Commander Travis is innocent

Commander Travis may be a hard man.

He may be a seriously nasty bastard if you manage to get on the wrong side of him.

He may end up a pretty unhappy and disturbed character.

But he isn't - and never has been - either a psychopath or an extra-terrestrial!

Over the past 30 years, many sci-fi fans out there have had no hesitation at all in calling him either or both.

Anyone who jumps to his defence, especially a woman, is immediately accused of being, at best, a bleeding-heart liberal like the Modern Parents from Viz, or, at worst, a star-swept lilac-haired tangerine-eyed Mary Sue who needs to buy a copy of Women Who Love Too Much and start reading it immediately.

Well, my answer to that is BOLLOCKS.

Okay, I freely admit that Travis (Mark 1 version) is perhaps my favourite character ever from Blake's Seven (albeit followed extremely closely by Avon and Servalan.  Vila and Carnell are also pretty good creations).

His story arc in the original version is extremely sad and even today I cannot bring myself to watch the end of Star One.

The problem is, I've always felt that Commander Travis, like many of the canon characters in this series, ended up suffering from a seriously bum rap.

Now, the first question I'm sure the scriptwriters of the new audio reboot must have had to ask themselves is: how did this misfortune happen?

Like detectives, they must have had to go back to the scene of the crime to re-examine it.

And the scripts of the original series unfortunately show that a lot of the blame has to be laid at the doors of the writers.

As a scriptwriter in training, I've always thought that it would be a vital part of the job description for the writers of a show to have the ability to create plausible, three-dimensional characters that exchange lines of snappy, vivacious dialogue with each other and prove a real joy for the actors to play.

If they cannot deliver on this promise, then they need to start looking for an alternative career immediately, as there will be a whole great gaggle of wannabes streaming through the back door to replace them.

That's why it surprised me so much to learn of Terry Nation's alleged deficiencies as a writer.

According to the seriously academic study of him that was published not that long ago by Manchester University Press, he was never that hot on writing dialogue.  It didn't matter which show he was working on, the same problem cropped up time and time again. Even though the basic working conditions of the late Seventies were very different to those of today, it was still considered a pretty tall order indeed for him to write every single episode of the first series of Blake's Seven all by himself.

I imagine that he was well aware that his entire professional reputation was on the line at this point - so I can't imagine he must have felt terribly happy when Stephen Greif started expressing his discontent with Travis.
 
Greif has always come across to me as one of those extremely practical and down-to-earth actors who would never dream of complaining unless they believe they have just and ample cause.  When they do make their thoughts clear, it is because they want to put in the very best job they possibly can and need to know how the difficulties that stand in the way of this could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

To sum up his dispute with the Commander in a nutshell, he thought Travis had very quickly turned into a morose, obsessional, one-dimensional cipher, who badly needed broadening out and humanising as soon as possible.

He had rapidly become bored with portraying the character and he felt sure the audience would soon get fed up with watching him too.   

Luckily Chris Boucher turned out to be a dab hand with the dialogue - and much of the Commander's subsequent savage line in wit can ultimately be traced back to him.  It is indeed a great shame that Stephen Greif didn't stick around in the end to get the benefit of it.  (Still would have loved to have seen what he would have made of Trial.  Regret to say that I don't feel the same way about Hostage, though.)

Now, as both an excellent actor and fully paid-up member of Mensa, Stephen Greif was doubtless quite right in his assessment of the situation.

Problem is, I suspect he ended up greatly over-estimating both the emotional needs and the critical abilities of many members of the audience.

Despite the constant whinges from certain sections of the viewership that television has slowly and irrecoverably been going down the tubes since at least 1960, it seems abundantly clear from the fond, rosy-hued reminiscences that they share in various forums that many fans have been pretty satisfied at some fundamental level with whichever shows that they personally happen to follow.

If the example of Algernon Fraser the mad scientist from The Floating Island Of Madness is to be believed, more than a little of this satisfaction must come from the fulfillment of audience expectations.

Despite the fact that many critics and academics saw the success of Blake's Seven to lie in its portrayal of a flawed, dysfunctional future society and its various citizens in very grimy shades of grey, more than a few viewers don't seem to have regarded it in the same light.

This is abundantly revealed in some of the fan fiction that has been produced about the series.

Because Roj Blake is firmly seen as a 'goodie' by certain viewers, his point of view is often accepted without question by them - even when there are serious grounds for taking what he says with a massive great pinch of salt (at the very least).

One of the classic examples of this occurs when he states that Commander Travis has 'no friends'.
 
If you look at this statement properly, it is more than a little obvious that Blake probably doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about.

First of all, exactly how well does he really know Travis?

How many times has he met him?

When they met, what did they say to each other?  And why?

Unless there is something major that Blake isn't telling his new crew (and by implication, us in the audience too) - then it is very likely that Blake has only met Travis a few times at most, and quite possibly only on the one occasion when he shot him. 

Travis, if you will recall, had been ordered to arrest Blake and the other dissidents.  However, it all rapidly spiralled into an extremely nasty, bloody disaster for both sides.

