Chris Boucher

Name:	Chris Boucher
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Occupation:	basketball player
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Chris Boucher is a Canadian professional basketball player.

Boucher's Comments About Blake's 7's Fourth Season

From a 1989 interview with Boucher:

Chris Boucher: Terry had gone, yes. He was sitting by the pool, as I understand it, making very vast amounts of money and getting very brown, and becoming sort of "American." I don't hold it against him!

Joe Nazzaro: Anyway, it was now you and Vere Lorrimer who were responsible for the direction die show would take in its fourth season.

Chris: It was a strange time, actually, because it had been pretty much decided that it was the end* that it wasn’t going to go on. The fourth series was sort of an afterthought There was a sort of most series do seem to have a given life, and thiee series is just about as far as they go energetically. After that a fourth series is usually something of an afterthought. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t unless of course you’re working on a soap, or, as I’ve been instructed to call them, "unfolding narrative dramas." It doesn’t seem to have a life beyond three, and you usually go for something different in the fourth series. Really, it was a new start but I don’t think [the] fourth series worked. It had some things that worked quite nicely and other things that didn’t but it was a new start end in order to judge the fourth series, you really had to go on to a fifth or a sixth to see where it went. I killed Father Christmas; I had no idea! The last episode of Blake’s 7 was not intended to be die last episode. I wouldn’t have written it like that if I’d known. It was just supposed to be another cliffhanger, and they put it out during Christmas week, and they said, "And now for the last episode of Blake's 7. My kids looked at me in total amazement: 'They’re not really dead." "Yes they are, look at them!” They only person who was dead in that episode was Blake. He [Gareth Thomas] came to me and Vere and said that he would do one episode in die series, and he said to me, "Make sure I’m dead," so I did.

Joe: What is the official Chris Boucher explanation for what happened in the final episode?

Chris: There are about four, all of which cost money.

Joe: Let’s put it another way: If you were writing the first episode of the fifth season, how would it start?.

Chris: Well, basically, what happened was the Avon killed Blake, as he would do. Again, it seemed to me the ultimate irony that he hadn’t betrayed them. You kill the thing you love, and it seemed to me, potentially, a great emotional moment Again, pretentious crap; rationalizing after the fact, what you end up with is pretentious crap, but it seemed to me a decent enough notion. Anyway, Avon kills Blake, everyone else was stunned (unless, of course, they didn’t want to do it anymore, in which case the stuff the Federation troops were using killed them), nobody was dead except Blake.

Joe: So it was just circumstances being what they were ...

Chris: I didn’t have the chance, and nobody had the chance to explain what happened. It was the shootout at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or The Wild Bunch.

Joe: It’s a very depressing ending.

Chris: It is, but it wasn’t intended to be. What it was intended to do was to have people sitting there and going, "How the hell are they going to get out of that?"

Interviews

• "Writing for the Renegades: An Interview with Chris Boucher" by Joe Nazzaro (Freedom City Gazette #6 (1989)
• Chris Boucher Interview, ^{Archived version} by Alan Stevens and Anthony Brown at Haldor City (1992)