The shots of the Federation ships are reused a lot during the series.

Avon uses a very 70s calculator. (I think Jenna does in
MTD.)

When Avon is talking about machines the camera tracking him causes light from the corridor to produce a green flare over much of the picture.

Blake asks Jenna to "Put Them Down". (Another odd teleport command is in a scene I've saw on of Clive James's shows where Avon snogs a woman then says "I'm coming up".)

Blake's notepad can act like an "electric pencil", the sort used on sports programmes.

Sinofar & Giroc have a good go at Travis.

Some scenes of Travis & The Mutoid were recorded in studio & pasted against a slide of the woods.

Look where Jenna boots the Mutoid.

Again Gan uses the medipack, we don't find out too much about his past apart from a federation soldier killing his partner, Gan killing the soldier in revenge, & being Limited & sent to Cygnus Alpha. Maybe he worked as a medic at one time.

The plot to this episode is basically the same
as TOS' ARENA and the upcoming VOYAGER episode
also entitled ARENA,where aliens capture two
opponents and set them against each other.

Great Avon Line:"Blake's up one tree and
Travis is up another..."on telling Vila why
he isn't interested in continuing to watch the
duel after night has arrived on the planet.

Actually Scott, Classic Trek's Arena was based on Fred Brown's short story Arena which had been published earlier.

Also in Tsunkatse (Voyager's Arena) the battles are for entertainment, not lessening the killing, or teaching a lesson.

Summary nits: I do not believe the duel was so that Sinofar & Giroc could learn about alien cultures. I think they were assigned to protect something & the duel was their way of determining if either side was worthy. (Although this was a poorly fleshed out issue in the episode.)
Also Jenna & the Mutoid were brought not so much to help, but to teach Travis, or Blake, a second lesson, "the death of a friend."

Early in show Travis says that the patrols have chased Blake into this galaxy. Excuse me? I thought all of the series took place within one galaxy?

This episode gives us our only in depth look at what a mutoid is like.

The Mutoid (Kiera?) needs blood plasma to function. First, the liquid in the container is green, not red. Second, is this really a more efficient way to do things? Blood plasma has to come from someone or something. (Unless this is some kind of cheap, lab produced plasma.)

The Federation ships use a plasma weapon. Did they get them from the Romulans? (In Star Trek's Balance Of Terror, the Romulans used a plasma weapon which seriously drained their energy banks.)

Anyone else think all the ships in this series are greatly underpowered? Using the forcewall for a couple of seconds drains the energy bank by 30% in this episode. Firing the neutron blasters a couple of times in The Web seriously drained the energy banks. The pursuit ships fire some plasma weapons and end up drained.

In Space Fall, the prison transport ship London was very small compared to Liberator. However, Travis's pursuit ship is closer in size to Liberator & is much, much bigger than the London. Since a prison ship's job is to transport a large group of convicts and a pursuit ship's is to track down another ship, I would expect a pursuit ship to be smaller than a prison ship.

There were two lessons to be learned in this duel, the death of an enemy & the death of a friend. The first, more specifically, was to make killing a personal, up-close thing, without the distancing that ordering a ship's computer to blast a faceless ship can give. However, the second lesson seemed to be tied into the first lesson. (Well, that's what I infered from the dialogue.) So if Blake had killed Travis, Jenna would have died. And since Travis did not kill Blake, the Mutoid was allowed to live. (At least until the court martial anyway. Blake was right, Travis had no friends.)

Jenna suggested that if they must ram Travis' pursuit ship, they should take the impact on the lower hull to minimise damage. However, it looked more like they were ramming practically head on.

When Blake was doing his pretty drawings on the viewscreen, I wondered why he and Avon didn't sit down or lean against something, cos every time the pursuit ships fired on them, they nearly fell over. Then I wondered if Blake deliberately stood where he did cos it gave him an excuse to get cuddled by Avon when Avon caught him to stop him falling over. (Well, hey, I would have done that - anything to get a cuddle from Avon!)

The production team raided the BBC Sports dept for equipment, the "Electric Pencil" for Blake's battle plans & the instand replay recorder for the slow bits.

This episode was so much like TOS Arena it was hard to watch. I mean, it was almost blow for blow with the ST version, right down to the goodie not killing the baddie when he had the chance.

Avon had some truly memorable lines in this one. Notably: "I've never understood why it is necessary to become irrational to prove you care. Or indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all."

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Avon had some truly memorable lines in this one. Notably: "I've never understood why it is necessary to become irrational to prove you care. Or indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all."
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A better one was the "Blake's sitting in a tree. Travis is sitting in a tree. Unless they're going to throw nuts at each other, nothing's going to happen until morning."

As for the aliens plan, it seems as if they were trying to find two opponents who had learned from the trial and would renounce killing, except in the direst of circumstances. Blake wouldn't kill Travis, even though he wanted to, but Travis was still looking to kill Blake, hence the "It is you who keeps us here" line at the end.

If this episode was given a Friends-esque title it would be "The One With Nipples" (check the good looking guardian- more the most part they could cut ice)