Blake's 7 (TV Series) Ultraworld (1980) User Reviews

Not as bad as its reputation, but it's not the best.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 6/10 · 25 August 2022]

The Liberator is drawn off course, and heads towards an unknown, high tech planet, Ultraworld.

Ultraworld, nope not a supermarket of the future, but a well imagined, man made, data gathering entity, a great idea, the planet itself looked marvellous.

Not a favourite of mine, when I got to this one, I couldn't remember it, that perhaps says it all, it just isn't hugely memorable. It's not bad as such, but it is sci fi paint by numbers.

The ideas were there, the budget clearly wasn't, maybe the budget didn't quite stretch as far as was needed, I couldn't quite buy into most of the visuals.

The Ultra, they looked ok I guess, I just found their dialogue very bland, so unimaginative. Cally and Avon were underused it's fair to say.

The best element for me had to be the banter between Villa and Orac, I didn't always like the way that Villa was always the one to sit behind, but here it was actually quite funny, and those scenes beat anything that happened on Ultraworld.

6/10.

More Generic Scripting

[Theo Robertson · 4/10 · 27 March 2013]

Picking up unusual readings The Liberator is drawn to an artificial planet which Cally teleports to . Avon , Dayna and Tarrant teleport after her only to find that the planet is in fact a giant computer system that now holds them prisoner and wants to wipe their minds and turn them in to menial slaves

Impressed with the synopsis ? Neither am I and nor was I impressed with the episode itself . We see yet another episode from a debut writer this time Trevor Hoyle who like nearly everyone else who writes their first episode for BLAKES 7 gives the impression that it probably started out as as a rejected script for STAR TREK or SPACE 1999 and he's just changed the names of the characters in to Avon , Cally etc . That said you are struck how this episode could have easily slotted in to season two with Blake and Jenna functioning as Tarrant and Dayna . One strongly suspects that this started off as a season two story and got moved to the following year

Regardless of when it got commissioned it's still pulp SF of the most mediocre order and it's not helped by the fact this weeks villain is called The Ultra which conjures up the images of images of European football hooligans or sanitary towels

A very poor episode which narrowly avoids being absolutely awful

[GusF · 8 August 2014]

The idea of an artificial planet seeking to gather all knowledge that it can by draining people's minds is a nice idea but it's badly executed. In many respects, it's reminiscent of a bad third season episode of "Star Trek: The Original Series" or any given episode of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" with silly looking, weird aliens capturing the crew and wanting them to have sex to increase their knowledge. I liked the fact that Dayna got more to do than usual but, as in "Volcano", what she got to do was rather boring. It was also interesting as one of the few episodes, along with "The Keeper", to sideline Avon for an appreciable period of time. All in all, a bad episode but not one which I had any strong feelings about one way or another. The very definition of a "meh" episode of "Blake's 7". Perhaps the most "meh" episode of the entire series.