OK, melodrammatic blogpost title. What are you, perfect?
With the release of two new stories from Magic Bullet/Kaldor City Productions, I was considering doing a proper essay discussing the identity or not of Kaston Iago. Given that both Paul Darrow and Alan Stevens had said he wasn't Avon, the bucketload of evidence to support the fact seemed remarkably... superfluous.
If anyone's interested, the play
Metafiction is a two-hander rambling conversation much in the mold of
The Prisoner where Iago tries to pierce the veil of reality... and any patience of the listener... showing that he really is a very boring windbag when he's not shooting innocent people. The main difference is that Metafiction has some humor in it, though much of it has to be Paul Darrow's drunken, glum performance as he tries to summarize
Blake's 7 and ends up with the conclusion that it was crap. If I were trying to read subtext, I would say Mrssrs Stevens and Moore, realizing how infantile, crude and ultimately pointless Kaldor City was, are trying to retrospectively slag off
Blake's 7 to make themselves feel better.
Certainly, there's no hero worship as they had in
Liberation or even that article about
Weapon. Far from being a politically-sophisticated, well-character-driven story arc,
Metafiction paints a clear picture of a pointless repetitious and morally-bankrupt saga of gunfire, explosions, shoddy science, bad continuity, nihilistic plotting that was all a waste of time. Iago is bored rigid describing the plot of
Blake, for crying out loud. It's the nastiest review of the show I've seen NOT written by Clive James.
Of course, the entire thing is a single punchline. If RTD were in charge, cutting out the flab and speeding up to cut to the chase,
Metafiction could be summarized as...
JUSTINA: So, Iago. Who are you really?
IAGO: You ever see
Blake's 7?
JUSTINA: No.
IAGO: Good. It was shit.
From the first, rather bewildering lines - this is Iago's job interview following the events of
Occam's Razor - it is clear the joke is that Iago is going to say he's Avon. BBC law of some kind means that he has to be extra vague, and just detail his flight from the Federation with a crusader aboard an alien spaceship. The only outright reference is to Gauda Prime (cue a joke that it means "Big Cheese"... never occured to me before or since) and that's it. The revelation that Avon survived the final scene by shooting out the lights and letting the troopers kill each other - which, shamefully, is pretty much my own take on events - surpised me as it contradicted The Logic of Empire. He didn't use a Sea Devil in Dorien's Basement to simply NOT DIE, but LOE's claim he then spent seven years hanging around space bars sulking is true.
Anyway, the joke I mentioned. The fact is, Paul Darrow plays the entire play not as Avon or Iago. He plays it as Zaphod Beeblebrox, stoned and mellow and very defensive. "Hey, we were trying, OK?!?" is the sort of thing he says, while his drunken and very inaccurate description of
Sand is basically Bill Bailey as the sperm whale. It's entertaining, but it never convinces for a microsecond that Iago really could be Avon. He gets 80% of the details wrong, is completely out of character throughout, and most damning of all is clearly taking the piss out of Justina from the word go.
At the end of the play, Justina wearily asks if Kaston Iago is really his name. Iago shrugs and reveals his name is...
...Paul Darrow.
(Actually, it's honestly made funnier by the delivery. It's basically like Iago breaking down and admitting he's NOT a cool psychopath who rapes and murders for fun and profit, he's just pretending and he's rubbish at that. Never has a man revealed his name so miserably before.)
So. The revelation is quite simple. Kaston Iago was bored in an interview and bullshitted a crude program guide to
Blake's 7 which Justina assumed was his real-life experience. Unless we're seriously supposed to think Paul Darrow is/was/will be catapulted into the future and then decide to become a foam-at-the-mouth serial killer on an alien planet using the skills he learned in a BBC Quarry several years ago.
Therefore we assume that Kaldor City occurs in a universe where the
Blake's 7 television series has somehow survived into the far future, and Kaston Iago watched it, thought it was crap, but was amused by the similarities between it and real life.
However, mein comerades, there is an ALTERNATIVE ENDING!
By which I mean the exact same play as a separate download except the final line is Iago calmly revealing his real name is Frank Archer.
Now, I assumed this was some kind of reference to
The Archers and put it down to some crap joke but, actually, the alternative ending makes a hell of a lot of sense if you then heard MB's play
The Time Waster. Again, it's an el-cheapo, three-hander, real-time, locked in a room dialogue. And again, it's better than
The Prisoner.