The Commander will have started off by announcing something along the lines of: "Put your hands up.  You're all under arrest."

At this stage, Blake is rather unlikely to ask him to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of tea and a slice of ginger cake.

Although there appears to be some dispute about what was then said by whom to whom and why, I think we would still be fairly safe in assuming that a squadron of extremely aggressive and determined troopers attempting to arrest a bunch of very frightened and pissed-off protestors are not going to be in the right frame of mind to get to know very much about each other's lives and priorities.

The strong implication would therefore have to be that Blake then read up about Travis in some sort of report or other afterwards.  If it was a media report, then the question has to be asked - would any Federation journalist really be able to include the fact that Travis has no friends in their report, without it being cut or censored in some way?  (Knowing the way that our own media tends to report incidents analagous to this one, I can't see how the hell it would be relevant to the story anyway.)  If it was written by some dissident reporter, then I'd be extremely interested to know what their source for this information was.

Or perhaps Blake was simply listening to rumour and hearsay, circulating on both sides.

We simply don't know.

In any case, it is impossible for the new crew of the Liberator to go and check out the background to this story - and I would reckon that Blake is fully aware of this.

Remember, Blake is an experienced revolutionary/terrorist (delete as personally applicable) leader with an agenda as long as your bloody arm.

Now that Travis is on his trail, Blake realises that he has no real chance of beating the Commander without the help and support of his new comrades in need.  Therefore, he must rally them to his defence as quickly as possible.

Like any effective leader, Blake has learnt over the years that appealing to the basic human emotions is a dead cert when trying to convince people of your views.

Therefore, he will probably want to spin a story that subtly, but powerfully, reminds his listeners that they are all in danger.  They are all in this predicament together.

Because he already suspects that Avon and Jenna are in two minds about whether to stay, Blake really needs to pull the stops out at this point.

So he emphasises that Travis threatens not just Blake - but every single one of them there and then.

The classic technique used in these sort of situations is to demonise your enemy.

Thus Travis becomes (in Blake's account, anyway) the cold, ruthless, remorseless psychopath that he has remained in the minds of many over the past three decades.

Now, to be fair to both Avon and Jenna, I think they are quite probably aware that there may be some wide, even gaping holes in Blake's account.  But they know only too well from previous experience that the Federation is not going to all this time and trouble unless it is totally serious about eliminating them.

This means that, whatever the precise truth of Blake's tale, it is cast-iron certain that Commander Travis is a.) a nasty bastard and b.) he means business.

At the same time, to be equally fair to Terry Nation, he very likely wanted the viewers at home to identify with the very different personal dilemmas being experienced by Blake, Avon and Jenna during this particular episode - and to ask themselves some tough, hard questions about what THEY would do if they found themselves in such a situation.
 
However, both classic narrative and psychological theory would have none of this ambiguity.

According to them, there is nothing the average human being hates and detests more than uncertainty.

Archetypes provide you with islands of safety that you can cling to when buffetted hither and thither in the storms of chaos that constitute modern life.

The first thing you need to do when flung into a narrative of any sort is find someone to identify with.

Blake demands that we take him as our protagonist, our friend, our comrade, our hero, our rock.  Anyone who opposes him must surely be our enemy too.

Okay, that's the theory.

But if you adhere to it too closely, then life dies.

And as Stephen Greif pointed out, you can end up with some seriously tedious telly.

Another vital point that many of these traditional archetype lovers completely miss when they blithely label Travis a psychopath is the basic reason behind the existence of armies in the first place.

As the great quote from General Patton? [let me check this and I'll get back to you] puts it, no good general wants to die for his country.  Instead, the purpose of combat is to make the other bastard die for his.
 
The Federation Space Force will thus have been designed to be as effective as possible.

A key way to ensure peak operational efficiency must be to attract the right type of recruits.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was a Federation recruiting officer interviewing the teenage Travis and asking him to explain just why he wanted to join up, I personally don't think I'd be terribly impressed if he admitted straight out that he was an aggressive little fuckwit that really fancied the idea of shooting as many people as possible in a total orgy of ultra-violence while wearing a pair of seriously cool shit-kicker boots.

Granted, Travis is a pretty intelligent, astute bloke, whatever else you may happen to think about him, so presumably he would have known better than to come out with a suicidly stupid statement like that, even if he did secretly believe it.

However, ever since the dawn of history, armies have known only too well that some of the people that attempt to join up end up being far more of a liability than an asset.  Because the consequences of untrammelled recruitment can be catastrophic, it makes perfect sense that the Federation Space Force would do everything in its power to make sure that only suitable recruits got through the door in the first place.

So presumably Travis and all the other applicants must have been put through their paces with a punishing battery of searching psychological and emotional assessment exercises.  If they wanted to go straight in for the fast-track officer training, then the tests must have been even more stringent.

We would have to assume then, that he must have passed all the exams with flying colours and managed to convince the recruitment assessors that he was a good bet for future officer training.

