Heroes: Metanoia (2017) Review

 

Metanoia was a load of nothing. 

WRITTEN BY

L. M. Myles, and this is the only work of hers that I'm familiar with. She's written some short stories for Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield. I hope they're better than this entry into the Heroes anthology.

PLOT

The Liberator receives a signal from a resistance informant in the Federation, requesting assistance in defection. Eager to spread disorder amongst the Federation troops, Blake agrees and travels with Cally to the planet Calfos to make contact, where the two quickly find themselves in a trap with no backup... 

ANALYSIS

It never threatened to become very exciting, but I wasn't really bored either until Blake and Cally made contact, at which point the story devolved into a series of ridiculous and convenient plot twists. By the end, the whole thing seemed largely irrelevant and forgettable. 

The idea that the defector wasn't sure if she wanted to kill Blake or not was actually very interesting and a fresh take on the usual traitor angle. And the traitor turning out to be her smuggler acquaintance wasn't bad either. But then Blake and Cally just break out. And the smuggler doesn't try to stop them. In fact, we never see her again. So... that was easy. Of course, in order to wrap things up quickly, the thus-far reasonable Federation defector decides to go kill the treacherous smuggler... not out of rage, but because she doesn't want the Federation to show up and torture that backstabbing smuggler. AND she declines to take anti-radiation pills... right. 

It's complete nonsense. I mean, really, what was the point of this? What was the message? Did the writer just run out of time? Were we supposed to relate to the lunatic who tried to go euthanise the smuggler? Cause I didn't. 

Another major problem was the dialogue - there's very few descriptions of who's talking, so it can occasionally be hard to follow, at least if you're listening to the audiobook version as I was. Oh, and speaking of the audiobook version? Michael Keating rattled off the text so fast and with such awkward, random pauses that trying to keep track of what sentence I was in became a real struggle. I love Keating, but he was very obviously uninterested in what he was doing here. 

CHARACTERS

Just about the only person I enjoyed was Orac, maybe because he's the only one whose voice Keating tried to imitate. But he had a few genuinely funny lines, and it was nice to see the comfort that Cally took from his presence. 

Well, actually, that's a lie. Before the defector(Commander Rainnis) went all cuckoo, she did have a pretty brilliant confrontation with Blake, where the topic of "just following orders" came up. Her point about Blake being able to break free from the system because he'd lost every tie to it was... on point. So I suppose there's some thematically interesting aspects, even though it doesn't add up to much.

NOTES

*Since when does Vila ignore conversations about ideas he disagrees with? I would've thought he'd be the first one to protest. 

*I like the touch of Jenna staying on the Liberator purely because otherwise, the ship would be handled only be Avon and Vila.

*At one point, Michael Keating misreads the word "pilot" as "pirate". Or maybe Jenna has taught Cally to be an expert pirate. Either works. 

*The reference to Rainnis's impractically pinned up hair is a nice nod to the occasionally overzealous production design of the show.

INFORMATION!

*Metanoia is set between the episodes Killer and Hostage(I wonder if Myles was trying to foreshadow Blake's encounter with his treacherous uncle with that family reference). 

*Blake's trip inside a Federation shuttle reminds him of the weeks he spent on the London(wasn't it more like six months?), which we saw in Space Fall. 

*Blake and Cally travel with anti-radiation pills, having learned from the crew's near-fatal mistake in Deliverance. 

*Kolan offers to smuggle shadow for Rainnis.

*The Liberator has acquired Federation shuttles from the destroyed base on Helios, which might explain Avon's use of a pod in Rock Star. 

BEST QUOTE AVON QUOTE

BLAKE: "This could change everything. Without a loyal military, the Federation are nothing."
AVON: "Could. If this is nothing more than another fanciful flight of idealistic imagination. One that, once again, you are prepared to jeopardise all our lives for."
BLAKE: "Not this time, Avon."
AVON: "Ohhhhhh?"

CONCLUSION

You had something, you lost it. Sad.