Spoils got under my skin.
WRITTEN BY
James Goss, who previously wrote the fantastic (and equally demented) Three.
PLOT
Desperate for a new direction after the failure at Central Control, Blake seeks out the Dreammakers, who are renowned for their ability to predict the future. He initially wants their aid to find out how to win against the Federation. They instead show him what would happen after he wins...
ANALYSIS
An inevitable part of any successful series is that the audience will become invested in its characters, a fact which the writers use to make us feel any number of emotions. We want to see them happy, so we feel bad if they're not. We want to see them safe, so we're anxious when they're in danger. And so forth.
But what happens when the writers turn the character into a villain? Usually, there are two outcomes: a cry of anger if it comes out of nowhere, and accepting admiration if it's built up over time. Seems sensible enough, doesn't it? We've followed the characters on their journey and we'd like to think that we've been there for everything important. So that when a massive change like this happens, we should be in the know. We should expect it, because we've been along for the ride. And when we expect something, we can accept it.
This is not true for Spoils, which turns Roj Blake - a hero, someone who's always had everyone's best interests at heart even at his absolute worst - into a repulsive villain within an hour and has the gall to have it make sense so that I can't even complain about it. I knew the basic premise of the story going in, that I was going to follow a subversion of Blake's hope for humanity's future after the defeat of the Federation. But that I would have to watch him take one moral shortcut after another and betray everything and everyone he ever stood for? No.
There's a logistical aspect to how Goss tackles the post-Federation government, and all the political problems that Blake would have to face as the leader of the new regime. We're with him every step of the way and struggle, like he does, to solve the insurmountable problems that he has to face. And we feel his pain and we feel his queasiness at the only solutions available to him, knowing that the next ones will drag him down even more until Blake, the story and the audience are all trapped in an oppressive prison. What could have been done differently? Surely the corruption can't be that inevitable! Who knows. Spoils isn't a political analysis, but a character analysis. We're here to see why Blake might fail.
But worst of all is when we're given hope. When Jenna reunites with Blake so joyously and offers to help him redirect his crumbling empire, there was a part of me that dared to hope this might all have a happy ending. Maybe Blake's learned his lesson. I still cared about him at this stage, in spite of the horrible things that had happened. He was with Jenna again and it seemed like redemption was not beyond possibility. I was a fool, of course. Not only was it beyond possibility, but Jenna had betrayed him, seduced him for information to aid the rebel cause. Somehow, despite knowing that she was absolutely in the right, I felt betrayed myself. Because Jenna's denouncement of him was the point where Blake was lost for good, and I didn't want to lose him. I was heartbroken.
The final act was more conventionally entertaining. It wasn't the most dramatic part of the story - that was Blake and Jenna's relationship - but once I stopped caring about Blake, I started having fun again. Just as I had hoped, Goss indulged in a neat little reversal of the show's original finale. Although this scene did highlight one of my only issues with Spoils, which was the decision to have the Dreammaker characters (played by Dan Starkey and Jemma Churchill) voice all the other crewmembers. I can understand wanting it to be more dreamlike and surreal, but ultimately I just found myself feeling that the story would be much more dramatic with the original actors. Perhaps it should've been one of the full cast audios.
And nobody was more missed than Paul Darrow. Starkey's impression of Avon is passable in the early scenes, but that recreation of the finale begs to have Darrow there to give it the appropriate pathos.
CHARACTERS
There's just something so intrinsically wrong about hearing Gareth Thomas's warm, grandfatherly voice gaslight all those around him. He's always been the best narrator for the Liberator Chronicles - so passionate and full of emotion that it's easy to get lost in the adventure. You just can't help loving the guy, and the worse the situation got, the more I wanted to like him until I couldn't. Blake's rule over the Federation is much the same. He's not classically evil in the sense that Servalan, Travis and even the President are. To the very end of his reign, we see Blake openly judging himself and allowing himself to be judged, living in a constant state of self-pity and defeatism as he becomes increasingly dulled to the suffering of others.
He's an entirely new sort of Federation villain, one that you can imagine hounding the Liberator crew with his good intentions in some bizarro version of the show's latter half. Gareth Thomas is of course fantastic in the role, and not above a hammy line delivery or too ("Destrrrrroy the Liberator!")
