(Most of this is accurate, but it does include some common assumptions that are not strictly canonical.)
As an Alpha grade engineer, Blake was accorded every privilege
of education. Unfortunately for the the government his position
allowed him to see things that caused him to doubt that the
Federation was as benign as he had been brought up to believe.
Eventually he joined the Freedom Party an underground resistance
movement, however the group was betrayed and he was captured - but not before
seeing most of his friends and collegues massacred by Travis.
The Federation subjected him to show trial, and then
a series of brainwashing techniques which rendered him compliant and erased any
trace of his previous life as a freedom fighter. Blake was now the perfect
citizen and was allowed to go free as an example to others, the Federation knew
that if they killed him he would become a martyr and the resistance would rise
again.As the series begins we see him being reintroduced to the Freedom Party cell in his city and being told the truth about his past life. Despite being initially unbelieving Blake starts to suffer flashbacks which grow stronger when he sees the cell being betrayed and murdered, exactly as his own had been. On his return to the city, he is arrested once more, and in short order, the Federation frame him with child-abuse charges to discredit him, and after a second show trial he is sent to Cygnus Alpha.
Initially Blake was an idealistic leader dedicated to opposing the Federation, however his goal of destroying it starts to dominate his life, and leads to his decision to destroy Star One, the central computer which controls all of the planets in the Federation. He comes to believe that the massive loss of life and inevitable civil war that would ensue are acceptable risks to be taken. Despite the salutory lesson of Gan's death, Blake crosses the invisible line from freedom fighter to terrorist, and pays the ultimate price. When last we see him, he has become more pragmatic, posing as a bounty hunter in order to recruit more people for his new anti-Federation group. He has lost the ability to determine who can be trusted and who cannot.
His own end, at the hands of Avon, is the result of a tragic misreading of Avon's personality, which has destablised in the time they spent apart.
Vila is a habitual thief, he can no more help stealing things
than he can stop breathing. He has spent the majority of his life in and out of
correctional facilities, where he has 'had his brain fixed by the best in the
business' to no avail. This, and his uncanny ability to get into places that
are locked, results in him being put on the ship to Cygnus Alpha.Vila is not a coward, he is just very, very careful. Indeed he is occasionally seen to do do extremely brave things -for instance in "Rescue", he tries to save Cally from the damaged base complex on Terminal just as it is about to explode. In "City At The Edge Of The world" he doesn't run away from the clearly insane Bayban, and is rewarded by finding the secret of the city (and by Kerril). Unfortunately bravery is his undoing; after killing the Federation spy Arlen, he is himself killed during the climactic shoot out.
Vila and Avon became a kind of double act, from exchanging insults: Vila:"I've got this shocking pain right behind the eyes!" Avon:"Have you considered amputation?", to sharing a scam in "Gambit" where they use a minimised Orac to break the bank at the casino in Freedom City. This relationship is changed in "Orbit" when Avon realises that his survival depends on throwing Vila out of an airlock, fortunately Vila realises this too and hides. After this there is no trust any more and Vila begins to look more and more miserable.
Vila's survival instinct clearly serves him well, he is the only character to appear in every episode of Blake's 7.
The 'gentle giant' of the series, Gan had been sent to Cygnus Alpha for killing
a Federation officer who was taking advantage of his wife's state of drugged
compliance. He had been declared insane and was subject to experimental surgery
that placed a limiter in his brain, rendering him incapable of killing again. It
does not seem to have extended to beating enemies up, or knocking them
unconcious however.Gan is a simple man who acts against the Federation because of what they have done to him, and to prevent them from doing it to others. Although not exactly clever, he has a good dose of solid common sense and is not afraid to speak out when he thinks that a plan is dangerous or foolhardy.
Gan has the dubious distinction of being the first of the original seven to be killed, he is crushed to death by a roof fall in the fake Federation computer complex on Earth in the episode "Pressure Point", leaving Blake stricken with remorse.
