What a lousy way to get rid of Cally.

This epsiode also introduces Soolin, the ship Scorpio and the ship's computer Slave.

The story is basically a sci-fi version of The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

I hear a Sea Devil from Doctor Who appears in this story. Wonder how it made its way into space?

Where the production team having a few laugths here? Firstly the "Triffids" on Terminal could be an in-joke to ex-producer David Maloney, who at the time was producing this. Also where they makig of that Dorian could become a crew member, before bumping his head he was just starting to fit in.

Presumably, this takes place shortly after Terminal, however here there is snow on the ground, but there wasn't in Terminal.

Supposedly, Servalan's ship was disabled when landing on Terminal & she needed Liberator to get off the planet. However, if she could send messages to Liberator, why not Earth, she is the President after all. Also Terminal is an artificial planet with lots of parts that can be cannibalized for repairs. (Not to mention the possibility that Terminal might have motors to move itself.)
However, once her ship crashed she just assumed that Liberator would show up & that she could get it, so we went & had the ship & base booby trapped to destroy Avon & the others.
When we see the ship here, the door is wide open & a Link finally goes inside & sets off the trap. Has this door always been open? Have the explosives always been primed, or did Servalan only activate all this just prior to teleporting up?

After the base explodes Avon mentions that he expected something like this. So why leave everyone inside the base then?

From the side Scorpio looks like a Millennium Falcon reject.

Why does Slave have blinking lights & moving parts? (When Univac was first showed to the public blinking lights were added to give the illusion that the computer was working, but they were just for show.)

Why is Dorian heading for Terminal? Did he intercept Servalan's transmissions and guess it was a trap? I don't see any other way for him to know where Liberator would be.

So why didn't Dayna warn Vila about the pit? Misery loves company?

Scorpio is identified as a Wanderer class Mark 2. We see an original Wanderer class ship in Killer & they were used 700 years earlier according to Blake.

Tarrant says that Soolin laid out 7 glasses, 1 too many, but it looked like 5 glasses & 6 would be too many.

Dorian's hair turns white. Hair turns white at the roots and has to grow out. It doesn't turn white instantly.

Dorian's purple outfit looked like one of Tarrant's.

It's said that Ensor spent the last 20 years of his life in isolation. I thought it was 40 years, according to info in either Deliverance or Orac?

Avon says that Ensor bequeathed Orac to Blake & Blake bequeathed Orac to Avon. Of course, Avon is 'stretching' the truth.

Dorian's 'mirror' looked like a modified Silurian or Sea Devil.

It's possible that Ensor had companions for the first 20 years on Aristo, but was alone with his son for the last 20 years. Yes it is a Sea Devil costume.

How long has Dorian been using the 'mirror' to prolong his existence? It's a long while since I saw the episode, so I may have forgotten some comment which shoots down this theory, but if he's been around for over 700 years, Scorpio's being a Wanderer class Mark 2 might not be a mistake.

During this time he's been able to upgrade it to keep pace with developments.

I seem to think 2 centuries at least, but I don't know if a definitive answer was given.

Blake seemed amazed to see an original Wanderer class ship & didn't expect that anyone would see one again.
However a number of people in various eps simply refer to Scorpio as an old type of freighter. So either the Mark 2's were built to last & are still in service or some manufacturer took the old Wanderer name & applied it to their (then) new ship to give some sense of nostalgia and/or quality to the 'Mark 2's'.

Airspace company McDonnell Douglas did this with the 1990s C17 Globemaster III frighter, which is named after the C87 / C124(?) Globmasters I & II of the late 1940s.

After watching this again I was suprised that Soolin never found the underground chamber.

I saw this show first time round, and instantly recognised Slave's electronics as being a computer kit which was available mail-order at the time. (Actually, it may have been a couple of years out of date by the time of this episode.)

This was when a home computer had a few hundred bytes of memory, a hex keypad and 7 segment LED display...happy days.

Terminal changes shape between episodes. In the previous episode it is shaped a bit like a rugby ball but in this one it seems to have become spherical.

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Tarrant says that Soolin laid out 7 glasses, 1 too many, but it looked like 5 glasses & 6 would be too many.
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There were 7 glasses, one for each of the crew, one each for Soolin and Dorian and the extra one which would have been for Cally.

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This was when a home computer had a few hundred bytes of memory, a hex keypad and 7 segment LED display...happy days.
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16K would have been about right - the 48K Sinclair Spectrum came out the year after this episode IIRC.

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There were 7 glasses, one for each of the crew, one each for Soolin and Dorian and the extra one which would have been for Cally.
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I thought the 7th was for Orac, working on the basis that they'd mistaken him for a person again.

And I must admit, I didn't catch the Dorian grey reference, DOH!

Oh good. I'm not the only one working through the series 4 DVDs. My only nit, other than what's been said already, is that no one really seems to care that Cally died. There's a little scene, and then they just forget. They also are pretty unphased by the destruction of the Liberator (other than trying to find a way off Terminal), the apparent death of Servalan and the announcement that Blake was dead and cremated.

I know this crew, especially Avon and Villa, have been through a lot, but that seems like a lot to take in. Avon, at least, should feel guilty about his hijacking the Liberator, resulting in Cally's death and losing the greatest ship in the known universe, not to mention all the wealth it contained.

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Oh good. I'm not the only one working through the series 4 DVDs.
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Nope

I think at least a few of these episodes may have been unused stories from earlier years. They didn't really have a lot of time between S3 and S4 to get stuff done.

Which is probably why what happens in Blake happens. They made sure they couldn't have the same thing happen again ;)

Shouldn't Oscar Wilde have gotten credit for this one?

Probably, but The Portrait Of Dorian Grey was printed in 1890 so it was long out of copyright and possibly considered well-known enough that sticking his name on the credits might have given part of the plot away to first-time viewers, or maybe British scriptwriters are so used to swiping others ideas that they just didn't think about it. ;-)

I was a first time viewer and I figured out where the inspiration for this came from halfway through.

Of course, I have The Picture Of Dorian Grey on my shelf (and have seen countless film versions of it).