to destroy the Federation computer system at the end of series 2 Blake and co teamed up with the Federation to defend it.
This reminds me of a funny idea I had for a t-shirt, which I’ve mocked up but I guess can’t show here. Imagine in the Star Wars logo font, three words: “Avon Shot First”.
Oddly enough I only ever saw the final season of Blakes 7, since that’s what was on when I briefly moved to England as a kid. But it made an impression. Same effects quality as Doctor Who but oh so different. And mysterious– we were missing backstory for everybody and everything, and only had a vague idea why the show’s main character wasn’t around.
Actually the miniature effects in Series D of Blake’s 7 — and late Series C starting with “Ultraworld” — are a quantum leap above the mom’s-basement-level space scenes in the first few seasons. I mean, the Liberator was always one of the coolest sci-fi spaceship designs, and there were a couple of other decent early miniatures like the prison transport and the Federation space station, but overall, the FX work was mostly even cruder than Doctor Who (and occasionally recycled from Doctor Who). But in those last 17 episodes, they raised it to a new level.
Whilst the idea that Blake was convicted as a child molester wasn’t followed up in the rest of the show, it was a terrific way of showing the true darkness within the programme and the evil of the Federation.
A line of dialogue confirms that the children involved had their memories altered so that they actually “remembered” and “lived through” the abuse.
You’re certainly not watching Dr Who.
Yes, but what landed horribly about that episode was that even the good-guy characters in the story showed absolutely no concern or empathy for the children who’d been traumatized with false memories of abuse. It was just an incidental plot beat, treated as something that was done to victimize Blake, and the story just shrugged off the victimization of the children. I found that to be horribly callous writing.
Just for the record, the British were not an evil empire; unless you define all empires as evil, in which case the adjective is utterly redundant. I find it strange that you associate the British alone with this word, and not others; indeed, you alluded to another evil Empire but did not state its nationality. I presume you meant the German or the Japanese perhaps ?
If the British Empire had not existed, others would have filed that void. Would they have left behind the legacy of democracy and human rights that the British did? History tells us not, because no other empire ever did. The sins of the British Empire are the common currency of all Empires; its virtues are unique. Virtually every modern day democracy was formally either a British colony or was liberated by the British army at the end of WWII. The British Empire alone chose to defy the Nazis, when others looked away, and dissolved itself not as a result of a war of conquest, in fighting a war of liberation for others.
You’re all welcome.
Many of the greatest evils are done by those who sincerely believe they’re doing good. As the essay mentioned, Blake’s 7 showed that there were many in the Federation who sincerely believed it was beneficial — even though the pilot depicted it as a society that kept most of the population in drugged complacency.
I always thought the series maybe did comment on Blake’s conviction for child abuse later, in a subtle but unnerving way – there is that episode when he’s reunited with his cousin – who is a love interest and, to my memory, looked quite young. I seem to recall the other characters are kind of unnerved by it. It got me thinking “Well, what if the Federation didn’t make up the charges?” Blake has such a huge ego and a lack of self awareness I certainly wouldn’t put it past him to think that anything he’s done in the past pales compared to taking down the Federation.
Judy Buxton, who played Blake’s cousin Inga in “Hostage,” was 29 at the time, only four years younger than Gareth Thomas. Story-wise, Blake said that the last time he’d seen Ushton and Inga was a long time ago, long enough that Ushton said “You’ve grown” when they met, suggesting that Blake was still a teenager at the time, so Inga can’t be that much younger than Blake in-story either.
I did find it creepy that he showed a hint of romantic interest in his first cousin, but it had nothing to do with age. And I don’t recall the other characters acting unnerved.
My recollection is that there was absolutely no mention of the child molestation charges against Blake after the second episode. I don’t think the producers wanted to remind viewers of it.
It would have been a great story if the the crew found out where there was another Liberator and went looking for it chased by the Federation, could have been a whole series.