Museum Piece is Ultraworld, but with a far darker tone.
WRITTEN BY
No specific credit.
PLOT
In the hopes of preventing the Federation from getting their hands on vital data, the Liberator chases after a monitoring satellite that's gone rogue, only to find themselves trapped by the same alien influence that took ahold of it. And Travis is closing in...
ANALYSIS
There's quite a few gaps in logic here and there, but they really don't distract from a very gritty and well-paced adventure. It felt like something written by Terry Nation when he's at his best - everybody had something to do, there was a dystopian backstory to the planet Memorantus that just gave it a wonderfully disturbing atmosphere, particularly when we learned who the villains were and what they intended to do. There's a multitude of threats to the Liberator crew, and they were stuck in a situation that escalated so fast that I was really asking myself "how are they gonna get out of this one??"
I have to applaud this short story for getting me that involved. They managed to cram so much in here, yet it didn't feel at all overcrowded. Probably because the writer didn't really bother with a resolution - there could easily have been a part 2 that directly continued from where Museum Piece left off, depicting the Liberator's escape from the Universal Museum and an actual confrontation with Travis. We're just sort of meant to assume that the crew manage to get away.
But again, it doesn't matter, because the actual adventure is so gripping and varied, with plenty of action, suspense and good humour. I highly recommend it.
CHARACTERS
Everyone's pretty much on point, although I should point out that just like with the other annual short stories, it's quite clear that the writers weren't up-to-date with how the show had evolved and were basing their work mostly on Series A. So for instance, we have Cally outright refusing to hide, and instead going on a suicide attack against enemy robots. It's out of place for the time period depicted here(Gan is already dead), but it's incredible to read and I feel like Jan Chappell would have loved doing it.
Blake and Avon got to go on a mission together, which really thrilled me since the show rarely paired them up on their own. It was all-too-easy to imagine Gareth Thomas and an exasperated Darrow running around a quarry chasing trucks. The Series A influence was strong here as well, with Blake being a more dominant figure whilst Avon tagged along, his bark worse than his bite. The sequence of their bodies being frozen with their minds kept awake and their eyes still moving(much like the fate of President Borusa in Doctor Who's "The Five Doctors") was chilling, although I got a chuckle out of the robots displaying them as fighting over the Federation satellite as 'Terran warriors'.
Jenna and Vila were another unusual pairing. Jenna had perhaps the least to do out of anyone, but she did get a lovely moment where she recognised an old smuggling ship of hers in the museum, and became melancholy over it. Vila, on the other hand, was surprisingly the most competent of all of them, being the one to come up with the idea of avoiding the robots in the Liberator's ventilation system and later successfully navigating the Universal Museum(contrast this with his pitiful memory in Countdown). The crew would have been screwed without him. He still got his obligatory bits of cowardice, of course, but it's refreshing.
NOTES
- This story was published in the 1980 Blake's 7 annual.
- Similarly to Paul Darrow, the writer seems confused over the nature of the galaxy vs the solar system. The satellite, which is remotely controlled from Earth, has visited a number of Federation planets before being drawn off course into "deep space", where Memorantus is. It's possible that it has its own Time Distort engine, and that deep space refers to territory beyond the Federation's influence, but in that case, it's oddly phrased.
- The Liberator "jumps" to deep space, as if it had a hyperdrive.
- It's weird that we now have two stories in a row where Travis closes in on the Liberator, but we never actually see him.
- Memorantus is an alien world, so I suppose I shouldn't question how it works, but it is a bit weird that the museum's robots have enough resources to override Zen and take the Liberator down. It was admittedly mentioned that they intend to turn the entire planet into a museum, so I suppose they might have somehow evolved to take control of military installations.
- I love that we never find out if the Memorantians really wanted to turn their planet into a museum, or if the robots have just gone insane. The vagueness makes it feel more real.
- Why would the satellite's info be of no use to Blake? I get not wanting the Federation to have it, but surely he would find information about rebel military bases helpful to the cause.
- I wonder where the tendency to call the Federation "Feds" came from. It's all over the annuals, Marvel magazines and Big Finish, but I don't recall it happening in the original show all that much.
- Whilst much of the story is very similar to Ultraworld, Avon's ending line is almost ad verbatim to that of Voice From The Past, when he sighed about Blake being his old self again.
- The Liberator crew have vigilantly maintained the habit of listening to Federation communications "since they started tapping them", which occurred in Seek-Locate-Destroy.
- Gan is not present, setting the story after Pressure Point. I was really hoping that Travis wouldn't be implicitly mentioned to be working for the Federation(like it was in Planet Of No Escape), since it awkwardly widens the gap between that story and Trial. However, he does have Federation soldiers on his ship here. I guess theoretically it could be set during the first series of Classic Adventures, when he was working for the President?? Ignoring that the Liberator crew had far more pressing engagements by that time.
- The Liberator entering the Memorantus atmosphere creates a potential continuity error with Drones, where the crew weren't aware that the ship is capable of it(we can set these between Drones and Mirror then, perhaps).
- It's quite possible that the old, battered twin-wing GD-5 that Jenna recognises as her own is the Dmitri from Epitaph, which was also described as a smuggling ship from her past, the fate of which remained unknown.
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