--- Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net wrote: >
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.
Nice Try ! Unfortunately the action of this story occurs because of Servalan's desire to get Orac and her actions in placing a bomb on Ensor Jnr's ship. This leads the crew to go down to Cephlon to rescue any survivors. The entire episode is a result of Federation machinations.
They are not renegades in Deliverance, but explorers. And they go down to the planet with the conventional attitudes of their society largely intact.
These being the conventional attitudes that got them sent to Cygnus Alpha presumably ?
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.
How can you decide that Deliverance is a reinterpretation of reality if you have not first established what that reality is ?
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.
I agree, but I would humbly suggest that unlike those yarns it does not prosletyse for Imperial expansion, colonialism or the attitude that made those possible. Genre is not the same as ideology. Suggesting that Deliverance is the same as Allan Quartemain because they share narrative features in common is like suggesting that Iain M. Banks and Ken McLeod share the politics of, say, Robert Henlein because they all write science fiction.
JMO.
Stephen.
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