Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net wrote:
The only thing missing from Deliverance is the pith helmets, because this episode is little more than a sad pastiche of Rider Haggard with pretensions to being science fiction. Our stalwart bunch of middle-class Home Counties adventurers
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 !
find themselves ditched on a planet consigned to quaint notions of barbarism through the magically convenient means of 'a war' at some unspecified point in the past.
I thought that this was an Awful Warning of the dangers of nuclear war, which was something of a concern in the 1970's (and probably should still be today)
Almost from the start we're told that whatever society there was has undergone a 'reversion to primitive', and it isn't long before we're comfortably assured that primitive means dangerous.
Doesn't it ? What was it Hobbes said about life in a state of nature ?
The planet itself is dangerous, what with all that radioactivity.
A well known legacy of nuclear war (see above)
Despite which, there are some local primitives still knocking around. First off, we have a bunch of men (plural), who are aggressive, inarticulate, and unaccountably hostile. What better excuse could you need for shooting them with impunity?
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.
Well, just in case, the script has one to offer - they like to steal our women. We don't see Jenna get abducted, but surely she wouldn't have gone off with them of her own accord? Heaven forbid! They don't actually do anything with her beyond sticking her in a tent, thus sparing all and sundry the anguish of singing Here Comes The Night.
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.
As well as the men, we also have a Woman (singular), who is young, passive, demure, extremely well spoken and has somehow managed to keep all her teeth white.
Meegat is the official Messiah greeter. As such, presumably, she would be dressed ceremonially, behave reverently towards any newcomers who might be the Messiah and maintain reasonable standards of personal hygene. Again, I concede that realism on this last may have been sacrificed to considerations of taste in 1978.
She instantly throws herself at the feet of our sturdy white giants and hails them as the saviours of her people, singling out Avon as 'Lord'. Vila and Gan presumably come from Another Place.
Again there are precedents for this sort of thing in primitive societies on our own planet.
From this we can deduce that the representation of the sexes on Cephlon is indeed of a very primitive kind, unsullied by any problematic complications like cultural awareness, ideological consciousness or a sense of historicity.
I agree that all this is deplorable. However the Federation is deplorable and no-one has (yet) suggested that any of the writers on B7 were Facist sympathisers (with the exception of Tanith Lee, I seem to recall).
Meegat has a minor problem that needs sorting out, and since it permits Avon and his chums a chance to flaunt their technological knowhow (they come from civilisation, after all) this must obviously take precedence over other matter (like, say, rescuing Jenna).
As I recall they spend a few minutes in the control room then, prompted by Gan, Avon announces "We must find Jenna". Given that Meegat has just saved their lives a certain amount of polite interest in her predicament is not unwarranted.
Fortunately it doesn't take too long, because decent chaps like these are hardly going to be flummoxed by a stack of antique hardware.
I don't have a good answer to this bit. They work it all out way too quickly to be believable, given that none of them have any prior experience of this kind of kit.
The fact that it's hardware of any kind is way beyond Meegat's comprehension, because she's primitive, and primitive people have no concept for such things. Nor do they feel any compulsion to try and understand what's going on, even if it's intimately tied up with their entire purpose in life.
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.
And then it's off to rescue Jenna, or at least see if there's anything left of her (they could be cannibals, you know).
That is why they went back down.
Meanwhile, Blake and Cally are up against a genuinely serious adversary. This is Ensor, who is of a bit of a decent chap himself, just a bit misguided. But he's technologically savvy (insisting that the course to Aristo is confirmed by the ship's computer, putting the energiser on his gun to automatic) and hence a genuine threat. Cephlon's brutish thugs might go down with a single whack of a big stick (and they don't stand up too well to fisticuffs either), but Blake and Cally are essentially helpless against one of their own kind. Only the toll of his injuries saves them.
Well, I think he was supposed to be clever (Ensor Snr praises his intelligence in Orac). Blake and Cally aren't helpless but a hostage situation with a gun held to someone's head is not the same as a fist fight with some undernourished tribesmen. Big sticks tend not to be terribly effective in these circumstances.
What we have here, then, is a pernicious piece of colonialist nostalgia, wistfully dreaming of the good old days when the sun never set on the Empire.
The Empire, in a brief cameo, is seen as a ruthless tyranny.
It is glib propaganda for armchair adventurers who need to be reassured that civilisation amounts to supremacy and that technological sophistication is the only kind worth a damn.
Two points. Firstly the Federation is (another) Awful warning against technological sophistication without morality. As the Federation are shown as being the baddies in all 52 episodes I think that we may discount this as being the message of "Deliverance". Secondly, the one character among the crew who could be accused of putting technological sophistication above any other value, is humanised by his encounter with Meegat, which would tend to point away from that direction.
Ultimately, it endorses a self-granted mandate to invade the lives of so-called inferior peoples, prove one's superiority and promptly walk out again without care or consideration for the consequences.
But Avon and co. don't invade Cephlon. They go down to pick up the survivors of the crash and get caught up in the situation down there and have to extricate themselves as best they can.
If you enjoyed this episode, may I also recommend Triumph of the Will and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. They should be right up your street.
Not, really my cup of tea thanks !
Whew. Didn't know I still had it in me...
I never doubted it for a moment.
Stephen.
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