For Fuck's Sake Nyder!!

While taking a break to let my brain heal from the first half of B7: Rebel, I stumbled across the blogspot of Nyder's Takeaway, AKA Alan "Nine Divinities" Stevens and realized the shocking truth. Lawrence Miles for all his infantile whining and self-pity behavior... is actually funny. Never let it be said I didn't laugh at his insults and insane comparisons, no matter how often I disagree with them. Indeed, my main annoyance at his Moffat Mathematics is that it's not funny, not that it pathetically hurls abuse at Moffat for reusing story ideas he himself wrote.

Nyder's latest sickening forray into Blake's 7 was the on-second-thoughts-slit-me-open-and-make-baloon-animals-out-of-my-innards awful comedy When Blake Met Travis. Exactly WHY anyone thinks getting two respected actors to get each other's names wrong (HAH! Trevor, get it! HAHAH! That's so funny when it was a one-off gag in The Mark of Kane ten years ago! Let's have the gag don't seventeen times on stage! It doesn't get old!) as Travis recites all the pet theories AS and FM have about the cast of characters (Blake psychopath, Jenna hypocrite, Avon psychopath, Vila coward, Gan Jack the Ripper) as if a guy who got up one morning and said, "I think I'll wipe out humanity" is some kind of moral beacon.

But no, Nyder is capable of much worse as he takes to 'rewriting song lyrics with a few words changed to make fun of someone'!

Hang on, EC, protests one of my miserable invisible friends, you do nought else! Why, you've done one for every PMG BF since The Twice-A-Night Kingdom!

Get back in my subconscious before I hit you, invisible friend! Actually, that is an interesting point. For a start, that was a joke that got out of hand. Apparently, the McGann theme music changed to a completely different arrangement for The Twilight Kingdom and so my joke that I was replacing this for a random song until they brought the old melody back. But they never did. There won't be any tunes for McGann's second BBC7 season since they've changed that tune. Happy now?

Not really.

Tough. But, my song spoofs are always part of something greater. I don't blogpost the lyrics with

I've written a song about it. Do you remember the Buffy musical episode? Well, here's one of the songs with the lyrics slightly adjusted.

And then slag off RTD for "beyond the grave" - Alan, baby, GET OVER IT! - do I? After all his bitching at RTD's complete lack of writing ability and realistic dialogue, what does Nyder do? He copies Joss Whedon. Blatantly. How fucking pathetic is that? I've seen David Brent with more self respect you slag.

But let's just check out one particular post - Recycling Watch Special. Sweet Onion Chutney, Nyder, if there's anything sadder than Ben Chatham discussion, it's writing long, long, long, long lists of where you've seen stuff before. Make no doubt, if I do that about one of his oh-so-wonderful Kaldor City reviews, he'd slit my throat. And get my name wrong. Because he's SO funny.

I've been relistening to "The Daleks' Master Plan" lately, and, well, blow me down if it isn't a stealth pilot for Terry Nation's later space opera, Blake's 7.

Already Nyder is lying through his teeth. Anyone suffering through this blog will know I've been arguing this point for a while now. He first flagged up the similarities betwixt the two in an article published "The Daleks' Masterplan: An Analysis" in 2001. Where he said

Nation would develop the themes of fascism and human nature explored in "Master Plan" further in his pessimistic take on space opera, Blake's 7. There are casual resemblances between Blake's 7 and "Master Plan", in the references to pursuit ships, prison planets and criminal thugs taking young women hostage. More directly, scenes such as the one in which Roald makes fun of Chen's speech, but does not question its message, echoes similar scenes in Blake's 7, in which the horror of totalitarianism is revealed to be the acquiescence of ordinary citizens to its demands. There is also the overarching question in both, of whether the series' protagonists are really any more heroic than their villains; Bret Vyon, who allies himself with the Doctor and Steven, nonetheless is a ruthless figure who has no compunction in gunning down his friend for an apparent betrayal. Daxtar, too, dies before we discover if he was indeed a traitor or simply a dupe of the regime; in typical Nation fashion, we never learn whether there is a massive conspiracy or, more likely, that loyalty to a corrupt system causes the unfolding of tragic events. The seeds of Nation's later work can thus be seen in "Master Plan".

A neat trick since he wrote less of Masterplan than that entire paragraph. Is this recyclingwatch admitting that Nation was stealing someone else's idea and reusing it, since that is how RTD suffers the the same experience?

In any case, this "Oh, wow, I just noticed..." is demonstrably complete shit. It's a blog, Nyder. A blog where the comments are not allowed. Who in the name of the sewerpits are you trying to impress and or fool?

