From: Tavia tavia@btinternet.com

As I picked this, I felt it my duty to watch it.

Serves you jolly well right :).

But then I picked it as the worst Terry Nation episode I could come up with, and I stand by that assessment.

I agree with you totally on that, actually (though I dunno, Time Squad...).

(I won't read Fiona's MtD expose' which I note has arrived as I

was composing this...)

And I'll respond to your response separately, cos I'm a bugger for filling up other peoples' mailboxes with posts with identical subject lines :).

First season B7 (in which all episodes were written by Nation) strikes me sometimes as a set of experiments in writing in different styles/genres.

I'd agree.

One can almost imagine Nation sitting down and thinking well, 13 episodes, Robin Hood in space, when was the deadline, god, last week... what cliche's can I rehash... and raiding the cupboard of action/adventure (SLD, Project Avalon), Star Trek (Duel, Deliverance), evil/mad scientist-style sf (The Web, Orac) &c &c before finally pulling out the Agatha Christie....

Or, perhaps a bit more kindly to Nation: well, 13 episodes, total blank slate of a programme beyond the Robin Hood in Space line-- why don't I try out a few different formats and see what sort of stories work best? This seems to happen with a lot of shows, look at early Doctor Who: ("let's do a caveman story, then let's do a New Wave story, then let's do a hard-sf story, then let's do a story where the characters are shrunk down to one inch tall...") or ST:TNG (let's do a time-travel story, an alien-child story, a story where one of the crew gets godlike powers, a rehash of a script from TOS...)-- before both settle down to an established format.

I think perhaps a little too much emphasis has gotten placed, over the years, on the famous story of Nation writing a script to a tight deadline, then getting Boucher to do the edit while he goes away and works on the next one (the usual quote is something along the lines of "What do you want, the edit or next week's story?"). However, from what I've heard, the editing was not so much Boucher having to rewrite the story, as him having to edit down the scenes which contained concepts they couldn't afford to realise (huge crowd scenes, pitched space battles etc) into something they could.

So we're treated to vintage detective fiction in the Poirot style -- mysterious series of murders, closed system crime, outsiders happen by and get pulled in to solve the mystery, events cast suspicion on each member of the group in turn, before finally plot device clue reveals the answer ....

But see my last post for the meaning of the plot device clue. I.e., that the answers *were* bloody obvious-- because the interesting bit is not in the solving of the mystery so much as in the watching of all the characters but Avon come up with convoluted rationalisations.

All very well, but the tension here is entirely lacking because there's no inherent threat to the crew of the Liberator. (The external tension devices [dark corridors, music track] are all very well but can't really amplify what just isn't there in the first place.)

Not necessarily a problem. There's virtually no threat to the crew in "Killer," and in Doctor Who some quite tense and exciting stuff came out of stories in which the one-off characters were at greater risk than the regulars. The lack of tension is IMO due to cheap production and very uninspired directing.

I'm not even convinced that the 'spacisation' of detective fic would have been novel at the time -- weren't there some Asimov novels that took this idea (eg The Caves of Steel, published 1954)?

No (remember, "The Robots of Death" also came out in 1977), but be fair, there are lots of stories that are good despite not being novel.

The original intent here was to discuss Terry Nation's writing, so we can safely ignore one of the worst aspects of the episode ... the terrible acting by the extras (with their budget they could either hire one or two extras who could act or 8 who, in the main, couldn't).

Technical point: an "extra" is a nonspeaking role; these are "supporting actors."

What we can't ignore is the succession of lame plot devices, not to mention gaping plot holes (how does Liberator get back to the Ortega without going through the meteor storm?

The implication in the Blake and Vila exchange: "We've got to get back to them!" "Now I *know* I don't feel very well..." is that it did.

, why does Avon confront a known murderer without a single thought as to the consequences?),

Because, as you point out, the story is a Christie pastiche. And for it to work as a pastiche, it has to include Christie elements, chief among which is unfortunately the "now I've brought you all together to inform you that the murderer is one of you..." scene (sorry, I don't much care for Christie). Hence that scene.

and rather odd characterisation (Blake destroying the Ortega).

Blake does hard-bastard things before and since-- witness Breakdown.

And a couple of wibbles. The sub-light-restricted Ortega will take 5 months to get to Destiny, while Liberator, the fastest ship in space, will take 4 days -- assuming months are earth length that's only a 40-fold difference, which doesn't seem to me to be enough.

But when has bad science been a barrier to scriptwriting :)? Apparently, when Terry Nation received a letter accusing him of scientific inaccuracy on one point or another, he would send them back a stock letter beginning "Very interesting, but you've overlooked formula XYZ to the power of 39..." and going on :).

There seemed to me to be a strong implication that the fungus from Hell might be some kind of Federation colonisation device, which in view of later episodes (Children of Auron, say) seems rather plausible.

Interesting, that's a reading I missed. At this stage in the series, though, it sounds like supposition-- going back through the script I can't find any implication that this is so.

In which case, there's almost certainly a quick and cheap way of killing the fungus once the existing colonists have been driven away/died. This type of possibility would seem to make for a much more interesting/pointful episode than watching Avon striding around with his hands behind his back imitating Poirot...

They did make that episode though, it was called "Killer" :).

So... sloppy hack writing ? Definitely.

Hack writing? Maybe. But sloppy? No.

Deep meaning ? None that I can see.

See elsewhere on Occam's Razor.

Entertaining ? Not really.

Agreed on that score. The poor production *still* leaves me cold.

Fiona

The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane I can't believe I just defended "M2D" at http://nyder.r67.net

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