Animals - not a turkey
As a perennial patron of lost causes (voting Labour in the 1992 election, voting Conservative in the 1997 election, supporting Everton...), writing a defence of Animals comes as naturally as breathing. Let me say it once and for all: Animals is not the worst episode of Blake’s 7.
At Deliverance, I ‘came out’ as an Animalite. People took little steps away from me, and nodded politely in a way that suggested that they would now like to be in another room, please. What is it about this fairly innocuous 50 minutes of television that has the whole of B7 fandom united? We argue constantly about everything else: was Avon mad or stressed? Was Blake fanatical or fighting for a just cause? Was Gan a crap character or a very crap character? Yet Animals gets an emphatic and uniform no-no.
It would be easy to make a defence of Animals by saying: 'It's not the worst episode of Blake's 7 because X is.' But I'd almost certainly mention someone's favourite episode. If I said Warlord, someone would rightly point out that it has some great Soolin moments (and who am I to deny Soolin moments..?); if I said The Harvest of Kairos, someone would say, 'But the bit with the sopron is a laugh!' and they'd be quite right. Playing tit-for-tat becomes somewhat dull, and I've done it elsewhere on this site.
So I'm going to outline some of the main complaints about Animals. I'll try to answer some of them, I may well agree with others. Then I'll mention some of things which I find enjoyable about Animals. Finally, I'll try to explain what I think is happening when B7 fans, en masse, repeatedly say, 'Animals is the worst episode of Blake's 7.'
What are the main complaints about Animals?
1. 'Og is a crap monster.' Yes, you're right. Og looks ridiculous. If I were genetically modifying humans to send them in highly radioactive areas, I'm sure the first feature I'd want to include is horns. But monsters on Blake's 7 are never any good. Look at the Kairopan spider, or the Links, or the Phibians, or... well, you get the picture. Does anyone out there actually watch B7 for the monsters? Of course you don't. You wouldn't be a fan of the series if this was your prime consideration. To single out Animals for failing on this count is cheating: you have to mention all the other times B7 singularly fails to scare in this department as well.
2. 'The bit at the end where the spaceship blasts off above their heads is stupid.' A subset of the previous complaint. Complaining about the special effects in Blake's 7 is like complaining that the animation on South Park is crude. This is not the point.
3. 'Animals was not written for Dayna but for Cally.' There are several examples of this happening in B7. I am pretty convinced that the reason there is so much in the way of reference to 'Tarrant's crew' and 'Tarrant's ship' in The Harvest of Kairos is that it was originally written with Blake in mind. (I'm happy to stand corrected if anyone can point out a production anecdote which refutes this.) Or else it was written with the earlier conception of Tarrant as a much older man. In addition, I am convinced that the reason Soolin's grey costume with the neck band is such a bloody awful fit is that it was originally made for Cally. But this could just be a case of handbags. The point is that, once again, Animals is rated badly when there other examples of the same fault.
4. 'Justin is a dirty old man.' This is a tricky one, and you can go either way. Neil Faulkner's Sevencyclopaedia states:
'Justin was a friend of Hal Mellanby, and had visited Sarran to tutor Dayna. Since the research on Bucol-2 had started six years before the War, and Dayna had been on Sarran for twenty years when the war started, leaving Earth as a small child, she could not have been older than her mid-teens when Justin taught her.'
Well, if you take Dayna to be a two-year old when she left Earth (she states in Aftermath that she left Earth 'as a baby'), she would have been sixteen when Justin left Sarran, which is legal in the UK, at any rate. However, it's unclear whether Justin went to Bucol-2 as soon as the research base was started. He could have been on Sarran for longer. Is it likely that he would go straight from the Mellanbies (wanted by the Federation) to heading up a Federation research base? Of course, this works the other way, in that it could put his visit to Sarran even earlier, which starts to become a bit icky. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that Justin and Dayna actually got up to anything on Sarran. Justin speaks of Dayna's hopes for a 'young love resurrected', which implies that a substantial part of the romance was on Dayna's side - a teenage crush. There's no equivalent line on his side: 'Crikey, Dayna, I've really missed all that underage, underwater hanky-panky!'
