Saturday, July 7, 2007

B7 introduction

Yes, your esteemed blog author has struck the big time... just without any cash rewards. Yes, a script has been written and accepted for the Blake's 7 Sequel Project, ideally an antidote to the serious and stead work of the main project author, Neil Blisset. After all, the B7SP has been remastered into the far superior Blake's Legacy and then into the rather baffling and shortlived Blake's Progress.

So... what happened between my definitive script and Avon facing down the Iron Guard?

So, Series Five....

5.1 Recovery
At the last moment, the Scorpio crew are teleported to safety by Orac to a reconstituted Liberator run by Jenna Stannis and Nij Blake, the long lost son of our very dead main character. Dayna's dead, too, by the by. Using Nij's ship, the Sevener, Avon arranges a two pronged attack that regains Orac, kills Arlen and causes more than a fare share of exposition.

5.2 Origins and Answers
Avon demands the truth, and Nij explains how he escaped a slaughter on Signus II with his ship Sevener, found the ruins of the Liberator and triggered its reconstruction. Then he met up with Jenna and the next thing you know, the first episode. Avon agrees to let Nij be leader on the grounds they finish fixing the Liberator before attacking the Federation.

5.3 Freedom
In order to get some crystals to fix the Liberator's neutron blasters, the crew head to Freedom City to get them, but unfortunately Krantor is not happy and traps Avon and Vila, getting them to face the Klute again. However, it turns out the Klute is a robot so Orac takes it over, and they win another ten million bucks. They kill poor Toise and take the cash...

5.4 Crystals
Just as Avon and Tarrant are on the Sevener with the crystals, about to dock with the Liberator, Commander Kreel (that loser from Hostage) attacks. After a space battle, everyone escapes. The end.

5.5 Resistance
Avon arranges a new alliance of non-alligned worlds and rebels on the neutral territory of the Liberator. Unfortunately, all the parties attempt to steal the Liberator and the crew have to kill all their potential allies.

5.6 The Missile Trap
After a run in with Kreel, Blake takes the initiative and heads for Agro 34 to steal a new batch of ultra powerful missiles, a new technology. Unfortunately, it's a trap and Servalan is waiting...

5.7 Revelations
Servalan reveals Nij is her son, the offspring of a one night stand with clone Blake. Nevertheless, Nij Blake still has loyalties to Avon and the others. They escape with the missiles, and Avon becomes leader again.

5.8 The Mutoid Affair
Blake is left on a quarry planet to find himself. Instead he finds himself trapped in a cave with a brain damaged Mutoid. Who Kreel then stabs to death. Blake swears to destroy the Federation.

5.9 Finding the Pieces
In order to wipe out the Mutoid Modification Plants, Blake needs to get the Sevener working and so sets out with Soolin to soup up the ship and get a teleport. However, Blake is captured.

5.10 Partners
In the first episode to lack Vila, and the second to lack Avon, Soolin and Servalan team up to bust Blake out of jail. Not trust, no treachery.

5.11 The Final Modification
Does what it says on the tin. The reunited Liberator crew wipe out the factories and no more mutoids will ever be made again. Surely this is a happy ending?

5.12 The Calm Before The Storm
In the obligatory 'alien life' episode, Vila encounters an energy leach from another dimension. This wrecks the mild holiday everyone else was trying to enjoy.

5.13 A Meeting With Destiny
The Elite Service Division is put under Kreel's command and he goes to that nameless planet to get hold of IMIPAK, and kills clone Blake while he's at it. The Liberator crew arrives and a massive battle starts between the rebels and the ESD. Kreel and Servalan escape with their lives, but Jenna is not so lucky. As the crew wipe out the ESD with a missile and try to find a doctor to cure Jenna, Tarrant uses Orac to reveal Sleer's real identity.


Series Six...

6.1 To Save A Friend
Blake contacts Rela Kyben and gets her to operate on Jenna, to no avail and Jenna dies. After escaping a Federation ambush, the crew head off, not realizing Servalan is now being forced to work for President Anders.

6.2 Walking in Fear and Memories
An extra-dimensional being forces the Liberator crew to live their nightmares and innermost fear.

6.3 Showdown
The crew discover that to make up for the lack of mutoids, the Federation has introduced new legislation which means anyone who helps/does not resist rebels will be executed, as will their families. Servalan storms the Liberator with her troops and tries one last bid for freedom. Vila throws her out an airlock. She's definitely, no returns, dead.

6.4 Kyben
The new legislation means poor Kyben will be killed if the Liberator crew don't rescue her. They manage it, but Kyben loses an eye and her family.

