Blake's 7 - The Way Back (S1E1)

Earth's future, at an unspecified date, in an unnamed country, under an interplanetary federation.  Good citizen Roj Blake  has a dodgy history.  In fact he might have more than one, and dodgy in ways he doesn't even know.

Blake was once a dissident who, having recanted and renounced the rebel movement in his highly public trial, would like to move on.  That's not easy to do when one of his friends is one of those annoying conspiracy theorists.  She insists on thrusting her anti-government rap at him. Lately she's asked him to fast for a few days as she claims the food and water are secretly medicated to keep the populace sedate.  Nutty, and yet he goes along with her request.  Now she's got him going to meet some "friends", a meeting she didn't tell him would be highly illegal.  Her friends turn out to be a group of rabblerousers and legal outliers eager to begin a new revolt now the last is several years dead.  Their leader has a shock for Blake: he says Roj's life is a lie.  Blake, he contends, was brainwashed and his family murdered. They want him to reclaim his role as their spearhead.
Before Blake can process this, he witnesses government forces slaughter the group as they try to surrender peaceably.  Welcome to the future.

So we have our world-building.  Blake's Earth is a dystopian future under a faceless totalitarian regime - the police stormtroopers wear threatening gear that hides their faces and kill without reflection, the bureaucrats  are mild-spoken folk who as a matter of routine decide Blake must be discredited all over again, and the populace is laced with spies that Stalin or McCarthy would be proud of (one such, Dev Tarrant, set up the dissidents to be butchered).  Blake's 7 was a British television production of the late 70s, a natural development under the Doctor Who mold.  That means its production values had to be curtailed, leading to some very sparse set design on obvious stages, and location work at numerous bleak-looking industrial installations.  It may look cheap, but it is also well-suited to the tone set by the premise: bleak.

It's decided that the Federation's best interests would be served by making Blake out to be something so reprehensible that any decent citizen must balk at the idea he could be any kind of hero.  Thus they charge him with molesting children, and proceed to manufacture evidence and witnesses.  This means brainwashing children with false memories of having been sexually assaulted.  This is decided in the same manner with which a committee might decide on a tax measure or work  bill.  It makes no difference to the children that the assaults never took place - they will now be scarred with the memories of it all the same, never knowing its not true.  Projection - the government piously accuses an innocent of the very crimes they commit themselves.  The very banality of the villains and their deliberations is the most chilling thing about them.  It's not melodrama, just procedure.  The villains look like school teachers, librarians, and kindly grandmothers.

As a protagonist, Roj Blake appears on the surface as the standard hero.  He's earnest, forthright, and not unduly outraged at the injustices welling up around him.  He's an everyman, one of us, an ordinary citizen.  Who wouldn't identify with that?  He's the hero we'd all like to be.  Look a little deeper and he seems a bit flighty.  Invited to break the law in a particularly serious manner, he protests..then meekly goes right along with it.  Told that everything he knows is a lie, he's quick to doubt his own experience for the word of a stranger who acts like an old comrade.  Blake used to be a rebel leader, and they tend to be charismatics, firebrands, even True Believers.  The Roj Blake we meet in The Way Back is no natural leader, but he does have the makings of a True Believer who will embrace an ideology at the drop of a hat and run with it.

Is Blake's 7 going to be run--of-the-mill science fiction or something that will subvert our expectations?  I don't think creator Terry Nation chose to set the adversaries as "The Federation" as a coincidence but as a direct response to Trekdom's utopian vision.  This may be a  reactionary program about reactionary people.

We have two more protagonists in the advocate who takes on Blake's case, and the advocate's wife.  The more Tel and Maja Varon investigate, the more they doubt their client's assured guilt.  As the episode unfolds they begin to take the spotlight from the eponymous hero with a warm chemistry and empathy, and bewilderment at the corruption they're suddenly opening their eyes to that makes them more likable characters than Blake himself.  I can see following them for a few seasons.  
The exonerating evidence mounts.  Victory races the clock as Blake is hauled to a transport to a penal colony.  Blake's vindication is at hand as Act III is surely about to begin...and that's where the episode ends with Tel and Maja lying dead at Dev Tarrant's feet and Blake on his way to life in a penal colony.

The writing is sharp on some counts, less so on others.  For example, science fiction has always had a weak spot for shortcuts, and trial scenes are usually whoppers.  The one in The Way Back is one of the less convincing, letting the arguments to be weighed by data globes instantaneously so we the audience don't have to sit through them.  Fans of due process should be tearing their hair out. It doesn't harm the show too much, and does reinforce the degree to which this society has twisted against its citizens to secure the state.  A longer episode might have wrung more out of it for satire but not without slowing the pace of the space opera, and the tone set by The Way Back is oppressively humorless.

The production and fx of The Way Back are a marked improvement on Doctor Who.  There is a shot of the transport ship on an arrival/departure platform that had me expecting to see names in the credits associated with Space: 1999.  It was that good, budget discrepancies in mind.  So is a sequence leaving a protective city-dome behind in the night.

8 Magic 8-Balls of Judicious Wisdom. 

The abrupt ending is in line with a more serialized program but I couldn't help thinking it felt like one of those two-part pilot movies that's been chopped in half for syndication. 

Do the Varons seem  too incredulous about what they're learning?  That might be the machinations of the show trial, allowing Blake to have honest representation by lawyers chosen for their inexperience and naivety.