From: Penberriss Wendy S. penberriss@yahoo.com

--- Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net wrote:

...

I think the difference between the two is that Deliverance, whilst betraying the sexist mindset of its author, is not actively promoting a misogynistic agenda, whereas Power is.

No, sorry Neil but Deliverance is far more misogynistic than Power. In Deliverance Meegat is totally subservient to Lord Avon. She's incapable of launching the rocket herself and requires a man to do it. The rocket is nothing more than a crude metaphor and once the gene bank is launched Avon leaves her, to die presumably.

I draw the line at considering Deliverance to be misogynistic because it doesn't endorse an active hatred of women by casting them as villains by default (as Ben Steed does with Pella in Power).

I can't say I'd considered the rocket imagery because to me a rocket is not a crude metaphor, just a big iron thing.

Does Avon leave her to die? Considering the rate at which Avon, Vila, Gan and Jenna go down with radiation sickness in the next episode, Meegat should have been bones glowing in the dark before her first birthday. So either she was radiation-tolerant (as the hairy primitives must have been), or her bunker was shielded. She was not alone, as she said to Avon:

AVON How many of your people are there? MEEGAT Less than a hundred now. Our numbers grow smaller. More die.

Unfortunately, we are not told how long ago the war was, or how many people initially survived it, so we can't calculate the rate at which people are dying off.

The real nails in the coffin of Deliverance are: (a) Why was Meegat all alone in that bunker? (b) Why didn't she try to contact others of her kind (either personally or via her visitors)? (c) How come a planet that had once been 'the trading and cultural center for this entire star system' (Ensor jr) had simply been left to rot, totally ignored by aid agencies, reconstruction projects, evacuation teams etc? What happened to the rest of the star system?

Answers are presumably: (a) To keep the script simple and the budget down. (b) As above, and besides it would scupper the plot. (c) That would have scuppered the plot too.

What we have here is a typically shoddy piece of background design by Terry Nation. With or without misogyny, it's a very silly episode.

See also my answer to Marion.

The imagery of the rocket only holds if you accept it in Freudian terms (which I don't, since I think that most so-called sexual imagery - unless deliberately designed as such - is only the imposition of a sexual connotation on an asexual object by the observer). Avon did not 'fertilise' the race, he launched the rocket containing the genetic banks, which are either self-fertilising or pre-fertilised. The analogy only works if you consider the rocket's payload in terms of sperm, which doesn't hold. You could equally well argue that the rocket holds as a womb metaphor. I tend to see it as more like a big iron stork. I hate to imagine the size of the gooseberry bush.

Neil