6.5 Unknown
Avon takes the Liberator and Orac on a secret mission while the others take the Sevener - they need a new crystal to work the missiles and to do that they need to get a crystal from a planet of superstitious nutters with a love of blonde bimbo handmaidens. The crew enlist a girl called Jain to do it, but she's not the only one hiding things...

6.6 Choices
Having worked out some of Jain's secrets, Blake has the scheme goes ahead, though briefly considers letting Jain die for it to work.

6.7 Take a Breath
The crew visit an isolated Federation colony, only to fall foul of the ruler. Jain is killed and the rest of the crew narrowly escape back to the Liberator to find Avon is dead! No return, defintely dead! Blake knows what it is, but refuses to discuss it.

6.8 Operation Quantum Force
The reduced crew agree to help the Federation stop a mad scientist and a doomsday cult from wiping out the entire created universe.


and that's where we are...

Aftershock

This is my second-most popular piece of writing, second only to The Penumbra Cell and a review of Picasso's Gurnica. Thus, I have gone to incredibly lengths to find a copy of it and repost it here.

###


AFTERSHOCK


###


The massive ship’s engines have all but shut down. Never mind. The heavy grasp of the young planet below has taken over. The ship begins to accelerate towards the wild geography below. Wild geography soon to be lost forever. Those on the surface look up at the new star swelling in the sky. And despair.

The boy is tapping out at the computer. Solve the code. Punch it in. There might just be enough control to steer the ship out of danger. Or achieve a landing. Or perhaps he should abandon now, search for another escape hatch. There has to be another spare. A few dozen Cybermen can’t possibly have taken them all.

He shakes his head. He must choose. Risk dying aboard the ship to save a planet, or try and escape, knowing what he had allowed.

No contest.

He continues to work at the computer. He has never appreciated how primitive such machines can be. He wouldn’t have the first idea how build one of these if it was in pieces before him, but it’s such a long and complicated method just to confirm what he hopes he already knows.

The room’s getting hotter. The ship is piercing the atmosphere.

Success! The computer, components humanly sluggish in the warmth, begins to print out the answer on the forward screen. The boy stands as close to the alien device as he can and still see the screen. Number after number appear on the screen, each one taking a life time.

But he will not panic. He will save the day or die trying.

Because it is the right thing to do.

But what’s this? The darkness of the flight deck is filled an electric blue. A box is forming in the corner with the sound of time and space undulating in agony. The boy blinks in surprise. He was not expecting that. No matter. He turns and concentrates on punching in the code which is still to be complete.

Behind him, the box doesn’t quite finish formation. It flickers and blinks, swinging randomly from solidity to translucency to nothing. The door creaks inwards. A blond head emerges, the pink face beneath twisted in pain. He shouts – he sound two rooms away. His voice cuts out in time with the flickering of the box.

“Adric! We have to leave! Adric!”

Adric shakes his head. “No, Doctor, I can do it!” he cries. Another three digits...

“No! You don’t understand!” The Doctor is screaming a breathless explanation, but Adric cannot hear it over the building roar outside the freighter.

The older man shakes his head, screws up his face and dives forward. He flickers violently and suddenly he is in the room with Adric, real and solid and in so much danger. The police box sits in the corner, barely stable for more than a second.

“Adric, you can’t finish that!”

“I can!”

“Please! Trust me!”

Adric pauses. Can he trust him?

“Adric, please!”

“I knew I was right anyway,” Adric mutters, clasping hands with his friend.

The Doctor grins with relief. The relief fades as he realizes that his time machine is now well out of phase. And now he cannot even stop the freighter – even if he was prepared to brave the consequences. He realizes that attempting to save one life has doomed his own.

The Doctor feels no regrets.

Because it is the right thing to do.

The box grows solid for a moment. The risk is death. The Doctor and Adric dive for the box. It drops out of existence and returns just in time for their feet to reach the doorway. Adric cries out, as though being cut to pieces in a hurricane. But they finally reach inside and the door slams shut.

The box vanishes for good.

And inside, Adric looks around in a daze as his senses return. He is being held upright by two women he never thought would look so pleased to see him. The Doctor is laughing with relief as he hits controls. Two silver corpses rust on the floor of the TARDIS.

Adric’s face falls. “Tegan,” he begins awkwardly. What can he say?

“I’m sorry.”

Tegan was not expecting that. She remembers his snarl to the Doctor, to leave him to his fate in order to keep her safe. Knowing if Adric was to be allowed to leave the freighter, the Cybermen would kill her instead. “What for?” she asks.

