Retribution is quite silly, but there's some fun hijinks to keep it entertaining.
WRITTEN BY
Andrew Smith. He's well known to Doctor Who fans as the writer of the classic serial "Full Circle". For Blake's 7, he wrote... Battleground. Which is rightfully not so well known.
PLOT
An old friend of Vila's draws him and Avon into a trap on the planet Treese, where Vila has a reckoning with cartel leader Niko Krent. Krent blames Vila for the death of his daughter at the hands of the Terra Nostra, and is willing to go to any lengths to see 'justice' done. It's up to Avon and Vila to escape Krent's mountain lair...
ANALYSIS
The first thing that caught my attention about Retribution was its lack of pretentiousness. There's no flowery prose, no pondering inner monologue, no attempt to redefine the characters. It's just "we went to this place and did that because reasons". A nice palate cleanser after the mindbending madness of Velandra. And if it had remained that way, I might've been really happy with it. Not every story has to be a masterpiece. Some (such as Counterfeit) can just be entertaining, regular B7 episodes.
And then we get a 10-minute exposition dump about how Vila ruined someone's life and caused his family and business to be butchered by the Terra Nostra, and how that someone has spent the rest of his life trying to hunt Vila down!
????
Talk about overkill! I knew Vila's old friend Ragnus was up to no good, but did it have to be the plot of a Daniel Craig Bond movie? This scene completely kills the pace and eats up valuable time that could be spent on developing the story's more interesting aspects. Once the cartel leader turns up, things get interesting again and it almost starts to resemble a Die Hard film with Avon and Vila in the McClane role. I'd have preferred it if we spent more time on that, not faffing about. There doesn't need to be any great motivation, just have Ragnus betray them for money and make the villain Travis or something. It's not as if Vila is hugely affected by Klent. He's just slightly more scared than usual. So that whole drama is wasted.
Speaking of waste, why bother casting an actor for Ragnus? He only seems to be relevant in the first few minutes, before the inevitable reveal that he's not a good'un. From that point forward, Ragnus serves as a lackey to Klent. If you really wanted this epic storyline between Klent and Vila, why not cast an actor for him instead of having Keating awkwardly double as a Leo McKern impersonator. And yes, this is another one of those awfully written Chronicles where the actors are required to double as major characters. It. Never. Works.
What does work is a rather imaginative sequence in which Avon and Vila deploy 'sky suits' enabling them to soar through air between the mountains. It's something which Blake's 7 could never have done on its budget (not without horrifying results at least), so in a way it felt more real than their usual fare because I couldn't imagine the cozy 1970s visual effects or sets. Keating's hushed, desperate tones also made it sound appropriately frightening and awe-inspiring. I guess you could say there's lots of really cool things about Retribution, but it just struggles to tie them together in a satisfying way.
CHARACTERS
This does a better job at being an Avon/Vila story than Disorder, I'll give you that much. At least the two of them are together throughout and on the same page. But Avon choosing to be involved in a Vila-centric mission to begin with is strange and their bickering - whilst amusing - isn't really up to par with the kind of writing they've been given elsewhere. It's all very surface level, which I suppose is fine for early Blake's 7, but then it tries to have its cake and eat it too by foreshadowing Orbit at the end, out of nowhere. So which is it?
John Banks gives a charismatic and believable performance as Vila's childhood friend, although his willingness to let him get brutally murdered for money does bring a lot of that into question. Did Vila believe their friendship was more than it was, or did Ragnus change the way Blake and Avon changed in Series D? We never find out, because as I said, his character becomes basically irrelevant when Klent appears.
To give Michael Keating some credit, he does a fine job playing the villain. Even behind the modulated voice and distracting similarity of cadence to Vila, he gives a sincere performance and makes the antagonist more of a dead man walking than the cartoonish force of destruction that he's built up to be.
NOTES
- I enjoyed the little detail of Vila knowing Morse code, but the rest of the crew being unfamiliar with it.
- The mention of a planet hopper sent my Scorpio senses tingling, but alas, no.
- Vila is teleported from the Liberator to near the top of a mountain with an open balcony, but appears to suffer no ill effects from the massive shift in altitude and oxygen levels.
- The explosion sound effects whenever Ragnus would say "boom!" were incredibly cheesy.
- The only thing I really liked about Klent's backstory is getting to hear more about the Terra Nostra and space cartels. Space mafia are cool!
- Much like in Star Trek, the value of platinum has gone up.
- Vila finding 50 million credits and mistakenly throwing it away is such a Vila thing to do. I love it.
- How thick is Ragnus that he can't predict Klent's helicopter will throw dust around when it lands?
- You'd think Avon would throw away the two skysuits he wasn't planning to use, rather than leave them to Klent and Ragnus. But then we wouldn't have a chase scene, would we?
- Vila mentions learning Morse code to escape the Youth Rehabilitation Center. Vila previously talked about the Federation's attempts to alter his mind in The Way Back.
- Klent's money was to be paid in platinum, because unlike gold, it can still only be found on Earth. This seems to be an indirect reference to Gold.
- The Klent family tracked Vila to Cygnus Alpha, only to find that he had escaped shortly beforehand.
- Vila copes with his situation by wishing for some adrenaline and soma, which would set the story after Horizon (although the box set is a Series A one).
CONCLUSION
Very inconsistent at times, but it's not terrible.
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