Long, long ago, when I was but a young man, I somehow ended up receiving catalogs from the Intergalactic Trading Company. Among the Star Trek and Star Wars items that interested me, there were a few other things I found confusing. For instance, there was a bumper sticker that said:
"I was stupid. I was expendable. I went." - Tasha YarI thought this odd at first, until I found another bumper sticker that said the opposite, as attributed to some unknown character called Kerr Avon . . . "I'm not stupid. I'm not expendable. I'm not going."
I thought little more of it, at the time, despite other quotes from this Blake's 7 show. Somehow as a boy Avon's wit didn't fully penetrate, and thus I had little interest. Frankly, at the time I was more interested in the grainy thumbnail-sized shots of the fascinating Timeship Lynx or the text under the Alaska Class Battlecruiser Enterprise-C on the Enterprise history poster (the text of which I could read with a magnifying glass, and thus never bought). (And incidentally, that poster only had the side view, not the top view in which the ship looks like a pregnant-guppy version of the Excelsior with those goofy FASA "megaphasers" all over it.)
But you see, many months ago I came across an old copy of one of their catalogs, and once again this Blake's 7 intrigued me. And I started to watch.
Much as Star Trek has iconic characters Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, Blake's 7 has Blake and Avon, with assorted fascinating interactions of the two with others. Put simply, Avon is one of the better characters ever created, though I daresay he is inseparable from the portrayal by Paul Darrow.
At first seeming to be a mere arrogant computer whiz, almost immediately Avon transforms. Imagine a combination of Nimoy's Spock, Quark when not being silly, and the Olmos Adama and you get a sense of the logic, greed, and badassness of the character, along with the quiet, humble humanity that permeates them all at the right times.
And the tech is an open field online . . . seems that no one has come at it from the perspective held here at ST-v-SW.Net, though there has been a little quickie attempt on scaling that has been copied elsewhere.
And now Blake's 7 will be back . . . maybe even for real, this time.
Can't wait to see what they do with it. But short of cloning Paul Darrow . . .
Also (unrelated): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-RWJ3JYszM
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