Stephen wrote: <What amuses me about the little mutual deprecation society Avon and Part of the problem here - of Boucher's darker view of Blake and of people who try to do right - is that, while he only *wrote* 4 episodes with Blake in them, three of them are among the very very best in the series (and would be my choice *for* the best) - Shadow, Star One and Blake. The impact of these three tends to cast a greater shadow (pun not intended) than the actual wordage would justify.
Notwithstanding that Chris Boucher is God <g> he's by no means a perfect one, and in his own way is as conventional as Terry Nation. The difference is in the conventions he follows - the (then new, by now a tad cliched) ones that the good guys are just as bad as the villains, there's no really any such thing as a hero, morality is *always* suspect and it's all doomed anyway. Life's a bitch and then you die.
Boucher was very good at shades of muck, but what he *wasn't* good at - and tended to avoid - was actually writing about genuinely good people (this is not unusual, they are actually much much harder to write well). If you look at the episodes he wrote, there really are only three characters at the most whom I would call essentially good (by which I dont mean wholly). Hanna, the drug addict in Shadow. Rashell in Weapon (who I think is poorly written but well acted). Max in Deathwatch. The rest are all tending *very* much to the middling to bad range, or moral voids like Clonemaster Fen (or maybe not; for all the lofty words, what she has done is made a clone of a man - without his knowledge or agreement - for the use and abuse of his enemies. Hardly moral). Of the crew, only Gan comes out clean (and he just wasn't interested in Gan). Cally is self-rightous (Star One) and holier-than-thou (RoD), and Tarrant swings from a standard and quite appealing hero (Deathwatch) to a *complete* and remarkably stupid bastard (City) according to the needs of the story.
He does wriggle out of trying to get inside Blake's head and give any idea of *why* Blake acts as he does, which would IMO enrich the moral complexity and alleviate the rather one-sidedness of both Shadow and Star One. He thought of, and thought he was writing, Avon as a psychopath. And the only member of the crew he *invented* was a woman who killed for money and didn't show any positive human qualities till near the end of the series.
To be blunt, I don't think Boucher *was* interested in ambiguity (as it by definition must include the shades of light as well as dark) so much as the more dramatic qualities of the darker side. A Blake's 7 - and a Blake - that was wholly his creation would have been no more rounded and complex than one that was entirely Terry Nation's. It's the tension arising from his darker overlay *onto* Nation's lighter, more 'heroic' origins that overcomes the cliches of both and gives B7 its unique flavour.
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