Let We Forget!
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| Title: | Let We Forget! |
| Creator: | Judith M. Seaman |
| Date(s): | October 1991 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Blake's 7 |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Let We Forget! is a 1991 essay by Judith M. Seaman.
In it, Seaman ferociously defends the character of Kerr Avon.
The Essay
Some weeks ago I was looking through some old magazines, when I came across an episode guide to B7 1st/2nd seasons. I read it and found that the entry for MISSION TO DESTINY ended "...both ships are destroyed thanks to an explosive charge on the airlock planted by Avon." (Fantastic Films, July 1982). Somehow this didn't match my memory of the episode, so I got out my nice new BBC video and watched MISSION again. Sure enough, it was Blake who said, "I rigged a charge on the entry hatch", Blake who nipped off alone on the Ortega telling no one what he was doing. So how had Avon acquired the credit of this wholly unnecessary act of murder?
Thinking about this I remembered a period shortly after the 4th season was first shown here, when virtually every club newsletter I read contained articles and correspondence which assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that Avon had personally murdered virtually every guest in that season - usually shooting them in the back for no reason other than paranoia. In fact if you go through that season Avon killed remarkably few people. His reputation appears to be based on the deaths of Pella, Dr. Plaxton and Blake, at least one of which was pure self-defence.
So why is Avon accused of murders committed by other people, while Blake, who is responsible for any amount of homicide, can still be regarded as a good, moral character who doesn't believe in killing? I suspect it has a lot to do with the way we have been taught to look at fictional characters, and even more with the way that the human mind tends to batch and then pigeon-hole items of information.
Blake is what I would call a 1950's comic strip hero. We know he's the hero because he's top of the cast list. We know he's a good moral character because he makes frequent 'moral' speeches to remind us of the fact. If he reaches a position where all possible choices would be equally morally dubious, he makes no decision at all and relies on the script-writer to get him out. Most important of all, he avoids killing people to whom we have been introduced. This last point is important because people we don't see don't count. Space ships are blips on a screen, like Space Invaders. They aren't recognised as containing men who live, breathe, bleed and die.
Explosions that take place at a distance aren't considered as dismembering living people. It is only when the people have names and faces that we accept them as 'real' and therefore that killing them becomes murder. Blake frequently and publicly refuses to kill Travis. It is the impression this makes that gives Blake his reputation as a man who does not kill. By making a grandstand play out of refusing to kill Travis, Blake whitewashes every other act of murder or genocide he commits. Blake is not a manipulator for nothing.
In contrast to this, Avon commits few killings, but they are of people we know and because of that they make an impact and we remember them. Kerr Avon acquires a label as a killer.
Humans like to label and batch things. If Avon has the label 'killer', then any odd death we can't immediately account for, is likely to be credited to him. If Blake bears the label 'doesn't kill', then his murders are ignored or credited to someone else. Is it important? Possibly. As the series recedes further into the past, memory begins to play tricks. Labels become more important because they help us to remember. "You remember Blake's Seven - the show that did all its exteriors In a chalk pit in Dorset?" Terry Wogan gave us that label. In fact B7 had a tremendous range of locations all over the country, from the tunnels of Goodge Street to the beach at Bamburgh, but it will be remembered for a chalk-pit in Dorset. Too often labels help us to remember generalizations that may be inaccurate - or downright lies. Remember Avon? The one who killed anyone who got In his way. Remember Blake? Soft-hearted chap who hated violence....
Maybe we should try it another way. Remember Blake? The one who killed all those people when he blew up Saurian Major. Remember Avon? The one who launched Meegat's folk to new life and safety. Which was the psychopath and which is the one with the concern for people? Without the labels we may have to remember the facts and acknowledge that judgement is not so easy.
For many of us it was the fact that the characters on B7 could not be so easily pigeon-holed that was the attraction of the series to start with. The new videos are a wonderful opportunity for us to go back to that time, to wipe out the labels we may have been using, often without realizing it, and remember....
Lest we forget - lest we forget!