Jenna's Story is a fitting, albeit somewhat clumsy send-off to the galaxy's greatest pilot.
WRITTEN BY
Steve Lyons. Possible relative of Games writer Bill Lyons?
PLOT
Having escaped from the Liberator, Jenna finds herself stranded at a refugee camp in the poverty-stricken colony world at Sinesta IV. There, she must inspire the populace to rise up against their masters if she is to entertain any thought of escape...
ANALYSIS
I was disappointed to hear familiar pratfalls with the format crop up again, things that I hadn't heard for a while and was hoping not to hear again. A framing device of one character needlessly expositing his or her life story to someone, check. Having a single actor voice multiple characters, check. Obviously, Lyons wanted Jenna's death to mirror Blake's, and in order to do that, the story couldn't take place directly from her perspective. But that doesn't change the fact that having Jenna stop to wax lyrical about her adventures is an incredibly clunky plot device. Perhaps it would've been wiser for the story to be split in two - half dedicated to Jenna's perspective as she escapes from Sinesta and arrives to Gauda Prime, and half dedicated to the collapse of Correl's... whatever it was that he had going on(mafia force? Business enterprise? It's never really made clear). That way, we could relate to both characters just like in the episode Blake, where we had two stories intersect at the end.
With that, and a quick rewrite to remove the need for Knyvette to recite dialogue that isn't Jenna's, this could've been a lot stronger. As is, I found it more respectable than really entertaining. The sequences on Sinesta were the most compelling part of the story. It would've been really easy to have that part quickly over and done with to get to the more conventionally intriguing bits on Gauda, but Lyons took the oppurtunity to use the refugee camp setting to really shine a spotlight on Jenna's character in isolation, without any help from the rest of the crew. This also gave us a first-hand account of everyday life in the Federation, something that Blake's 7 has done surprisingly rarely. I found myself quite fascinated by the details of the miserable little colony. The Federation's cruelty in abandoning its unimportant citizens to live and die in vain hope of being transferred away from the mudball of a planet seems minuscule compared to the greater atrocities it has committed, but something about it really rubbed me the wrong way. It's the sort of thing that one can imagine happening in real life.
CHARACTERS
I had mixed feelings about Jenna's ultimate fate. Her absolute loyalty and dedication to Blake are true to the person we saw in the series. And I was really touched by the sense of purpose she claimed to have been given by his example. But I just can't help but feel that Jenna was slightly deprived of initiative as a result. The explanation for her death that Blake gave in the original series - that she died defying the Federation as a smuggler, rather than a freedom fighter - made it seem more like Jenna went out on her own terms, doing something she loved. In Jenna's Story, she makes a point of saying that she's not an idealist, but rather sees Blake's cause as the best way to survive, but it rings hollow. She dies during a mission to recruit followers for Blake, and it's just not quite as satisfying for me personally.
I was also disappointed to learn that Blake and Jenna never met after departing the Liberator(I had imagined them working together on Gauda for at least some time).
John Banks gives a solid performance as Correl, and I felt that his character had some promise, but we never really learn anything about him. Was Correl a warlord? A miner? A farmer? If so, what were his goals, exactly? Simply to get rich? Where did he even come from? I liked his betrayal of Jenna(echoing all we learn about Gauda Prime in Blake), but I just wasn't invested in him, because the script gave me nothing to latch onto. Given that Jenna's whole mission was to try(or at least pretend to try) to recruit him, I feel like we could've been given some background, at least.
NOTES
- The Big Finish website states that this story is set during Series C. However, since it deals primarily with Series D material(and for the sake of completion), I am going to label it as a Series D story on this blog.
- I've never really understood what the problem is with Series D and Big Finish.
Until recently, the company has only used characters and worlds from the original show that were created explicitly by Terry Nation himself(Big Finish bought the rights from B7 Productions, who got them from Paul Darrow, who got them from Nation's estate).
Why the rights would only extend to concepts Nation himself introduced, I really have no idea. Are Big Finish really paying money to the hundreds of estates whose authors' materials they are using for their various Doctor Who audios?
To make matters even more confusing, Lucifer explicitly features Gauda Prime without bothering to hide the name like Jenna's Story, and the recent Bayban The Butcher, The Clone Masters and The Terra Nostra audios seem to imply that Big Finish does in fact have Chris Boucher's rights as well, or at least they do now. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want more Series D content, lol. - I still find Gauda Prime to be an absolutely fascinating planet, with tons of story potential for various different types of criminal organisations. Correl's setup, and rivalry with Brant, sounded mafia-esque. And it makes sense too. If there's no law at all, there would have to be criminal law to compensate.
- Jenna simply lost contact with the Liberator because her bracelet fell off. How appropriate.
- Way to tease me with "Jenna's 7" and then have no follow-up at all, Lyons. The second part actually annoyed me. Jenna mentions that the crew she'd accumulated on Sinesta 'disagreed' with her decision to fight the Federation and then they're never mentioned again. So what happened to them? Did they disband amicably on some random planet? I was expecting some kind of mutiny against Jenna.
- And continuing from that, how did Jenna put together a resistance on Gauda, exactly? Given that the story emphasizes her relative lack of charisma compared to Blake, I feel like that's a valid question. Did she use some leftover smuggler/Liberator fame to win people over? Wouldn't she be the most hunted person on the planet then?
- I'm amazed she survived so long without thinking of sticking a gun into her boot or something to avoid situations like "an asshole takes away your only gun and commandeers the ship". For a career criminal, Jenna is kind of a doofus.
INFORMATION!
- Whilst explaining her real background to Correl, Jenna makes mention of the smuggler career she'd enjoyed prior to her capture by the Federation, as seen in The Way Back.
- Correl had assumed that the Liberator crew was wiped out during the Galactic War. He'd also heard rumors that the President had attended Blake's cremation on Jevron(a lie Servalan perpetrated in Terminal) and that he'd sold out to the Federation(a half-truth perpetrated by Blake himself).
- There's a flashback to Warship, featuring the scene of Jenna convincing Blake to abandon the Liberator.
- Jenna pays for her trip to Sinesta IV with a diamond necklace. Where she gets one, I'm not sure given that when we see her for the last time in Star One, she's wearing a metal necklace(I suppose she could've put on a different one off-screen, but it seems unlikely). Maybe she just had one in her pocket for such an occasion?
- Jenna references her brother Tomak's ill-fated defiance of the Federation, as seen in Epitaph.
- Correl's mountain houses date back to the First Calendar, which would suggest that Gauda Prime was colonised relatively early in humanity's spacefaring history.
- Jenna had never killed a man before meeting Blake in Space Fall. This is true to the series, since she had asked Avon about his ability to kill shortly after.
- Blake's upcoming visit to Gauda Prime sets up the events of Blake.
- Jenna jokingly hopes that she won't die on a cesspit planet like Cygnus Alpha.
"That's how we measure success, isn't it? People like us. By how long we can get away with it. You're about to learn the same lesson I learned, Correll. It doesn't matter in the slightest how successful you once were, not once it's over."
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