Once safely in and having passed the basic induction process, Travis seems to have done pretty well for himself.

Not only has he managed to get promoted to a high rank fairly quickly, but he has also received advanced training in some extremely specialised and dangerous disciplines and carried out a range of highly sensitive assignments.

Because he hasn't got chucked out on his bum +/demoted by now, the likelihood is that, on the whole, he must be putting in a satisfactory performance at work (assuming we discount the entire Zircaster can of worms for the moment).

So if the Federation Space Force apparently don't have grounds for diagnosing Travis as a psychopath, then what the hell else could be wrong with him?

The obvious answer - and one that would be of particular resonance to today's audience, particularly in the aftermath of two Gulf Wars and the dreadful debacle continuing on in Afghanistan - is that he is suffering from some sort of emotional injury that has either been caused by combat conditions or made worse by them.

In the original series, you'll recall that he ended up suffering appalling injuries during his run-in with Blake.

Now, he does insist to Servalan in Seek-Locate-Destroy that he is not all that bothered by his wounds, particularly now that he has made a full physical recovery (as far as possible) and the army surgeons have done such a great job installing his cyber-replacements.

Sorry, but the next point that has to be made here is that, if we can't believe every word that Blake says to be gospel truth, then there are no grounds for assuming that Travis always states exactly what he really thinks and feels either.

Travis knows only too well that if it wasn't for Servalan offering him a lifeline in the form of the Blake assignment, he would be in deeply serious shit following the Zircaster balls-up.  At best he would be looking at the very real prospect of being dishonorably dismissed from the service.  At worst, he could even be executed.

It is therefore in all his best interests to appear as normal and functional to Servalan as possible.

As the Supreme Commander of the entire force, Servalan is not only a savvy operator generally, but also a consummate politician.  She surely must have heard a great deal about the various forms of psychological injury that soldiers are prone to during the course of her career.  It is very unlikely, therefore, that she truly believes Travis when he assures her that his terrible injuries mean as little to him now as he assures her that they do. 

She knows he is desperate.  Therefore his motivation to succeed is high.

And if he DOES end up failing, then she has got him right by the short and curlies.

Another vital factor to bear in mind is that Servalan is female.

One of the more sympathetic aspects of the Commander's character that we do get to hear about, albeit far too briefly, during series 1 of the original version, is his appreciation for attractive women, like Keira the mutoid pilot used to be before she got converted.

If it is true that Travis is a man who is attracted to women, then naturally he will be extremely concerned to create a good impression upon them.  He will be anxious to convey to his new female boss the idea that he is not only a tough, effective officer, but also a proper successful alpha male.

According to his way of thinking, Servalan will assume that physical appearance doesn't matter as much to a man as it does to a woman - especially not a male officer who knows and accepts that injury is one of the many high prices that soldiers have to pay in combat.

Women give in to their feelings, whilst men don't have any.

Yes, it's a pretty traditional way at looking at the differences between the sexes - but whoever said that the army was the most advanced bastion of society?  Certainly in Britain during the late Seventies, anyway.

Now, I have to be brutally honest and admit that I reckon Travis is talking total and utter crap here.

The injuries he suffered during the fight with Blake were quite utterly appalling.

People with these sort of injuries in everyday life usually need to have further outpatient contact with a doctor over quite a long period.  Even after the articial eye and arm have been installed, the doctor would need to keep ensuring that that the person is continuing to live comfortably and function normally.

It is generally recognised by doctors that these particular type of injuries are likely to cause a person considerable psychological trauma that may take many years - and much anguish - to come to terms with.

I would therefore strongly suspect from the way that Travis behaves, especially in relation to Blake, that he has got a very bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than being a raving psychopath.

Now THERE'S another extremely interesting and important point!

Has anything like this been diagnosed in him - either just after Blake's attack or more recently?

Has any psychological treatment been prescribed or offered?

If not, then why?

It's obvious that Travis is in a pretty bad way in the emotional sense.

If yes, why hasn't it worked?

Or has Travis refused it?

If he refused the treatment, why?

How the hell can you say that something as fundamental as this is of no importance to Travis and his life?  Writers worth their salt knew all about the dramatic potential in circumstances like this during the Seventies, for God's bloody sake!

What about all those war films starring characters like Douglas Bader who suffered terrible injuries, but managed to overcome them to fight again?

The only conclusion that I can come to is that exploring this dramatically very promising issue might have been regarded as putting Travis in serious danger of becoming a bit too sympathetic a character.

And an extremely interesting possibility has just occurred to me for the current audio version of the series.

Giving Travis an eye patch and an artificial arm these days might be regarded as a touch TOO cheesy, tacky and obvious.  Also, you can't see them on the radio - and characters running round describing the Commander's disabilities every five minutes sounds far too reminiscent of The Gun That I Hold In My Right Hand Is Loaded for comfort.

So, what about having Travis escape from his run-in with Blake still physically intact - but his mind is slowly succumbing to post-traumatic stress disorder?