From: Sestina94@aol.com Aha, a Real Subject...
So what you have then is an attempt to chart a world of fantasy but one's imagination it seems is not totally limitless, but is in fact limited to the mundane reality of the world you have actually experienced.
Absolutely true, and I think SF works best when used as a distorting mirror held up against the times in which it is crafted. SF is essentially didactic. It's hardly surprising that the writers - the root source of B7 - should turn first and foremost to their own country for a framework in which to set their scripts. In B7's case it's pretty clear - post-colonial guilt, post-imperial nostalgia, and a crisis of confidence engendered by an awareness of the loss of global influence.
The real world of 20th century Britain further shapes the show in the surprising lack of cultural diversity in the actors as well -- It seems
the
only people of color I remember seeing in the show other than Dayna and
Hal
"My name is Superfly" Mellanby, are some Black guys in the fourth season
ep
"Warlord"
Also some spear carriers in Vice From the Past. Ginka (Children of Auron) is AFAIK the only character of Asian descent. (Horizon is culturally ambiguous - I always took it to be modelled on ancient South American civilisations. Deep Roy may be an Indian actor, but he never played an explicitly Indian character.)
and man, I think the person who costumed the Space Rats, outfitted these dudes as well. Which means that they seemed to be someone's imagination of "far-outness" that was limited really to the costumers real life understanding (or misunderstanding) of punk or alternative youth culture.
Nicky Rocker should never, IMO, have been let anywhere near B7.
Finally, where I see the real world 20th century Britishness intruding in
B7
occurs I think in the very changing depiction of Roj Blake not as a
valorized
and sympathetic "freedom fighter" as was strongly marked at the beginning
of
the show, but more and more as a kind of fanatical "terrorist" especially
in
series 2 where he seems to be a bit more drawn more like an anarchist of
some
sort.
Blake never really has any kind of 'ism' attached to him at all. This is partly understandable in that identifying him with a particular real world doctrine might squick some viewers, or at least compromise the series' claim to be lightweight entertainment. It's a good thing because it permits plenty of personal readings of Blake, but a bad thing because it weakens the credibility of his aims by failing to locate them in a broader ideological perspective.
But I have always got the feeling that Boucher, Nation and company (though perhaps I need to distinguish them better than I'm doing) seemed a trifle bit uneasy with a show valorizing a figure whose only
means
of fighting politically is to destroy key aspects of the state apparatus,
in
a culture that is so marked by such real world "terrorism". I mean, does anyone else get the sense that real life British society's situation with
say
the IRA and other groups fighting the British State posed a problem for Boucher and Nation in terms of how to handle Blake's character?
I don't see any sign of unease at all, and I wouldn't expect it to be a problem for Terry Nation who had little trouble labelling the good guys as good and the bad guys as bad (though some of his Survivors scripts showed the levels of ambiguity he was capable of when he tried). It would seem to be Chris Boucher and Robert Holmes who were more interested in greying the polarities, usually by putting one-off characters between the extremes (eg Bellfriar and Gambril in Countdown, Grenlee and Forres in Rumours). I don't see any great problem with presenting Blake as a terrorist (a word which IIRC is never used in the entire series) because no explicit connection is forged between the series and the situation in Ulster. (Although as Una pointed out, it is possible for viewers to make one for themselves. In fact, I'm surprised at the number of people engaged in RL revolutionary struggles have responded so positively to a series that largely failed, IMO, to take its central subject matter seriously enough.)
