From: Stephen Date stephend999@yahoo.co.uk
Hang on a mo ! Call me wilfully obtuse, but I thought Haggard's heroes were English gentlemen, sharing the conventional values of their society, who sought to extend the Empire (most of the time). Whereas our lot are Desperado's on the run from the law and seeking to bring down their empire. If they come from the Home Counties than so did the Romans in I Claudius !
With the Federation effectively absent from this episode (except in the Servalan-Travis scenes, remote from all the action on Cephlon), our heroes effectively become the Establishment for the purposes of this episode.
They are not renegades in Deliverance, but explorers. And they go down to the planet with the conventional attitudes of their society largely intact.
Plymouth Argyle fans obviously <veg> Seriously, on a planet like Cephlon, where resources are scant a bunch of new, well fed interlopers are not going to be greeted with open arms. I concede that the exclusive casting of men as the savages may owe more to 1970's casting policy than any considerations of anthropological exactitude.
Taking females as plunder is (I think) fairly well documented in tribal warfare. We are told that the fertility of the primitives is declining so a female would be a valued commodity.
Again there are precedents for this sort of thing in primitive societies on our own planet.
Again, primitive societies do have primitive belief systems. It is possible that the teaching of the sciences might have declined after a nuclear war. It is also possible that a society in decline might have accepted a passive fatalism as it's response to events. The historical parallel to this is the later Roman Empire, who's finest minds went into retreat from the world, just as the Empire's decline became terminal.
etc etc
Nice try, but it's completely wrong to measure Deliverance up against historical reality or anthropological fact. The episode does not draw its imagery from reality, but from the reinterpretation of reality that was made in order to render the facts ideologically palatable. Deliverance is a ripping yarn in the Boys Own tradition, what with its savage natives, hostile landscape, meek little priestess (a noble savage?) etc. Quite possibly the kind of thing a young Terry Nation might have read.
Neil