In the seventh episode of Down and Safe, Michael, Liz, Scott, and Amal discuss Duel, the eighth episode of Blake’s 7, and manage to get through at least fifteen seconds before they mention Arena, that Star Trek episode with the same plot. This same epic restraint to avoid cheap jokes is, of course, shown in the rest of the episode too.
This is a useful reminder that this podcast is very probably not safe for work, and may contain mild spoilers for the rest of the Blake’s 7 series throughout the episde (we keep major spoilers to a spoiler section of the podcast that we give warning is going to be particularly spoilery.) This episode also contains spoilers for Wacky Races and Babylon 5.
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Down and Safe 
Pingback: Down and Safe: The One with the Gorn | L. M. Myles
“The planet of psychic women who disdain the use of bras.” Also, I’m guessing the heat was down on the BBC studios that day…
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Don’t ALL powerful psychic women distain the use of bras?
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Pingback: Down and Safe: Episode 7 – The One With the Gorn | Amal El-Mohtar
Interesting that you should mention the ‘Arena’ episode…when in fact, the knowledgeable SF viewer knows that apparently every SF TV show has the ‘single combat’ episode’ on standby.
Space1999 had ‘The rules of Luton’; The Outer Limits had ‘fun and games’, and so on.
At least blaeks’ hearkened back to ‘fun and games’, where you had one man and one woman.
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I can’t see how, in the discussion of the by play between travis and the mutiod, that you miss the obvious: since travis has no personal life, the only way he could have known the mutoid pre-process was if he had a hand in her case: .
There’s a clear implication that Travis in fact was responsible for her disposal; perhaps he was even the one who arrested her or brought evidence against her.
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…or maybe before his face and arm were blown off, he did have a life. He knew she was much admired and sought after, maybe he sought after her, too.
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Only now catching up on this podcast. Just thought I’d mention the typical Farscape hommage with a twist they do for all SciFi TV tropes – Maldis in That Old Black Magic with Crichton as Blake and Crais as Travis…
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Be cautious about citing the “These Are the Voyages” books as regards Star Trek because they’re really rather poorly done and the author makes a lot of mistakes (many of which are documented in this actually properly researched blog: http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/). Anyway, as regards Frederick Brown’s “Arena” the show did, in fact, purchase the rights to the short story as a precaution to head off any possible suit.
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