It's a complicated tale of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimeyness (and I mean
complicated - I don't pretend for a moment that I kept a proper grasp on the various parallel timelines, as I was too busy cheering on Trevor Cooper's "Oh, fuck off!" every time Paul Darrow came up with a bit of pretentious macho wank like "I don't waste time - I WASTE CRIMINALS!!!").
Basically, Frank Archer is a 20th century copper who gets a time machine and uses to rewrite history so criminals are murdered before they can commit such crimes. Alas, he ends up a temporal exile on the verge of insanity and multiple copies of himself flee through history. It's hardly the work of Craig Hinton to suggest one such copper - now a deranged serial killer with an identity crisis - travels into the future, ends up on Kaldor and then, as
Metafiction shows, bluffs his way with knowledge from
Blake's 7 which he had seen on TV.
(For those who want to try and comprehend how
Kaldor City can occur if
Blake's 7 never happened, Steven Moffat himself wrote a Bernice Summerfield story several years ago when she was shocked to discover a BBC television series accurately portraying the acts of a terrorist group in the far future. Terry Nation was fond of the idea he was simply "dramatizing" historical records, as he publically claimed he got all his scripts from a metal cube he found under a tree - very humble as a writer, isn't he?)
This leads me to the thing that bothers me. I quite liked
The Time Waster, except the logic of Frank Archer was... well. A bit dogy. Basically, he wants to use a time machine to solve crimes. Easy enough to do, but he is faced with a "moral dilemma".
He cannot stop a criminal from say, killing someone, because then a crime is not commited. You can't put someone away for murder if he hasn't murdered anyone. And if you put him in for attempted murder, he gets a reduced sentence, gets out and commits another crime.
Frank Archer apparently is such a bleeding heart that he cannot bear the thought of all those people who will either be dead, injured or traumatized.
His
instant solution is to then murder the criminals for crimes they are going to commit.
He thus kills around 26,000 people who hadn't technically done anything wrong but were intending to do so.
Anyone willing to slaughter defenseless people in the tens of thousands doesn't strike me as someone who gives a flying fuck about morality. Frank never considers, for example, using the time machine to
save lives. He prevents crime, but he doesn't, for example, stop anyone boarding the
Titanic (and if the authors are reading, yes, I know there's a reason
why he couldn't travel back that far, but there are plenty of other such disasters he could avoid and prevent). He decides that the only use for time travel is to kill people. He doesn't even try to get the lottery numbers. And while he benefits from these history revisisons, it's clear Frank is in it for the killing crims rather than his inevitable promotions.
Now, I could chalk Frank down as a hypocritical psycho unaware his callous disregard for human life is precisely the quality that he uses to deem other human lives expendable. Except the two coppers who exist, it seems, solely to give Frank someone to retell the story to, never point out the flaw. They note all sorts of temporal paradox, trickery and plot holes like me reviewing a sparacus story on crack (btw, his latest effort is, for him, surprisingly good - he's actually learned what "past tense" is, for example).
But they never say to Frank "why don't you go back in time, find what MADE the criminal want to commit the crime, and then fix it?" To put it another way, when Kryten was asked if he'd go back in time, find the baby Adolf Hitler and then kill the baby and thus prevent the horrors of the Nazis.
Kryten calmly replied, "No. But I would be prepared to go back in time, find baby Adolf Hitler and give him a damn good talking to!"
And, while I'm not naive enough to say this would be a universal solution, it's an idea, isn't it?
It's not as if Frank would be unable to do it. He can make it so he rules a planetary mafia of assassins. Why not rule a planetary mafia of psychiatrists, hunt down each criminal and cure him? Or at least try?
In
Dirty Harry, a similar sort of problem faces Clint Eastwood. He can let a legally-innocent man walk and thus cause horrible injury, or break the law with a pre-emptive strike. Clint shoots the crazy fucker dead, but chucks away his badge, clearly unable to get out of the grey area - he has saved lives but also taken them. Were it Frank Archer he would have probably shot the bloke and all his hostages because at least ONE of those busload of children was going to grow up to be a criminal.
Why, therefore, is murder the first resort in so many Alan Stevens/Fiona Moore stories?
Take Kaldor City, the world of psychopaths who spend all day trying to kill each other. Why? Why is life so cheap? Why, if 80 per cent of the population live in the Sewerpits as savages of no use to anyone - the robots do all the work, after all - why don't the elite just gas all the peasants? Carnell, puppeteer extraordinaire, can't think of any plans that don't involve murdering people. Uvanov hates Landerchild, but unlike seemingly everyone else on the planet, doesn't get Iago to shoot him. It's not even as if Iago's gun-sprees do any damn good, is it? Whatever happens at the end of
Checkmate, Iago shooting people is not the answer. What good occurs from people killing each other?
