You've heard great things about Blake's 7, that edgier 1970s show from some of the makers of Doctor Who. You've heard it features darker, more complex characters, and it's like a warped mirror held up to Star Trek's utopian future — instead of the human Federation being this amazing force for peace and justice in the galaxy, it's evil and oppressive. You've heard it includes dialog so sharp you could shave with it. But how can you discover this show for yourself? Here are some handy tips.


This list actually came about because I had a friend who was interested in the wonders of B7, and I was starting to write her a long email with advice on discovering the show. Then it occurred to me that other people might actually find this useful. Anybody who has enjoyed shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Firefly will find a lot to love about the anti-heroic Blake's 7, whose DNA is woven into the most daring SF on television.


Find a friend who has the VHS tapes. Because of legal stupidities the DVDs aren't available in the U.S.

Go ahead and read spoilers. Blake's 7 is that rare show that's actually 1,000 times better if you know how it ends. I won't spoil the ending here, just in case you may disagree. But knowing the ending gives a new significance and poignancy to many scenes in the first two seasons.

Feel free to skip the first episode. It's pretty good, but it's like a pilot for a different show. Pretty much none of the characters and threads from the pilot make their way into the following episodes, except for our hero, Blake. All you really need to know going into episode two is the show's main premise.

And here's that main premise: it's the distant future, after humanity has colonized much of the galaxy. The evil Federation rules over most human worlds with an iron grip. Only a few rebels still hold out against the Federation, and their greatest, most legendary leader is Roj Blake, who gets stuck on a prison transport on a one-way trip to a prison planet. There, he has no choice but to team up with some unrepetentant criminals to fight for freedom. And maybe, over time, he can mould them into a force for more than just escape.

Be willing to suspend your disbelief a bit in the first season. Blake and his crew have a run of good luck that's pretty hard to swallow, including stumbling on the greatest spaceship in known space and later inheriting the most awesome computer ever built. Just run with it, because it sets up some great stories later. And it's no different than lots of other science fiction shows, where the hero just happens to have the greatest time machine/spaceship/whatever in the universe.

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The first season may require some patience, and you should feel free to skip some episodes liberally. The first season is a bit of a slog, because the show's creator Terry Nation wrote the whole thing himself. And this meant he was dashing off drafts as fast as he could, and then zipping to the next episode without looking back. Script editor Chris Boucher managed to add some sparkling dialog here and there, but there are also long stretches of padding and repetitive plot devices. The scripts improve a lot in season two, when Nation is no longer single-handedly writing them. Here's a compilation of some of the best quips and insults.

The only first-season episodes you absolutely should watch are "Space Fall," where Blake meets his future band of criminals, "Cygnus Alpha," where Blake rescues some of his crew from a cult led by a scenery-devouring Brian Blessed, "Time Squad," where Blake meets a telepathic resistance leader named Cally, and "Seek-Locate-Destroy," which introduces the Federation's biggest villain, Supreme Commander Servalan. (It also introduces her lackey Travis, about whom more later.)


You may also want to watch "Orac," the season finale, which sets up some stuff in the next season. And three other episodes, "Mission To Destiny," "Breakdown," and "Bounty," are amazingly great, but non-essential.


Things to watch for: Servalan's outfits become more and more vampy as time goes by. Almost every episode has a cameo by someone who appeared on Doctor Who from time to time. The show's special effects get cheaper and cheaper, until some episodes actually just feature a cardboard cut-out of Blake's ship, the Liberator, instead of model effects. But the show scores points for having a teleportation effect that actually makes people have trouble finding their footing when it plunks them down.

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