Avon was a computer expert, he would say genius. Following his
involvment in the failed government teleportation project he
tried to steal massive amounts of money from the Federation
banking cartel. Unfortunately the security services were actually
stringing him along and as the plan reached its conclusion they tried to pull
him in. Despite a near fatal escape he was eventually caught and sentenced to a
one-way trip to Cygnus Alpha.Avon (played by Paul Darrow) is by nature a loner. As the series begins he clearly trusts no-one, however his logical attitude to life means that he sees that the rest of the crew are a necesary irritation. He is continually on the edge of leaving them to their heroics and finding something more profitable to do. He is the logical foil to the impulsive Blake, continually questioning his authority to lead the seven. Despite this Avon does not leave, and frequently saves the others, although there is no benefit for him in the process. Over time Avon's character shifts, and by the third series he has actually taken Blake's place as the nominal figurehead of the resistance, driven by the realisation that the only safety is the destruction of the Federation.
The border between genius and insanity is famously thin By the end of the fourth series following the discovery that his great love Anna was actually a Federation agent who was watching his scam, and the failure of several of his plans he began to act irrationally. Although not actually psychotic he was suffering from strain and started making mistakes, the last of which was the belief that Blake had betrayed him on Gauda Prime, which coupled with the paranoia induced by his betryal at the hands of Zukan in "Warlord", has fatal consequences.
Fittingly Avon's is the last face we see as he steps over the dead body of Blake seemingly to guard it against the enclosing circle of Federation troopers. Avon, Blake's greatest ally has encompassed his destruction. The fight is lost.
Jenna was a smuggler who fell foul of the Federation and was
sentenced to exile As a result of this she was involved in
Blake's revolt of prisoners aboard the prison
ship and the initial exploration of the Liberator. Her abilities
as a space pilot made her a vital to the survival of the crew,
and although her character was later woefully underused, she did
still get some of the good lines in the first series, for
example: Jenna: "I don't think it likes you somehow"
Avon: "I'll have to reprogram this computer" Jenna:
"That still won't make you likeable".Jenna appears to have had a dangerous and highly criminal past, as her encounter with the Amagon space pirates in "Bounty" show. However, she accepts Blake's policy of deliberately harrying the Federation although she doesn't agree with his motives. Jenna left the series in an escape capsule following the battle with the Andromedans and never returned, the last we hear of her is from Blake who calmly informs Tarrant that she was killed resisting arrest while smuggling weapons to Gauda Prime.
Cally is the only actual alien in the group, exiled from the
planet Auron. She has some limited telepathic abilities which are more of a
hazard than a boon to her colleagues. The Auron people are neutral, and appear
to suffer from a 'holier than thou' attitude to the rest of the galaxy, Cally
too exhibits this - particularly when talk turns to violence or revenge, but her
feeling that it is impossible to ignore the plight of the worlds crushed under
the Federation's heel keeps her with them even when she isn't comfortable with
their methods. Avon and Blake originally encountered Cally on the planet Saurian Major (in "Time Squad"), where she was the leader of a rebel cadre. Unfortunately the rest of the unit had been killed and she was alone, not the ideal situation for a telepath, a theme which is often brought to the fore. She seems to act as a magnet for the psychic scum of the universe, including other Auronar (in "The Web"), intergalactic despots (in "Dawn Of The Gods"), zombies (in "Sarcophagus"), and a giant brain (in "Ultraworld").
Cally's character changes slightly during her 3 seasons. Becoming less and less keen on direct action, she seems to be disatisfied the most with Blake's stated aim of destroying Star One, but goes along with it because she can see no other option. Cally's meets her fate, alone again, on the planet Terminal when she is killed by Servalan's trap.
Zen was created by the System as an integral part of the
Liberator. Zen was extremely sophisticated (even Avon
didn't seem to understand how some of it worked) and controlled
all of the internal systems of the vessel. Largely unemotional,
and seemingly without personality - contrasting sharply with the
easily irritated Orac - Zen quietly and
efficiently followed orders and got on with running the craft. It was only when
encountering phenomena that it could not explain or deal with that it showed
anything other than steady support, although it initially refused to explain
the working of the teleport, saying that 'Wisdom must be gathered, it cannot be
given.' In fact Zen's last despairing line (in
"Terminal") is all the more upsetting precisely
because it counterpoints its previously even speech pattern.
