Blakes 7 – Archangel by Scott Harrison

Review by Jackie Emery

This is the second Blakes 7 novel produced by Big Finish, and aptly takes place during Season 2. Set between the episodes Trial and Killer, it’s a time when the crew of the Liberator are still coming to terms with the death of Gan and their own uncertain futures.

The Archangel of the title is a top secret Federation project that had been shut down some years previously. Blake discovers that an old friend of his, who was believed to be dead, is actually alive and being held prisoner on Sigma Minor. This friend, a talented cybernetic engineer, had been linked to Project Archangel. Blake is determined to rescue his friend and to find out once and for all the secret of Project Archangel – whether his crew are with him or not…

There was a lot I liked about this book. I thought it was well written and well-constructed: after a pre-The Way Back prologue, the main part of the story has the actions of the Liberator crew intercut with flashbacks to the creation, testing and subsequent closing down of Project Archangel as the mystery is gradually revealed. I liked the different writing styles used in the flashbacks – some are told from the point of view of one character; some are spoken or telepathic dialogue and one is the transcript of a datacube recording. It adds a nice variety to the straightforward third-person narrative of the main part of the story. The book ends with a Season 4 epilogue, the title of which - Salvation - could refer to either of the characters that feature in that final chapter.

The guest characters are well defined. The main guests, Kodyn Tam (the cyberneticist) and Tobin (an ex-Federation Fleet Officer who now works for the rebel cause) are excellent. Their actions and motivations are completely credible, given the situations in which they find themselves. Minor guest characters also shine, in particular Malcus, a senior technician and Breck, the project supervisor who appear only in flashback chapters; and Brinn, a Federation trooper, who tries to help Blake and Vila when they all find themselves in peril.

I liked the different locations; each place was vividly described. There was also a fair amount of technical detail. I personally prefer sentences like:

…the sun was little more than a blazing scar beyond the trees… an icy wind was blowing down off the mountains, bringing with it a tangle of swollen grey cloud…

and tend to glaze over when reading:

…the outer polyherculanium shell was built to the Mark IV Bueller-Teshak civil administration platform specification…

but no doubt there are readers out there for whom the reverse is true!

As for the depictions of the main characters, on the whole they felt right. The dialogue is in keeping with the interactions we see on screen, and there are some especially entertaining exchanges between Avon and Vila.

Apart from the crew’s reflections on the implications of Gan’s death, there’s a very good moment where this is also discussed by Bercol and Servalan, which provides an interesting perspective on the way the Federation views Blake’s character.

As with The Forgotten, this is an ensemble piece for the Liberator’s crew, and I felt overall that the balance was kept, with each of the crew being given plenty to do, mixing and matching the pairings. Blake works with Jenna, Avon with Vila, then Jenna with Avon, Blake with Vila and Cally, etc. Blake leads and negotiates, Jenna pilots and does technical things to spaceships, Avon struts his computer stuff and Vila opens all manner of doors. They all take part in the various action and fight sequences. However, Cally's talents seem sadly underused, especially given what we find about the nature of Project Archangel.

I also felt that the ending was rushed. The dénouement was action-packed but over too quickly. There was also a point when I thought I’d turned over too many pages – at the end of Chapter 16, a crew member is injured and lying in a pool of their own blood, but two pages later seems to have made a remarkable recovery, and continues to participate in the action, before eventually being taken to be patched up in the medical unit. As the injury had no real effect on either the person’s actions or the overall plot, it seemed rather gratuitous. I would also have liked an extra chapter at the end, before the epilogue - a kind of summing up in which the crew discuss what’s taken place, and debate the wisdom of staying with Blake. I did enjoy the epilogue, but if it was a question of length, would have sacrificed it for more time on the Liberator.

Technically, although there were no glaring errors of the sort that appeared in The Forgotten (Auronite, Baban etc), there were still quite a number of typos. However, most of these are punctuation errors rather than actual spelling mistakes, and I’ve been reassured that an additional proof reader will be employed by Big Finish from Book 3 onwards, in the hope of catching the pesky things. Also, the formatting of the text seems to fall short of Big Finish’s usually high standards – the header and footer margins are off-kilter, there are widow and orphan lines, and although the paper is good quality, the print from the reverse of each page seems to bleed through, making the text appear shadowy and un-crisp. Hopefully this too can be addressed in future publications. The binding is good quality and the book is graced with excellent cover design and artwork that, together with The Forgotten, is starting to build into a very nice display on the book shelf.

In summary, the book feels less like a missing episode and more like well-written, original fiction set inside the B7 canon. Apart from the nit-picks and quibbles noted above, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would definitely recommend it.


Archangel is available to buy from BIG FINISH HERE

You are welcome to comment here on this review, and you can also read - and site members can join in with - the general Discussion Thread about the book on the Forum: HERE

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