"Servalan"

Every so often some mannys talk on the internets about making more Blakes 7 for TV, but because mannys are fundamentally not as good as cats they still haven't.

If I was in charge of making Blakes 7 for modern TV, here is how I would do it.

Modern TV seems to love remakes and reimaginings of old TV programmes, instead of just making more of the same programme in the same way. Modern TV also seems to love making the baddys into the main characters. And prequels. Mannys love prequels, for some reason.

With this in mind, I would not call the series Blakes 7 any more. I would not even call it Blakes 8, despite this being an obvious name for a sequel.

I would call it... Servalan.

It would start with a large ensemble cast of baddy characters all jockeying for position within Space Command while dealing with the plot of the week. Servalan would just be one character among many but at the end of each episode she would somehow end up on top, like a sci-fi House of Cards, and as the cast thinned she would become more and more central.

Towards the end of the season one episode would see the events leading to Avon's capture from Servalan's point of view, and in the finale of the season Servalan would become the Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation and the name "Blake" would be mentioned for the first time.

A second season would then parallel the events of the first season of Blakes 7. To begin with Servalan would be consolidating her power and would keep winning and remain in charge. Then about half way through the season she would have to deal with the growing problem of Blake and the Liberator, so she would appoint Space Commander Travis, and things start to go wrong from there.

If season one is her rise, then season two is Servalan's (partial) fall, caused by Blake's success and her failure to obtain Orac. Then season three would parallel Blakes 7's second season and so see her rise again, using the shadow of Star One and the galactic war to become President.

And so on from there. By the time we get to see Rumours of Death from Servalan's point of view... all the awards, thank you very much.

Blake, Avon and the crew of the Liberator would be recurring characters, just as Servalan was in Blakes 7. They would meet Servalan in the same ways as they did in Blakes 7, preferably with exactly the same dialogue being used, although there would be no requirement for them to look the same or for the sets to be identical. And they would still be terrorists to the Federation, but by this point in the series it should be obvious to all viewers that the Federation are the baddys.

One thing that would be absolutely essential would be to not ever refer to Servalan by any other name. Like Columbo, her only other name is her rank or title at the time. No hints, no clever-clever moments that some mannys are so fond of - in the modern day, if you showed it on screen for even an instant then it would be all over the internets within moments. If not sooner. Not even initials would be allowed.