Orac was the creation of Ensor, an exiled computer genius who
had previously created the 'tariel cell', a component integral to
all Federation computer technology. Orac was the ultimate result
of that development -a supercomputer (Ensor regarded it as an
intelligent being in its own right) capable of utilizing the power of every
computer that contained such a cell, effectively making it the sum total of all
the computers in the Federation. Blake acquired Orac at the
end of the first series after rescuing Ensor's son (also called Ensor) from a
space accident orchestrated by Servalan. Both Ensors die
at the hands of Servalan, and Blake takes Orac to keep it away from her. Many
future episodes would be based around a plot to steal it. Orac was a kind of genie, a mysterious plastic box with flashing lights which, when activated by a key could give the owner access to the knowledge of the universe, assuming they asked the right question. Unfortunately Orac had a personality problem: it had Ensor's personality. This was a bad thing because Ensor was old, short tempered and arrogant. This meant that Orac regarded anyone else as inferior and was particularly tetchy to crew members rash enough to ask it questions that it thought had obvious answers. There is some initial implication that Orac was created for a task of some kind (it is frequently 'too busy' to help its human companions) unfortunately this seems to fade away, particularly after Orac has been damaged a couple of times.
Other problems were caused by Orac's thirst for knowledge - this puts the whole crew in danger in "Dawn Of The Gods" when it decides it wants to investigate a black hole, and in "Traitor" when it decides that a task is beneath it and assigns it to a nearby Federation computer. On the whole Orac does more good than harm, and is instrumental in several otherwise improbable escapes, most notably in "Redemption" when it destroys the System, in "Dawn Of The Gods" where it thwarts Lord Thaarn's minions, and in "Ultraworld" where it used Vila's illogical brain and its own fascination with riddles to overload the planets core intelligence. Orac did have limitations in its scope, as shown in "The Harvest Of Kairos" where it is unable to identify sophron, a living rock that Avon is toying with.
Orac's final location is never specified, and it is likely that for some time to come there would be an extremely irritable plastic box sitting in the forest waiting for someone to reawaken its genie.
Dayna Mellanby grew up on the planet Sarran, where her father
Hal Mellanby, a famous scientist and later rebel against the
Federation, was in hiding. Dayna was a skilled weapons designer, and her devices
were instrumental in many episodes (notably
"Ultraworld") despite the fact that her costumes
appeared to have no place to hide them. Young and idealistic, she joined Avon
after the intergalactic war (see "Aftermath")
when the marooned Servalan killed her father. She had been infused with her
father's revolutionary vigour and wanted to end the Federation's grasp over the
galaxy, however she is young and although deadly, was not as experienced at
survival as the rest of the crew.
Tarrant appeared right at the very begining of the
third season. Avon was almost fatally surprised to find him aboard the Liberator
when Zen picked him and Dayna up from the surface of Sarran. Tarrant explained
that he was a Federation Space Captain, and that he was now the owner of the
Liberator, the Federation troopers who had boarded the Liberator after him did
not wholly agree and started to disappear. Eventually it turned out that Tarrant
too is an outlaw, and although he had graduated from the space academy he had
gone AWOL to engage in more profitable pursuits of his own. Accepted into the
fold, Tarrant engaged in a kind of battle for leadership with Avon. The latter,
recognising Tarrant's charisma played along at first, generally sending him into
dangerous situations that he himself would have avoided.Tarrant was impetuous, and was given to making rash decisions without any forethought. He often regards the feelings of the others as unimportant and was given to bullying when they did not agree, this is most obvious in "City At The Edge Of The world" where he forced Vila onto a dangerous away mission against his will. Fortunately Tarrant's bravado and ability as a space pilot were useful in the fourth season where he was needed to fly the more primitive Scorpio.