The facts can go either way. The main problem, of course, is that the script was written for the older character of Cally, and the ramifications of switching it to Dayna just weren't thought through. It's then becomes a question of choice. If you want to shrug and go, 'Bloody production problems,' you can. If you want Justin to be the Second Calendar's Humbert Humbert - then that's your choice.
5. 'Animals is just a rehash of The Web.' And of all the episodes you could choose to remake, why the hell choose The Web? I can see where the similarities lie: the isolated research base, the genetically modified creatures. However, in Animals, it is a Federation research programme, there is no link to Auron history, and there are the extensive aversion therapy scenes. Animals has much more in common with the 'scientist of the week' theme of early season four than with that season one classic.
6. 'I don't believe Dayna would have been broken by Servalan in anything less than five years. The moment Dayna was let out of restraints, she would be ripping Servalan's throat out with her bare hands if that's all she had.' [This was a point raised on the mailing list - I give the exchange in full.]
There are two points to answer here. Firstly, the characterization of Dayna and, secondly, the nature of interrogation in the Federation.
Dayna is badly done by throughout the show. One of the examples which I find most annoying is in one of my favourite episodes, 'Sarcophagus', where we suddenly see Dayna playing a musical instrument as her 'character trait'. So I agree that as a general rule, Dayna suffers from deeply poor characterization. However, I don't agree that having her break quickly is necessarily a result of this poor characterization. Any interrogator will tell you that it's strong emotions which are easiest to manipulate - they're our weak point, because they are the outward expression of the things we care most about. Dayna's driving emotion was hate: this is exactly the sort of thing an interrogator would latch onto and manipulate. (The key to getting people to do what you want is to have them doing something which is entirely within character.) A combination of the right sort of drugs would *soon* have Dayna quite impressively disorientated as to who exactly she needed to carry out her revenge on. The effect didn't have to be long-lasting: enough to get her to focus on all that hate and her mission, to reveal Justin's location.
It's unclear in the episode, I think, how long the 'aversion therapy' sessions take, but I agree that the suggestion is that it's only a few hours. I agree that this is too short. But I think a couple of days would be enough. I don't know if this falls within the scope of the episode. What it would involve is heightening someone's characteristics, using drugs, and leaving them capable of performing quite a simple action on your behalf. I suspect that the reason they took so long over Blake, in comparison, was all the personality restructuring. I don't think it would have taken all that long to 'break' him at all: not a comment on Blake's strength of character, more a comment on just how successful these people can be when they really put their mind to it.
Incidentally, I understand that quite a bit of material was cut from the interrogation scenes between Servalan and Dayna because the episode was over-running, which is a shame.
'Nope, Una. The amount of drugs needed to get her disoriented and keep her disoriented (because unless you do build a background, when the drugs are no longer affecting her obvious behavior, she will begin to remember who she hates) would leave her unable to carry out much in the way of intelligent behavior. And she not only has the conditioned hate for her former love, but actually is in control of herself enough to suppress the desire to kill him before asking the questions she is supposed to. Or do I remember incorrectly?'
Not at all. I guess a problem here is that I don't know enough about pharmacology to say, 'Well, such and such a drug can have exactly these effects,' or indeed if such a drug exists. All I can say is, 'Well, if I were a military dictatorship not noted for its human rights record, operating in an SF setting, then I would want to have amongst my many tools a cocktail of drugs which would rapidly enable me to have people carry out my wishes, without impairing their ability to perform such tasks.'
'A few hours is enough to get someone to give in to the current pain and confusion and give information. But I doubt it is enough to get someone to rewrite their allegiances, even with Federation technology.'