“I tried to stop it. I did.” His eyes are hot, damn them. “I’m sorry.” He lets out a sigh. “Earth’s just been destroyed. I’m sorry.”

Tegan laughs in his face. Not cruelly, but as if it is a joke.

Adric decides then and there that he will never understand her.

“You didn’t destroy Earth,” gentle Nyssa assures him. “You saved it.”

“The freighter struck,” Adric protests, part of him insisting he play along with the others. Enjoy this high esteem, even if it is misplaced. No. “It’ll wreck everything!”

“Causing a huge explosion and a resultant Ice Age?” the Doctor asks, chuckling.

What is wrong with them all? “At least!” Adric protests.

“You should have been with us in the cavern,” Nyssa explains. “We learned a lot about the development of life on Earth. Reptiles were supplanted by mammals because a massive space object caused the Ice Age and wiped out the dinosaurs.”

Adric understands – though he’s not sure if he believes. “You mean, the freighter was that object?”

“You’ve just saved my species,” says Tegan, hugging him as if saying thanks on behalf of her race.

Adric rolls his eyes. “I knew I failed. I didn’t realize it was this bad,” he jokes.

Silence.

It was a joke. He doesn’t really hate Tegan. They know that, don’t they? Don’t they?

They all start laughing, a catharsis that, if the Cybermen on the floor were still active, would have puzzled over. The Doctor adjusts the controls as a mushroom cloud forms on the primeval planet below. “Just have to collect Scott and the others, and then we can leave. Ever heard of the Great Exhibition?”

Adric shakes his head, absently pulling at the torn strands on his shirt where Ringway tore off his badge for mathematical excellence. The Doctor notices, eyes immediately flicking to the yellow crumbs scattered on the floor of the time machine. “I’m sorry about your badge,” he says with genuine regret.

Adric smiles at him with a dazzling grin that the Old Doctor would have been outshone by.

“I don’t need it any more. I know how good I am.”


###


The Doctor opened his eyes, wincing. The lights in the control room were low and the roundels in the wall burned orange. He was not alone in the control room. Scott was slumped in the corner, Cybergun cradled in his arms. His sudden violence against the corpses of the Cybermen had drained him until he dozed off while keeping watch on the Doctor.

Keeping watch. That was Nyssa’s idea. She didn't trust him on his own.

Nyssa wasn’t there, though. She had shown the grief-stricken Tegan back to their bedroom, helped out with finding rooms for Briggs, Berger and Brookes, before heading for bed herself. All of them were muted the grief the Cybermen had caused, grief the Cybermen simply couldn’t understand.

The Doctor turned his attention to the console once again as the read-outs insisted the warp ellipse around the freighter made materialization impossible. He couldn’t get onto the freighter. He couldn’t even somehow smuggle it aboard before the trouble started and save Adric, because the ship would never be free.

He couldn’t save Adric.

Even though it was the right thing to do.





The End
"Impeccably written and genuinely very moving." - Delgadofan
"I enjoyed that, as I do all your work, Youth. I have nothing I can add to it, so I'll just say how much I enjoyed your opening paragraph. I think its the fact that the detatched prose stops that makes it so good. Like seeing a planet from outer space, as a distant observer, objectively, then zooming in, and becoming more and more involved as the story goes on. Just seems to fit perfectly with...er, I'm not sure. It just sounds fab. Bloody well done, and as I can't find anything to criticise, I depart." - Dr Lorenzo
"Excellent stuff, up until the very end. I loved the pros, I loved the sense of danger, I loved the way each paragraph dovetailed into the next. I love your characterization of Scot and the others,, brief as it was. The problem was the ending, which was all about a warp elipse rather than about people, it didn't quite fit, and for those who don't know what a warp elipse is (I do, but from the point of view of a less scientific mind) I don't think it quite hits home. If I were to do that I'd give a lot more of the Doctor's point of view there, and explain what a warp elipse is and why it means there is no way to save him. It's the Doctor, Tegun and Nyssa that should hold importance to that ending, and how the story really did end and why it had to end that way, from character's point of view. That's only the last paragraph or 2 though, the rest was bloody fantastic!" - Time's Champion
"I never really liked Adric in the series - but I like him here. Which, I suppose, is testimony to how well you write him. Nice one!" - Joseph Q Publique
"Twas very moving it was." - Chris Hale
"Great stuff YOA. Better than the TV version. I'm surprised I found that quite moving, cause I burst out laughing when he died originally." - Bingo99