I suppose that's more than a fair reading of it. I'm actually surprised Jan Chappell left because she felt she wasn't getting enough to do, despite a lengthy period in season 2 where she was welded to the teleport controls with Jenna she's doing pretty well out of season 3 so far (and has another double episode coming up IIRC).Cliffjumper wrote:It might be my memory fitting my reading, but there just seems to be so little in Season 3 Cally would be interested in doing - she's a revolutionary freedom fighter, the rest of them seem happy enough with a mix of crime and revenge.
The ending of [i}Children of Auron[/i] is bizarre, we go from Servalan- Murderess of Small Babies (including her own) to the crew laughing and joking about how the two survivors are going to find it tough raising 5000 children alone on an uninhabited planet.
I do think he's making a lot of his material better than it actually is. A big part of the problem is that Avon needs the rest of the crew for their individual talents (thief, expert fighter and telepath and psycho weapons expert) but Tarrent doesn't have one. There's some slight guff about him being an expert pilot but we've not seen much of it. There doesn't seem to be any reason for Avon not to push him out the airlock.Steven Pacey's great, knows exactly when to use being six foot tall and macho, and when to use looking about 22. It's the little embarrased looks whenever Avon really calls him on something important.
Dayna's already fading into the background, which is a shame as her first episode was strong, and the idea of the impulsive guiltless killer that Avon has to take under his wing is actually a good one.
Blake's is like Survivors to me - the plots form more of a back drop for character drama. B7 comes out better through not having such a preposterous amount of cast changes, though.
The character interaction is what makes it, isn't it? A lot of the computer based plots are incredibly dated now (especially the whole concept of Star One, even at the time people must have realised having one place control everything with no back ups would be a really bad idea) but as action adventure most of them do stand up fairly well though.
Except Voice From the Past. No idea what the hell was going on there. Including why, after (the otherwise better than Grief IMO) Croucher conclusively proved he couldn't say rendezvous two episodes earlier, they still had him do a French accent. It should have been Tony Ainley under those bandages.
To be vaguely on topic: Is there a single episode that doesn't have a major role for someone who did Who around the the same time? I spent most of Auron wondering who the hell the one guy was before it clicked he was Captain of Neva in Revenge of the Cybermen. Which means he made a career of playing heads of bases that get infected with plague by camp disco queens.