Star One drags and is too rushed at the same time.
WRITTEN BY
Chris Boucher, who really needs to get a grip on things.
PLOT
The Liberator crew finally arrive to Star One and find it corrupted by a task force of alien invaders trying to deactivate a minefield between the Milky Way and the Andromeda. With Blake incapacitated, Avon assumes command to protect humanity.
ANALYSIS
This is a story that severely suffers from being told in a mere 50 minutes. Or should I say, a mere 25 minutes because at least half of the episode is spent on building up to the crew's actual arrival to Star One and doing a crappy Invasion of the Body Snatchers homage.
We also discover that Servalan has usurped command of the Federation, a game-changing reveal that falls entirely flat because the episode simply has no time to deal with the implications or give poor Jacqueline Pearce any good dialogue scenes to chew on.
Everything about Star One is so painfully matter-of-fact when it should be the biggest, most cathartic episode yet. It's not until the very last few minutes that some genuine atmosphere gets built up to what's admittedly a damn awesome cliffhanger. But it didn't feel earned to me.
If we had two episodes, then we might've actually gotten time to get to know the Andromedans or at least establish them as threatening villains, not to mention Travis. The first cliffhanger might've been the discovery of the gigantic fleet behind the minefield. And then a second episode could've focused on Servalan assuming military control whilst Blake's crew deals with the Star One invaders.
As it is, the pace is too sluggish when nothing is happening yet, and then the important plot twists zip by so fast that they can't sink in properly.
CHARACTERS
Blake and Avon's first and last scenes are a bit of a tonal whiplash, aren't they? We start the story with Avon being utterly fed up with Blake on the Liberator, to the point where he's more or less trying to force the latter off the ship as soon as Star One is out of the picture. But yet his first action in command is to follow Blake's wishes despite the obvious lack of any profit from it. I guess he's kind of like a teenager who's reached the age where he wants to be all independent, but also tries to impress his parents once he's got it.
Poor, poor Brian Croucher. The writing for Travis has been frankly abysmal these last two episodes, with very little time devoted to actually exploring what he wants and why. Suddenly, he's on a mission to eradicate humanity entirely. It could work, of course, given how he perceives the Federation as hypocrites and all that. The setup is there. But it's so weakly executed. He just walks in, barks some orders, shoots Blake(without any fanfare) and then gets thrown into a hole. Travis deserved a better end after all he's been through.
NOTES
*The Federation's idea of killing or memorywiping literally everyone who knows where Star One is is dumb on a multitude of levels.
*Gareth Armstrong bears a strong resemblance to Tenth Doctor actor David Tennant.
*Why do the Andromedans bother worrying about Lurena's mental conditioning, especially considering they just want to kill her?
*In a quirky costuming decision, Avon resumes wearing his silver surface parka from the last two episodes of Series A.
*If Star One has teleport shielding, why do none of the other Federation bases?
*Sally Knyvette taps the communications button so many times that it's a miracle Vila can hear anything on the other end.
*I know the Andromedans are aliens, but how stupid are they to not recognise that Blake isn't Travis when his physical description doesn't match and he has no identity papers?
*I feel like Orac should've been able to find Star One. If it controls all Federation computers, surely it's just a matter of tracking that control back to the source of origin.
*How on earth did Travis get in touch with the Andromedan fleet? How could he even get to Star One before the Liberator, which presumably travelled at maximum speed?
*Both Croucher and Pearce ruin pretty dramatic scenes by hopping and sauntering away from the camera, respectively.
*Love the dramatic blood spurt from the first Andromedan that Avon kills.
*The Liberator very obviously moves away from the galaxy in the background when it engages the Andromedan fleet(which of course is supposed to come from Andromeda). I suppose it could've been the Milky Way in the background, but then the Liberator would be ridiculously far from it. Then again, the ship has been known to cross the span of the galaxy in like a day.
INFORMATION!
*The Liberator crew discover Star One based on the information they found on Goth in The Keeper.
*The President's wariness of Servalan in Trial proves to be justified, as she deposes him.
*Avon reinstates the bargain he made with Blake in Pressure Point, to be given the Liberator in exchange for his part in helping to destroy Federation Central Control.
*Upon discovering the antimatter minefield, Avon theorizes that someone must've developed the intergalactic drive. It was mentioned as a Federation project in Horizon.
*The Liberator avoids detection from Travis's ship via the detector shield Avon invented in Trial.
*Servalan declares a "Red One mobilisation", which is presumably a massive upgrade from the "Red mobilisation" that Subcommander Cheney announced to his squadron of troops in Bounty.
*The explosive devices that Blake, Avon and Cally spread throughout Star One are of a similar design to the ones they used to wreck the communications centre in Seek-Locate-Destroy.
TRAVIS: "Be polite, and I might let you live."
AVON: "Be informative and I may let you die."
CONCLUSION
I can't deny that it's iconic. But everything good about it just isn't executed anywhere near as it well as it could have been.
The way this episode kills off Travis finally and permanently is awesome but Travis really should have been swapped for adifferent villain during series B Carnell from weapon would have sufficed as arch-villain Servalan,s lackey
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ReplyDeleteI've heard the season was meant to end on a two-part finale written by Terry Nation. For some reason, he couldn't write it on time, so Boucher had to have The Keeper commissioned for the second last episode, and hastily write a one-part finale. I don't know if that's true, but it would definitely explain why it's so rushed.
ReplyDeleteI like Star One a bit more than you, but it's definitely true that I like it a lot more in theory than in practice. At this point in the show, I was mostly invested in Blake and Travis, both of whom had intriguing arcs throughout Series B, this episode feels like a logical conclusion for both of them, but falls down due to the lack of time. Travis definitely needed his motives for betraying Humanity to be fleshed out, we can infer that it's his disillusionment with the Federation that's taken him there, but because we never got to see the moment where he made the decision, the whole thing feels forced. Blake's burning desire to destroy Star One also needed a lot more fleshing out, we only get a little conversation about his true motives and whether he's truly right to want to destroy it, when that's meant to be the central question of the whole story. It's a shame, because there was a lot of potential for some great character-work with Blake here, it makes me wish even more that he'd stayed on for Series C, where his feelings on Star One being destroyed could have at least been explored a little.