I’ve had the itch to rewatch Blake’s 7 recently. It’s one of my favorite science fiction series, probably my favorite. If you know of it you know that the sets and props are laughable, the scripts are strong and performances stronger. It’s a tale of revolutionaries and renegades against a monolithic star federation/empire, not as leaders of a unified alliance or beneficiaries of prophecy but as organizers, adventurers and, yes, terrorists. Blake and Avon are two of my favorite leads ever and their brilliant tension begins even from the first moment they meet.
I decided to do something slightly atypical with my watch-through. I’m not gonna do it episode by episode, instead I’ll pick up some topics that crop up and riff a little about them. It might go anywhere from politics to the structure of fiction. Needless to say, spoilers ahead.
Episode 1 “The Way Back” & Episode 2 “Space Fall”
In the opening stanzas of the Blake’s 7 saga, we see the story of how Blake and his crew come upon their ship Liberator. The first episode deals with who Blake is, overcoming memory erasures and getting locked onto the prison barge. The second takes us through that journey and Blake’s eventual escape onto the fantastic new ship. As an aside I think both episodes are interesting in that they’re sort of self-contained teleplays whose main characters aren’t Blake or any of the crew. In the first it’s Tel Varon, the intrepid defense attorney doomed by his own inquisitiveness. In the second it’s Leylan, who I’m calling ‘the good captain’.
Throughout the episode, as the situation progressions from bad to worse to ridiculous, Leylan is the steadying hand of his ship. He always acts reasonably and appears to have an old sort of wisdom that demands all life be respected. We’re invited to think that he’s really a good person. After all, he shows remorse when prisoners are killed during their mutiny. He cautions Raiker and others against using too much force. He shows concern for his crew. These are all traits of a good man, we think. When he says firmly that he will report everything, and he follows through on that promise, the idea is that he’s done all that he can do.
At best, though, I can only call Laylan a decent man, and then only in a logically negative way. It is true that he does not do anything to purposefully harm others. It is true that he employs persuasion to get those under his supervision to do as he’d like. It’s not true that he does anything positive to resolve the situation. In fact, Laylan almost aggressively does nothing. He’s tired. He’s used to things going the right way. When the Liberator makes its miraculous appearance he is seduced by the idea of it but only at Raiker’s insistence; that is, the insistence of a man whose murderous ruthlessness supposedly disgusted Laylan. If we measure goodness by his humanity I can give him points for concern but take away triple that for standing by while crew and prisoners were killed. If we measure goodness by his ability to run his ship there are the faults of his inability to control the mutiny on his own terms, resistance at disciplining gross excess by his crew, and the escape of prisoners under his supervision. It can be said that circumstances overwhelmed him. That’s understandable. That doesn’t mean I can still call him good.
This archetype is common in fiction because it’s common in us. I think it’s becoming more common as we see ‘quality’ in fiction being equated with ‘grit’, this false sense of complexity that comes from touching a roughened surface. We don’t need this person to be totally vindicated, that would be unrealistic. Treatment in a sympathetic way is usually enough. I didn’t finish Breaking Bad (I watched until about season 3) but Walter White reminded me of this sort of character played out to a particular end. Not intending on doing anything harmful, generally altruistic, pushed along certain currents. Grizzled veteran characters, of wars or adventure or some more pedestrian life, loom large as ‘the real heroes’ as we eschew flash and glam. I feel the question we rarely ask is why we accept such an outcome.
It’s clear that Laylan needed to act. Originally I was going to write ‘simply’ but it is in truth not a simple prospect. That isn’t the point. The point is that the moment needed action. First, the standoff in the computer room. Raiker had the action that Laylan did not and it was the morally wrong choice. From here Laylan had a choice to act, to order the arrest of Raiker, but he didn’t. Again and again he refuses, he stays neutral, he hopes that things will resolve. He has seen enough to know that things can go either way but in the end he’s caused a total calamity. Yet somehow I get the feeling that were Laylan’s story followed through he might be investigated, slightly rebuked, and then be captaining a ship again within a year. After all, Laylan didn’t do anything wrong, he was a dependable runner of the ship, and that’s all that matters.
Why can’t we as a society make it imperative upon ourselves to act in such a situation? We think for some reason that because a man wears a uniform, perhaps the same one as us, that he must be on our side. Raiker showed himself to be a threat to anyone on board who refused his way of seeing things. An abuser does not limit that abuse to ‘prescribed’ victims; when confident enough they’ll identify their own targets. If Laylan’s primary concern was crew safety, on the abuses alone Raiker should have been locked up. ‘But he’s part of the crew’, they say, forgetting how he’s hissed and brooded, manipulated the obvious intentions of his captain, gloried in needless killing. ‘Without him it’ll be tougher to run the ship.’ And keeping Raiker undisciplined directly led to the deaths of three crew (including himself) in a boarding expedition, at every step running counter to Laylan’s judgment but finally given his sanction. But why did he give his sanction? Why not refuse? Or otherwise, why not take charge? Why do we find the defeatism of Ed Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men or Red from The Shawshank Redemption compelling, as if they’ve figured something important out about the world?
We need to find out how to limit that urge. We cannot find defeatism profound and interesting for its own sake. We cannot call retaining decent behavior in the face of exceptional circumstances ‘being good’. That’s the least we should expect. It’s tempting to want Laylan to be good because that says something praiseworthy about ‘doing your job’ in the prosaic sense. But he isn’t. He is ultimately part of the problem which produces people like Raiker. Passive, yes, but integral. Whatever goodness we can ascribe to the captain — and undoubtedly everyone, even Blake, views Laylan as ‘good’ — also shields those under him.
You can’t allow a man like Laylan to run a ship if the idea is to run it properly, without indulgence or criminality. He doesn’t have the strength or resolve to follow his convictions. However good his intentions may be, he will never be a good man. That raises the question: is there room in the world for those who are just decent? Of course. But for all of us let us ask more and, for those of us who lead us and who care for us, let us demand better.
