Mistral wrote:
- Keep the S1-S2 characterization of Servalan, instead of the S3-S4.
- Undo PD's S4 hairstyle change. Sorry, I just hate it.
- More, more, more Jarriere!!!
...
- Killer - Jenna should be the one that knows about 61 Cygni.
- Aftermath - Too much Avon ;-) Can we please have more information
onwhat happened to the rest of the crew? 3) Animals - Replace it with a Jarriere-centric episode.
Thanks, Mistral, for saving me the bother of having to think! I agree with virtually everything (except I don't mind much about Aftermath, or Sand, if that's included in (1.1)).
Maybe that's a bit lazy. If Mistral is going to get me five of my wishes anyway, maybe I should use up some more...
1) I'd like more Bercol and Rontane too, which is as much as to say more political intrigue, fewer daft aliens. Joban can come back too. 2) And, obviously, the women to get more interesting things to do, especially Cally, whose telepathy should be used as an asset far more than a liability. 3) If Blake can't stay, I want Tarrant to remain as originally conceived, the ambiguous stranger of Powerplay. [See the Blake's 7 Winter Special from Marvel Comics: "Discussions on Season C began in late November 1978 between Nation, Maloney and Boucher... To replace Blake, a new character referred to as 'the Captain' was devised... The Captain would be intent on betraying the Liberator to the Federation..."]
1) The Web - sorry to those who've heard me say this too many times, but it would be quite OK if the whole episode centred on Cally - who's the saboteur, it's her! how do we stop her, why did she do it, can we ever trust her again? As it's her first ever possession, it's not yet a cliche, and there should be much more of an issue of trust when she's a new arrival. Maybe (see (2) above) she should finally use her powers to save them all and defeat Saymon, who should, incidentally, be reduced to a Voice Off-screen and never actually seen. His assistants can be dropped altogether. I'll accept suggestions for keeping the Decimas. Maybe they're telepathic slaves and Cally liberates them. 2) No crew-shares-a-feeble-joke endings - this means Breakdown, Trial, Children of Auron, maybe something else I've managed to forget. 3) Maybe the last one has already exceeded the limit, so I'll just settle for putting Orbit before Gold. Vila acts in Gold as if Orbit is behind him - withdrawn, strangely grim, making Avon sweat with the teleport delay.
One of the above, the characterisation of Tarrant, seems to me to be pretty relevant to the conversation discussed in the Captain Vila thread. Volcano is effectively Tarrant's second episode, so could be expected to show more traces of the character as originally planned, and I think it's significant that doubts about him crop up in the remarks of Hower, as well as Vila, though they come at it from different angles:
Vila: Tarrant says he was a space captain, but then he says a lot of things, and you don't have to believe it all, do you?
Hower: You were once a Federation space captain, you said. Tarrant: Yes, I was, for a time, until I deserted. Hower: You still sound like one.
Was he a space captain, is he still a space captain - I presume that, until it was decided to make him squeaky clean, these hints were being inserted into the script to keep us uncertain about Tarrant's real motivation. Hower appears to be an intelligent and perceptive man, and Avon remarks in Gold that Vila is "frequently right" (when not distracted by female legs, evidently).
The conversation between Vila, Avon and Cally also helps to re-establish Vila's character (it's early in the season, and he missed most of Aftermath) - prattling and unreliable, but with the familiar motif that he's brighter than he seems (the Sarcophagus Alien doesn't have any reason to lie about this). And if you look at his precise words, "Alpha" never comes into it, nor does he actually say he could have been a space captain - just that he didn't want to be one. I've got no difficulty with interpreting his remarks as wildly exaggerated distortion, but neither have I any difficulty with the idea that there was once some sort of incident at a testing centre which inspired his line of thought (and maybe, over the years, he's kidded himself into believing it - I think he's at least as good at deluding himself as deceiving anyone else). So he's babbling, he's reminding us all of who he is, and he drops in an idea about Tarrant which could have become very significant - but as the series abandoned the storyline for "the Captain", it didn't.