Blake’s 7 Rebooted: Servalan Sharpens Her Shoulder Pads (TV news).
Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we have a finely tuned sixth sense for cult sci-fi news that makes the internet hum like a misaligned teleport bracelet. Today’s hum comes courtesy of Deadline, bearing the words many of us never quite expected to read without irony: Blake’s 7 is being rebooted.
Yes, that Blake’s 7, the BBC’s grimiest, grumpiest space rebellion, is being dusted off, recalibrated, and pointed back at the Federation. At the helm is Peter Hoar, freshly lauded for directing the quietly devastating “Long, Long Time” episode of The Last of Us. Hoar has launched a new genre-leaning outfit, Multitude Productions, and Blake’s 7 is its crown jewel. Somewhere, a Liberator control panel just flickered ominously.
On paper, this makes an unnerving amount of sense. Blake’s 7 was never about shiny starships or technobabble comfort food. It was about moral exhaustion, compromised ideals, and the creeping suspicion that the bad guys might be better organised than you are. In other words, it was prestige television decades before the term existed. If Hoar brings even a fraction of the emotional precision he showed in The Last of Us, this could be less “nostalgia cosplay” and more “existential dread with laser pistols”.
Speculation time, because that’s half the fun and the other half is shouting at the telly. Expect a Federation that leans harder into surveillance-state horror, less cardboard tyranny, more algorithmic oppression. Orac practically writes himself as a sinister proto-AI, the kind that speaks calmly while dismantling your soul with probabilities. Avon, if handled properly, won’t be softened into a lovable rogue but sharpened into what he always was: a walking ethical landmine in black leather. Blake himself? Likely reframed less as a messianic freedom fighter and more as a dangerously persuasive extremist with just enough moral high ground to keep everyone else stuck following him.
Visually, we’re almost certainly saying goodbye to quarry planets and wobbly corridors, though one hopes the new version keeps the brutalist vibe rather than smoothing everything into generic streaming-service gloss. Blake’s 7 should look oppressive, claustrophobic, slightly wrong. The Liberator should feel alien, not cosy. If it starts to resemble a high-end Airbnb with mood lighting, something has gone terribly astray.
There’s also the small matter of where this rebellion will air. Exec producer Matthew Bouch has expressed a desire for it to land back at the BBC, ideally with co-production cash from American streamers and European players. This is the sensible path, though it does raise the eternal question of whether the BBC can still do properly bleak sci-fi without someone upstairs asking if it might be made “a bit more hopeful”. Blake’s 7, it should be remembered, specialised in endings that made you stare into space and reconsider your life choices.
Still, if you’re going to reboot something, this is the one. Blake’s 7 has always been more idea than iconography, more political thought experiment than action romp. In an age where rebellion is branded, commodified, and sold back to us via subscription, a show about a doomed resistance tearing itself apart from the inside feels uncomfortably on point.
So polish the teleport bracelets, rehearse your best nihilistic monologues, and prepare for discourse. If this reboot gets it right, it won’t just resurrect a cult classic. It’ll remind everyone why British sci-fi, at its best, doesn’t offer hope so much as a grim little torch and the suggestion you’d better run.