But that's the basic problem - we don't know much about Federation technology/pharmacology. Although we do know that 1. they have developed drugs which are effective enough to suppress people's rebellious impulses without interfering with their ability to operate higher mental faculties (all those people on Earth doing jobs like Avon's); and 2. they're good at breaking people.
'And speaking of Federation techniques, what we saw being used on Dayna wouldn't be enough to convince me to kick a cat. The disorienting sonic impulses being used on Blake are at least intriguing in terms of futuristic means of reaching the mind.'
I thought that was interesting, and it made really powerful television. But there are probably cheaper ways of going about screwing about with someone's mind. The bits I like most are the interchanges between Havant and Blake: all those disorientating head-to-heads.
[Thanks to HK for her superb challenges and responses on this question, and permission to include her correspondence - and I know I haven't convinced you yet!]
What's good in Animals?
What is there that's defensible about Animals?. There are a number of things which are worthwhile. Perhaps best of all are the wonderful scenes between Jackie Pearce and Kevin Stoney, as Ardus. Stoney is as terrific as ever - I love his moment of realization, quickly masked. Pearce is pensive, scheming, and as menacing as ever. Once again, she takes advantage of a blind man without a moment's flicker. Secondly, I like the information that we're given about the war: it's one of the few occasions in the fourth season where there's some attempt at consistency between this season and events which took place in earlier ones. Sometimes, watching the fourth season, you get the feeling that the whole of the earlier three seasons didn't happen at all. Finally, Dayna at last gets an episode to herself (her first since her appearance in Aftermath, unless you count her bits in Deathwatch - but Deathwatch is such an ensemble piece that it's not really anyone's episode in particular). It's just a shame that the most woefully under-used character in the entire show has to inherit an episode, rather than getting one which was written for her. But that's a failing of the season as a whole, rather than the episode in particular.
Why do we hate Animals?
By no stretch of the imagination is Animals the best episode of Blake's 7. But I don't believe it's the worst. Animals' biggest crime is that it's slightly dull and the dialogue is occasionally turgid. Watching it again to write this little piece, I found myself irritated by the constant interchanges of: 'Yes, you are, 'No, I'm not', 'Yes, you are,' between Dayna and Justin and then, later, the scorching repartee of: 'Yes, you will,' 'No, I won't,' Yes, you will,' between Servalan and Dayna. Not exactly Pulitzer material, I'll agree. But it simply doesn't compare to the toss churned out in your average Ben Steed episode (and here I point particularly to Power). There are also, I'll agree, no particularly 'grand' moments: those brief, shining jewels in the programme where all has become right with the world because Chris Boucher has finally got his hands on the script.
I think Animals has become the scapegoat for what we, as fans, don't like to see in our favourite show. We baulk at inconsistency across the series, we shudder at cruddy monsters, we get irritated by the necessities of production intruding on the narrative. Other episodes have these elements in spades: there's inconsistency between Countdown and Rumours (and, while we're at it, is it five or fifty million credits, anyway?!?); dodgy monsters can be found starting with The Web, taking in the spider from Harvest of Kairos and winding up with Links from Terminal (to name but a few); BBC el cheapo production values are the main bugbear of the entire series - my particular favourites include the leg-shots of 'not Stephen Greif' in Deliverance and the cardboard cut-out Liberators that strike terror throughout the first couple of seasons. Possibly the most stunning example of production intruding on the narrative is the fact that Travis transmutes between seasons from RADA rake to cockney thug - and yet none of us bat an eyelid! I spy double standards at work...
I think that we have settled on Animals as our personification of the dissatisfaction we feel with failings which span the whole series, allowing us to salvage other episodes and feel affection towards them. At the end of the day, the episode really isn't that bad.
So go on, give Animals another try. Watch it with an open mind, and try to forget its reputation. You never know, you might enjoy it. In the meantime, pass me that betting slip. I'm off to put fifty quid on Jimmy White for next year's World Snooker Championship…
Josette Simon gives her first reaction to the script.