M wrote: <Although what always puzzled me is when that guy in Way Back puts his hands up and says to remain peaceful as they arnt braking the law and want their rights. As he seems to have been a rebel for a while, knowing Blake 'before' and all, does this mean this has worked in the past?.>

Possibly he expected them to be arrested, not slaughtered (as I said a couple of days ago, I think the Federation is a *little* image-conscious, at least on Earth). It appears that - even mindwiped - a group that might include *Blake* was seen as a big enough threat to warrant the more savage methods; he made the Powers-That-Be nervous.

Came in handy later, of course, since they wiped out any witnesses to the realities of Blake's arrest and could make up hatever they wanted to hang on him.

What is interesting is the way the Powers-That-Be never *do* work out how to handle the man. They don't want to kill him and make a martyr, so they try a smear job and exile. Exile doesn't work, since the Liberator turns up (yes, yes, they could hardly foresee that :-)) and it's clear from SLD that the smear job failed as well, since he's a hero to all grades. The official reaction is to deny his existence (thus making it impossible to *use* the allegations against him) which clearly doesn't work either; and to kill him, the very thing that they were trying to avoid in the *first* place.

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