It also makes
Robots of Death impossible to take seriously as a prequel. Why? Because, simply, people give a damn about each other. Murder is a crime, a serious crime that provokes anger, hatred, grief, fear. Borg is a suspect because he's aggressive, with a hair-trigger temper. So why hasn't he murdered the whole crew by now? Robots do all the hard work and he's rich enough to get away with it. The answer is: BECAUSE HE'S NOT A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH! Like Uvanov - he reveals his hatred of the Founding Families wasn't simply down to social insecurity, but because he was framed as a negligent boss by the old boys' network when one of their number commited suicide out of robophobia. "I tried to save him," he says sadly, cradling Poul.
This is, apparently, the same nutter who orders Stalinist purges of close friends. For the hell of it.
And, oddly enough, Magic Bullet Productions have restaged
Robots of Death - now with all the stupid
Doctor Who stuff removed and pure Kaldor City removed. Kaston Iago and Blayes travel through time to the Sandminer for the original murders and... shoot people. Because they're psychopaths! And human life doesn't matter!
Reviews for the
performances are, I think it fair to say, mixed - particularly the revised ending to the play where Taren Capel turns into the Fendahl and kills everyone.
The play, however, is not a total success, and where it falls is largely where it deviates from Boucher’s original concept. On TV the Doctor had to investigate the mystery, then improvise an ingenious solution when Taren Capel was revealed. Here, Iago and Bleyes are aware of Capel’s presence from the start, and the story concludes in an unsubtle hail of plasma bullets. Worse, the last few minutes unveil another, previously unhinted-at force behind the events; it’s the equivalent of Hercule Poirot gathering all the suspects together in the library, only to reveal the killer is from an entirely unrelated Miss Marple story before spraying the room with a machine gun. The play itself has been made strange and the ending unsatisfying.
This leads me back to
Metafiction, I suppose and the strange difference between how
Blake's 7 is seen. Apparently human life is totally worthless. Iago has no interest in Avon's dead crew, or Blake, or the millions that died in the Galactic War or all the planets that blew up. Killing people is, as Jim Moriarty might have said, is what people are, apparently for. Frank Archer wants a world with people dead rather than people alive. The Fendahl is death and kills every living thing.
Yet I think of
Headhunter. In
Metafiction, Iago protests that this was the only time they ever tried anything beyond selfish and violent destruction of innocent lives. And, of course, the most important thing is that everyone was so stupid to mistake a robot with a severed head on its shoulders for a living scientist.
I only remember the scene where Avon tries to tell Vena that his crew might have killed her boyfriend. The shocked, greiving Vena shouts that her criminals are murderers.
And that pisses Avon the fuck off.
Having made a genuine effort to be kind and sensitive, Avon snaps, "Try not to be stupid! We needed him alive - his death serves no purpose for us!" The A-Man is unsettled and upset at that. True, he and his pals have killed a lot of people, but the idea he kills for kicks - for
fun - disgusts Avon. Killing people is a serious matter and one that Avon never takes lightly. Shooting down a Federation guard in self-defense is one thing. The hoops Avon went through justifying going after Shrinker showed he understood Cally's arguments against and had clearly thought of them himself. And that's surely a huge, important difference between Avon, Iago and Archer.
If I may spoiler, in an upcoming B7 episode in Season E, Avon has to defend himself for killing Blake.
He holds himself up quite well in court but then he is asked a question he cannot answer.
How did shooting Blake help?
What good was caused by doing that? Even if he had betrayed Avon, what was the benefit of killing him? Blake didn't live long enough to suffer any kind of punishment or remorse. It didn't improve the Scorpio crew's chances in the silo - whereas, say, taking Blake hostage could have saved their lives. Even the most brutal viewpoint would be Avon wasted three bullets on an unarmed man that could have been used on armed troopers.
Now, I'm not saying ANY of that was occuring to Avon when he pulled the trigger. That's the whole nature of a Greek tragedy, circumstances painted Avon into that corner where all he could do was the wrong thing. My point is that it was the wrong thing.
In the episode, Avon has to confess that killing Blake achieved nothing.
Kaston Iago, in similar circumstances, would not even
understand the the question.
And, from their writings, I'm not sure the minds behind Magic Bullet would either.
