Betty said, answering Sally's request for lists of three special/different things and three saving graces:
- The gritty, bleak feel to the whole thing, with particular reference
to the fact that the putative Good Guys are a) not all that Good (certainly not with a capital-G), and b) do not always (or even ultimately) win. Let's make this one really inclusive, and mention the ending as well, and the beautifully tragic nature of the whole thing.
Yes! Yes! Not to mention that Avon's rare excursions into empathy and affiliation just make things worse.
[...]
- The characters: three-dimensional, believable, interesting, and fun
to attempt to psychoanalyze.
I dunno...sometimes I suspect that the fun of the attempts to psycho- analyze stems in large part from trying to add a second dimension (or even to project an image onto a blank canvas)....which is why I love the sopron so much. It sums up the whole series for me (well, that and the robot in Volcano (e-mail me for reasons if you don't remember).
I like that Blake frequently looks nervous in conventional terms which is unusual for the as-close-as-we-get-to-a-hero-of-an- adventure-series.
- "Moloch": The apple-and-mouse scene, and also Vila's expression when
he finally understands Doran's "problem with women."
Grose is my favorite one-time villain, I even used "That would be like trying to choose between lust and good-old fashioned gluttony" as a sig for a while
"Orac" has my favorite Blake line of all time: when he mutters "I'm fed up wi' takin' orders" after a whole one and a half orders.
-(Y)