He inadvertantly proves the downfall of the whole crew when, in the final episode he meets Blake and - believing that he is a traitor - tells the already massively paranoid Avon that has been betrayed. Avon has already been betrayed once too often.
Soolin is probably the weakest of the main characters. As a
child her parents settled on the planet Gauda Prime and started
farming, unfortunately Gauda Prime held massive mineral reserves,
and was declared an 'open planet' by the Federation. Essentially
this meant that there were no laws, and the planet became home to
the scum of the universe; all of the peaceful farmers were slaughtered in order
to extract the minerals in their land, including Soolin's family. This is almost
as much as we know about her, other than that she was trained by the best gun
fighters in the galaxy, and killed her parent's murderers aged just 17. Soolin
later left Gauda Prime and meets Dorian, eventually joining the rest of the crew
when he attempts to feed her to his Gestalt being in Cally's place.Soolin's qualities as a gun slinger are indisputable, she even manages to outdraw a computer simulation of herself in "Games"!
Servalan makes an entrance during the second episode of the
first series, but what an entrance! Easily the most elegant
character in the Blake's 7, (in what other series would you see a
character running across the surface of a chalk pit wearing an
evening dress?) she is also one of the most dangerous, her lust
for power makes her completely ruthless without a trace of mercy.
Starting out as a minor member of the space force, Servalan
worked her way up to Supreme Commander, and eventually ousted the
supreme council of the Federation in a coup (in
"Star One"), installing herself as
President just prior to the Intergalactic war at the end of
season 2. It is a short lived victory, at the end of season 3 (in
"Terminal") her capture of the
damaged Liberator removes her from her power base in the
Federation and she is deposed. Forced to adopt the identity of Commisioner
Sleer, she begins a new plan - to take over the Federation again using her
control over the drug pylene-50, which is key to the Federation's attempts to
regain its lost worlds. We do not learn of Servalan's fate at the end of the
series, but with all resistance crushed we can be sure that the trail of bodies
will grow longer. Her only real failure has been her continuing inability to
best Avon or Blake. Servalan is almost certainly the strongest female character in science fiction, she is devious, cunning, and strong willed, a formidable adversary.
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"Travis is an exponent of total war" - said
Servalan of the Space Commander assigned to
kill Blake and capture the Liberator. It is
a good description. Travis's pursuit of Blake is driven and
persistent. With and without the authority of the Federation, Travis follows
Blake to the edges of the galaxy, finally betraying the entire human race in his
mania to have revenge. Travis is Blake's oldest enemy: he lost an arm and an eye
in a battle with the Freedom party and eventually took part in the climactic
massacre which delivered Blake into the hands of the Federation. Travis is
already discredited when Servalan puts him on Blake's trail; he is accused
(apparently correctly) of indulging in shooting unarmed civilians on the planet
Auros (and/or Zircaster). The Federation puts him on trial, where he is found
guilty, but by a twist of fate he is saved from execution by Blake who chooses
that moment to attack the Space Command headquarters. As the court room
depressurises Travis escapes and forces Servalan to give him a ship and a crew
with which to continue the chase.
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Mutoids were the result of a surgical and psychological
modification program carried out by the Federation. The aim was
to create perfectly obediant, trustworthy followers who would
never question an order or action, and who were stronger than
unmodified humans. Largely this project was successful. Although little
information is given about the process, it is known that the subjects' past
memories were erased, and their biochemistry radically altered. Since Mutoids
were expected to be more powerful than regular humans, they had to run on a
higher-octane fuel - blood serum. Human blood serum in point of fact - this led
to their nickname 'vampires' amongst the rest of populace. Mutoids gain their
sustinence from vials of serum which are placed under a panel in their chests;
in case of emergency they were fitted with needles to draw blood directly, this
was nearly the death of Jenna in
"Duel".Mutoids really get it in the neck, they are used as cannon fodder ("The Harvest Of Kairos"), insulted and reviled ("Duel"), and largely treated like slaves. The Mutoids do not seem to mind, after all they have been conditioned to obey without question whatever the situation.
Last updated on 16th of February 2005.