Warlord (412)

[vilakins]

This is a fairly typical season 4 episode: bleak and without hope. It's not even that entertaining unless you count Avon's underwear-less attire on Betafarl, and Zukan and Zeeona's hairstyles.

Comments

[kalinda001]

I actually like Warlord, except for the crazy hair. Avon showing that he's actually a good, intelligent leader who has the ability to put together complex alliances among people who don't trust each other, and to put together all the complicated technical components to mass produce the pylene-50 anti-serum.

If it weren't for Servalan's trap, it would have succeeded fantastically and brought the rebellion light years forward by creating a large and powerful alliance, something Blake never managed or even attempted to do.

To be able to survive a deliberate trap by Servalan is a great achievement, something Blake never achieved except by sheer luck and Avon's intelligence.

I doubt if the trap would have happened if Tarrant hadn't been fooling around with Zeeona and gotten her father pissed off. It wasn't because of any lack on Avon's part, which is usually the case with Blake when he falls into Servalan's traps.

I'm still not sure why people think S4 is such a failure, when they had many successes, and not usually due to luck, unlike most of Blake's, especially in S2. Just because Blake doesn't go around acting like he's a loser, doesn't change the fact that he was one and far more than Avon was. I don't see Avon's plans getting lots of his own people or his own allies killed like Blake did. And if you actually paid attention to the details of the series, you'll realize Blake rarely ever achieved his goals and the very few times he did, it was due to dumb luck or despite his failures as a leader and his lack of intelligence. The number of times Blake actually succeeded in something he set out to do is very rare. And if we're going to be snarky about surviving a deliberate trap as not much of a success...well then lets do that about the many times Blake's so-called successes were just that. But no...we see Blake's survival, usually due to luck, as some great triumph and Avon? We get nasty comments about...I suppose survival counts as winning. Just wonderful.

I see no mention was made of how Avon refused to give up when he was trying to rescue Tarrant, Dayna and Vila (or how clever he was to figure out how to save them, which was due to his intelligence, not luck)...of course people will probably claim he only did that because he needed them. But make great noise about him knowing Zeeona was going to die when he sent her down there...something which can only be supposition. Yeah, right, Avon knew she was going to do something stupid like removing her glove. Or...Avon suspected Zeeona might commit suicide because she felt guilty for what her father did and gave her that choice. Of course if he did know, then this presupposes a level of understanding of people that none of the rest of the crew had. A level that most people claim Avon didn't have so he needed Blake. Well, you can't have it both ways. Either he did have that deep understanding of people and didn't need Blake for that, or he didn't and so when he sent Zeeona down there, he had no idea. And even if he did, Avon was giving Zeeona the choice of doing what she wanted to do, something Tarrant wouldn't have given her.