Some lysters said they'd like to hear more as I show my friends the series for the first time. Well, we reached the end this week... on Tuesday we watched Warlord and Blake. So I thought I'd give one more update on reactions.
Animals was received with great indifference, but Headhunter wowwed them. Somehow I think of this as the most classic science fiction episode of all, and I think my friends agreed. Even though they pretty much despise Tarrant, they approved of the way he went into action at the end of this episode, and seemed to enjoy Avon not always winning (though they still enjoy it when he wins). And they gained an appreciation of Soolin at about this point. (My biggest regret about the series ending when it does is that we don't get to know Soolin terribly well.)
Assassin... oh, so cheezy, and yet, so good! They were still guessing up past when Neebrox was killed (because he's the obvious first suspect and they had to rearrange their thoughts). This is largely because one of them talked over the "better than sitting around waiting for them to bring in the mangon" line, and there's no graceful way to say "wait, you missed an important line! here, let me rewind so you can listen again!" without completely giving away the ending.
They took the acquisition of the star drive very seriously, however, and were wondering how it could possibly be in doubt whether Scorpio would get back to Cancer's ship before Servalan. "Well", I shrugged, "they're not *infinitely* fast. They could have been heading home at a fairly fast clip, so have a lot of distance to make up." They found this a weak explanation, but it's all I had.
Games: they loved Gambit, and Vila being resourceful. They asked about the shooting game, so it's a good thing I'd checked with you all. ;-)
Sand: okay, they really resent Sleer. They feel there's no excuse for Servalan to exist in season four, because they don't particularly like her and they'd just as soon have seen a new Federation villain in charge. And, they largely dislike Tarrant. That said, they enjoyed this episode quite a bit when they weren't yelling at disliked characters.
Gold: Not much to say here. They found the "two federation guards/ two bodies/Avon and Soolin" thing pretty obvious, but I think it's supposed to be obvious to the viewer.
Orbit: Goodness, I'd forgotten quite how nasty Egrorian was to Pinder. One girl anticipated Orac's "Vila weighs 73 kilos" and we patted her on the back. Then nobody breathed during the rest of the shuttle ride. The Vila fan was very quiet afterwards.
We had the usual debate about whether Avon would really have done it, whether he meant it, and then an interesting "what if Blake had been on the shuttle" (in place of either Vila or Avon) conversation. They all feel Blake's influence on the series even though he's been gone so long, which made me feel even better about the effect of the final episode.
Warlord: Nobody argued when I nominated "But words are no more than... words" as the worst-delivered line of the entire series. Some laughing Star Wars references were made when Zeeona reacted to Zukan's death. Other than that, no huge reaction one way or the other to this one. They laughed at Avon in the flight uniform, which is one of my favorite costumes of his. But then, I grew up in the 70s and most of them didn't.
Blake: the room was completely hushed whenever Blake was onscreen. They were all, naturally, trying to figure him out. There were seven of us watching. Two of them had been spoiled for the finale by reading web pages about the series; the others were in total shock. The guy sitting nearest to me gasped at Avon's first shot at Blake; his arm dropped nervelessly at the second one. He'd been the one following the intensity of the Avon-Blake interactions most closely through the series.
They didn't have any coherent reaction to the episode immediately afterwards--nor did I expect it. One argued that with the sense of encroaching doom that pervades the fourth season, they were bound not to survive Blake's base anyway, even if they hadn't been picked off one by one in the final scene. After all, one gets the sense that far more Federation military are on their way than we see in the tracking gallery. On the other hand, Blake surely had a plan.
We didn't get much into the "is Avon mad?" discussion. The general consensus was "yes; saw that coming", and a couple of people observed that Blake was being stupid in how he handled Tarrant and that even with Avon as unstable as he apparently was, it needn't have ended that way (real-life constraints aside).
Many of the students watching this time around were freshmen. I'll let them alone for a while and then maybe we'll watch it again their senior year. *grin*
Claudia