Recycled elements include:-

Ahem? Surely if the pilot of Blake's 7 were to be recycled from something, that something would involve a group of spacemen left to become farmers on a barren planet? As was the original starting point of the series - which ended up being left in one episode, Cygnus Alpha and then finally got its own show, Survivors.

Political official who's secretly making deals with aliens to betray the human race

Except Chris Boucher wrote Star One. Not Terry Nation. And Travis was a wanted criminal, not a political official. He was hardly being secretive as the aliens immediately go, "Yo, Travis in da house! Who's your bitch?"

Interplanetary federation of humans, who don't seem to socialise with aliens much-

Except that the Solar System is not a federation. And the Federation was shown on several occasions to be quite social with various aliens - they obviously chatted with the Andromedans in the distant past, and the Auronar and those aliens mentioned in Breakdown are the antisocial ones. The Federation's main drive to maintain order in its territories, rather than killing all aliens. If that were so, why did they never smear Blake with "He hangs around with ALIENS! He's EVIL!"?

Fascist government with black uniforms and kinky boots

Wow. Cause no one else ever had the evil guys wear black. The fact the uniforms were purple is ignored too.

People with short, pithy names

...is that it? Is that all you've got?

People named Sara

Oh my god! Because there was a character named Sara in one episode of B7 who died and was never mentioned again! It all fits! And "people"? There's one in each you daft tit!

Teleport system (which works, but isn't in wide circulation)

Again, that's feeble. Did B7 also rip of The Seeds of Death? The Ark in Space? You don't think maybe Star Trek might have had an ever-so-slight influence?

Prison planet, with criminals intent on hijacking any ship foolish enough to stop by

Remove "planet" from that sentence and you have one of the biggest cliche plots ever. The fact that the only time Terry Nation tried that particular plot, it wasn't a criminal intend on hijacking the ship that arrived by accident, it was an insane cult leader intending to use the ship that stopped there deliberately to spread the religion. He didn't want to leave the planet at all.

Pursuit ships (here, they belong to the Daleks)

And are never seen, never fire plasma bolts, are not flown by mutoids... all you've got is the word "pursuit", really. Not much.

Sequence in which a deadly weapon is tested by locking someone in a room with it and watching the results through a glass screen

So Curse of Fenric, The Liesure Hive and Ambassadors... of DEATH were all ripping off this too? And, why the hell is this relevent? Yes, I agree it's a bit similar to twenty-three seconds of one episode. It's not a crucial part of Blake's 7, is it?

Officers of the abovementioned fascist government who change sides after realising what a crock fascism is

Yet somehow Tarrant never bursts into tears and claims he shot his own brother and has converted to the side of freedom. Nor does Travis try to save the galaxy from aliens. Shrinker also never actually became a sympathetic character whose death was enough to end a whole episode. Oddly enough, all these examples occur in the middle of the show, and not the stuff you'd think they'd rip off right away.

Like Mezin in Rebel.

Jungle planets

Fuck off. Jungle planets appeared in Pathfinders to fucking Venus. Note that in its first series there is only one jungle mentioned - by Cally, standing in the middle of a quarry. The rests are the New Forest.

Carnivorous/quasi-sentient plant life

Again, in the same SINGLE episode, Blake mentions totally randomly that the plants can think and this is never mentioned again. Since Nation wrote a whole EPISODE about quasi-sentient plant life for The Keys of Marinus, why isn't The Dalek Masterplan noting him recycling his own work?

Nation also recycled the invisible-aliens idea later, but unfortunately that was in "Planet of the Daleks" (which also features a group of space people squabbling as they are marooned on a jungle planet infested with Daleks), so no go.

...eh? "So No Go"? What is that, Judoon? Are you admitting that the stuff Terry Nation ripped off was actually his own work from a different story and that blogspot is a complete waste of my infinitessimally valuable time? Have you actually read Terry Nation's Dalek Annuals? THAT is Blake's 7. Sarcastic AIs, amoral rebel leaders, space battles, alien technology, not to mention total bastards. Indeed, Nation actually rewrote The Seeds of Destruction (where Daleks go after a special growth hormone for GM food) into The Sima Experiment (where Blake suffers the aftereffects of the Federation creating a special growth hormone for GM food).

Nyder, I can do no better than to quote you yourself

What is this shite now? It's doesn't mean a thing!

But I'm sure a comedic genius of your standing will find the funny side.

Preferably in silence.