Really, I've always felt that they took the easy way out by marking Blake
so
strongly as a fanatic by the time Pressure Point and Star One rolls
around,
Then, B7 as a popular show on the BBC, couldn't possibly be considered "political" in the sense of condoning so-called "terrorist" actions
against
the British State. In raising the gray area of Blake's commitment and fanaticism, I think Nation and Boucher were trying very hard to make
viewers
NOT read the Terran Federation as a metaphor of 20th Century British
Society
I disagree with this. Whilst there is a recognisably British mindset to the Federation, the Federation as a government is not a reflection of the British government (under Callaghan for the first three seasons, Thatcher for the 4th). In fact Callaghan's muddled government and its alliance with the Liberals is quite unlike the unified monobloc of Federation rule. Nor can I see anything substantially Thatcheresque in Servalan (though I can't recall when Thatcher came to lead the Conservative party - was it before or after B7 began its run?). The Ulster situation is hardly paralleled either, since we do not have the Federation (as the British government) collaborating with another galactic power bloc (the Irish government) to suppress a dissident voice (Blake) outlawed by both. If there are parallels between Blake and any RL faction, it would be an ideologically motivated one such as the RAF or Red Brigade, not a parochially motivated one such as the IRA or PLO. Nor need Blake be considered as an analogy of a left wing revolutionary movement - he could be the OAS against the Federation's De Gaulle.
-- for to do so would implicitly condone and legitimate the actions of
those
so-called "terroristic" groups who were in armed struggle against it.
Hence,
I think we get a pronounced marking of Blake's ego investment in the cause
in
the ep "Pressure Point" where he says "we did it; I did it" (So much for collectivity here) as well as his similar remark to Cally in "Star One"
where
he says that not to blow up Star One would then mean that everything he's done was just meaningless acts of terrorism. (Again, I think he speaks in terms of I and not we)
It is in fact 'we'. I think Chris Boucher's concern here is that revolutionaries do develop an ego investment in their campaigns, or at least can do so. This is perhaps almost inevitable when the individual identifies her/imself so closely with the chosen cause, as is necessary to turn revolutionary comitment into action. I don't think the problem of legitimation is an issue here.
It pays to be careful when second-guessing a writer's intentions. My take on Star One, Blake choosing to side with the Federation against the Andromedans, was that it might have been a critical comment on the Peace Movement's calls for unilateral disarmament. I finally got to collar Chris Boucher over this at Deliverance 98, and his reply was to the effect that this was very unlikely since he was pretty much in the CND camp at that time. This doesn't rule out the possibility that he might have harboured doubts about the unilateralist position that subconsciously worked their way into the script. (I should point out that this is pure speculation based on a 3-year old recollection, and I'm not trying to nail CB's political colours to any mast. For one thing, it was pretty loud in that bar and my hearing's not good at the best of times.)
Let me say that I think there's a lot of play in how people read and extrapolate from fiction to reality such that while I see Boucher and
Nation
loading the dice to make Blake less of a valorized character by making him look like more of a "terrorist," (always a negative term), I think many people (myself included) find enough internal evidence in the show to read against this loading of the dice.
I'm not convinced that any dice were being loaded either way. What we have is a valourised stereotype of a white hat hero given greater complexity and ambiguity (and hence plausibility). Whilst this might provoke some people to ask "Is Blake a terrorist?", that question is not asked within the series itself. Blake does not at any time comit a purely terrorist act (ie; the deployment of terror against the civilian populace to weaken the credibility of the ruling government). There is nothing analogous to the street bombings of the IRA, the PLO and its car bombs and airline hijacks, the hostage taking of the Munich Olympics or the seizure of OPEC ministers. The closest realworld analogy to Star One would be the IRA's 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, which would not have brought down the British government (as an institution) any more than assassinating Servalan (or the President) would have toppled the Federation. Terrorism can only achieve victory by enforcing recourse to negotiation (as has happened with Northern Ireland and Palestine) or inspiring a popular uprising (as the Tupamaros failed to do in Venezuela). Its direct impact is inevitably limited unless perhaps its aims are very narrowly focussed (the British Animal Rights movement had measurable success in restricting the sale of furs through a protracted campaign of vandalism and arson, but the fur trade itself continued [unfortunately]).
Basically, we cannot say that the dice were loaded against the risk of portraying Blake as a terrorist because Blake never really acted as a terrorist. Not that this stops some people claiming that he was one.
My point here is that even with sci-fi, one can never indulge in pure fantasy as that fantasy always bears some relation to the real world context in which it was conceived,
Perhaps the most glaringly obvious transfer of RL events to a B7 episode is in Trial. A certain Lt William L Calley springs to mind.
Neil