Everybody in Space City is scheming and making each other offers – but who’s in a position to refuse?

This feels somewhat like an end of season tale for The Worlds of Blake’s 7, with the presence of Hinton and Vila – as well as a couple of other familiar characters – bringing various plot strands together, dealing with what seemed to be loose ends, and adding a whole new thread to Series C of Blake’s 7 that simply wouldn’t have been feasible in 1980. It’s one of those stories I’m glad I didn’t know too much about going in, so, of necessity, there will be some broad stroke discussions here.

One of the things that Peter Anghelides has brought as producer to this side-look at the Blake’s 7 universe is a unity that the TV series sometimes struggled with. Things happened between episodes that we simply weren’t told about, and characters whose fates seemed inextricably bound together for the 50 minutes of episode X were forgotten about in future. That’s a sweeping generalisation, I know, but there were so many loose ends that it seems odd we’ve waited quite so long for this (although obviously, commercially, stories about the Liberator crew would presumably sell far more than others). But at the end of this hour, I was surprised – pleased, as well as surprised – to realise how far back seeds have been sown.

Jan Chappell, Sally Knvyette and Michael Keating have flown the flag as heroes from the “parent” series and they have been given a strong foil in Abigail Thaw’s Hinton as well as the more ephemeral menaces. The stories have the pessimistic air of the best Blake’s 7 tales (making the final line of this particular one quite ironic) and you definitely get the feeling that were the show be being made today, a tale such as this, which focuses on but doesn’t necessarily centre on Vila, could easily be put into production. Of course, some of this has been of sad necessity, but these are much more than “substitute tales”.

Verdict: A Machiavellian story from Peter Anghelides and Lisa Bowerman that brings a lot of things to their head well. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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