Spoils also allows Jenna's characer to really shine. Knyvette is regrettably absent, though Jemma Churchill does an admittedly excellent impersonation of her (even though it's almost indistinguishable from the way she plays Cally). One of the show's less reputable moments early on was the suggestion that Jenna might be sexually assaulted in Space Fall (and a suggestion that her mother actually was). It certainly did its job in bringing the Federation's corruption to life, but it was unpleasant nonetheless, and hardly favorable for the show's lead female star, even if Jenna did get to slap Raiker in the face for it. So you can imagine my sickened reaction at Jenna being brought so low as to try and seduce the corrupted Blake to help further the rebel cause. It was certainly very ironic, but also just incredibly depressing, and probably the most uncomfortable moment I've had in the audios. It's especially bad when you realise that this is the only time the franchise has ever acknowledged any romantic element between the leads.
It's left somewhat ambiguous whether the Dreammakers really could see the future, or whether the dream was caused by either Blake or Servalan's fevered imaginations. And this comes out in the strange behaviour we see from the dream versions of Avon, and especially Vila. Avon at first seems to be purely the result of what others think of him. Surely he wouldn't really become a fat aristocrat in space, if given the chance? And he most certainly would not prey on innocent traders. But then I thought to myself, what is it that I would expect Avon to do in this scenario? To be honest, I'm not sure. Avon is such an enigmatic and psychologically disturbed character that he could go in almost any direction, even if he did have a heart at some point. Perhaps winning would corrupt him, like it did to Blake?
It's fascinating that after the somewhat humorous early scenes of the rich and fat Avon (was Goss taking a jab at Paul Darrow's weight?), we don't see him again until the very end when Avon has clearly become a variant of his Series D self, full of fury and accusations. Obviously, he went through some kind of journey of his own, but what? Did he rediscover his own humanity, or is he furious at Blake's hypocrisy in outlawing him for the same despicable deeds that Blake himself now commits? Perhaps I'm overthinking this (after all, none of them are real), but it's still an interesting development and I do wonder what the mindset behind it was.
Vila is the other character who doesn't seem like himself... at all. And it's really his appearance that convinced me of the fakeness of the dream. Vila is no defiant rebel, and would never openly criticise anyone before being tortured. Nor does Dan Starkey even sound remotely like Michael Keating. Either Goss completely misjudged what kind of person Vila is or this is the strongest hint that the dream wasn't any possible future, but simply a simulation designed to intimidate Blake.
NOTES
- It's kind of amusing how transparently artificial the Dreammakers are as an idea. They exist solely to justify this AU story, and their actual motivations, reason for being involved with Servalan and the fact that nobody ever mentions them in the main series is left completely unexplained. You'd think that when the crew found Orac, somebody would have mentioned "oh yeah, there's this other bunch of people who can predict the future too".
- Blake's justification for seeking out the Dreammakers is also rather flimsy, given that an episode about him figuring out what to do after Gan's death already exists: it's called Trial.
- Lol at the B7 theme being played on trumpets every time Blake addresses his subjects.
- I couldn't quite catch the name of Blake's manservant. I think it was Daryl, but it almost sounded like Darrow!
- Blake is still reeling from Gan's death, setting the story soon after Pressure Point.
- The rebels destroy the president's palace on Earth (seen in Rumours of Death), and build a new one to replace it at the same area.
- The supply routes of Blake's Federation come under attack from the Space Rats, a group of fiends seen in the episode Stardrive.
- Mentions are made of clandestine activity on the planets Lubus, Porthia Major and Helotrix, the names of which all come from Traitor, where they are stated to be in Sector 4.
- In the dream, Blake makes use of Pylene-50 to control the masses. It is a project that was only introduced by Servalan in Traitor, meaning that the dream had to be either influenced by Servalan (who is the only one who could have plausibly known of the project in Series B) or the dream was indeed depicting a possible future.
- The scene of Avon confronting Blake in his palace is an obvious homage to the end of Blake.
- Servalan once again orders the main drive to be at 'maximum power', as she did in Terminal.
No comments:
Post a Comment