From: Ashton7@aol.com

But what specific incidents in the Blakes 7 *universe* (not in the

production

values or the actor's accents) dictate or even show the audience that the people in B7 are all meant to be descended from a British society?

Actually I thought we were looking for evidence that Federation society is more British in mindset than American.

I think it is, but to go looking for specific incidents in particular episodes is unlikely to turn up anything. The Britishness of the Federation (by which I mean here its ideology, the mindset of its citizens, not its social or political structure) is vague and elusive, wafting through the scripts, unseen but yet subliminally perceptible.

We also have to remember that we are comparing British and American society not as they are, but as they perceive themselves, or wish to see themselves, and the relative importance of ideals common to both.

We have the grade system (which is never challenged by anyone, not even Blake), which can be compared to the British concept of class, far more rigid even today, than it has ever been in America. Such formal and codified social stratification, with the ensuing importance of knowing your place in society, contrasts with the American ideal of equality.

The Federation, for all its aggression, is essentially defensive, clinging on to its Empire. Which is what you might expect from a British TV show made in the 1970s, when at least some writers and actors were old enough to recall the collapse of the British Empire. So that experience of loss translates into a fear of loss and an ambivalence towards the justification of that fear. Compare that with the expansionist ethos of Star Trek which refuses to acknowledge its own colonialism.

A defensive Federation is effectively a guilty Federation, knowing full well that it maintains itself through immoral practice yet unable to acknowledge that, even to itself. But whereas the ST Federation tries to deny the lie by forever trying to outrun it and leave it behind, the B7 Federation is fixed and immobile, just as post-Imperial Britain was trapped on its tiny island. With nowhere to go, it retreats behind masks of cynicism and silence. Federation troopers wear masks, symbolic of the state's disengagement from the populace.

This disengagement hasn't really happened in Britain, though the distance between state and people may have become clearer over the past half century. Masked troopers in black have clear connotations with the Nazism that a young Terry Nation could feel landing round his air raid shelter. Although the American contribution to the war in Europe is unquestionable, it was Britain that came perilously close to being invaded. My own home town, 60 years on, still has a negligible Jewish population. Most fled in 1940 and have never returned. The equation Federation = Nazis is, however, too simple IMO. The collapse of the Third Reich was mirrored in the consequent dismantling of the British Empire, so it is possible for the British to see - as they sometimes do - Nazism as British imperialism writ large. We, the conquerors of the Nazis (because Britain won the war, after all, ha-ha) are ourselves petty nazis of a kind, who have in our turn been defeated by history. The Federation thus becomes not just an image of an evil regime, but also of what might have been - A German conquest of Britain - and what might also yet prove to be, the latent nazism in the British psyche. Blake thus becomes (as a fictional character) a redeemer of the national conscience, or within the milieu of the show as a redeemer of Federation conscience, as opposed to Kirk as vindication of the ideological ideal both within the Star Trek milieu and beyond it.

So that's why I think the B7 characters are 'British' in terms of their mindset, as opposed to their descent. The Federation is in a position analogous to that of Britain in the wake of the Second World War, and just as that affected the British psyche (including that of the writers, actors etc), so too does it affect the psyche of the Federation and its citizens - including most of the regular characters.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if you had to be British to see it, let alone appreciate it.

Neil