| NAME:
|
Jenna
Stannis |
| BORN:
|
Earth |
| RANK
/ POSITION: |
Space
Pilot |
| STATUS:
|
Outlaw |
| FIRST
APPEARANCE: |
The
Way Back - Alerts Blake to the
fact that his watch has been stolen by Vila. |
| QUIRKS:
|
Fancies
Blake. |
| INTERESTS:
|
Jewellery |
| CRIMES:
|
Smuggling
"Free Trader". |
We first meet Jenna Stannis in The Way Back, the very first episode
of Blakes 7. She is the only woman prisoner awaiting to be transported
to Cygnus Alpha, which tells us she is someone special.
She seems to take a liking
to Blake, perhaps partly because
she feels sorry for him. After all Blake
is hardly a common criminal, unlike his fellow inmates, so perhaps
Jenna feels that he’s in uncharted waters.
Clearly
Blake grows on Jenna. Not only does
she play an active role in his plan to gain control of the prison
ship London, but after they gain control of the Liberator, when Blake
teleports down to Cygnus Alpha, Jenna chooses to put her faith in
Blake, rather than taking the chance
to run off with Avon. Likewise, in
Bounty, rather than throw in her lot with some of her old ‘friends’
from the smuggling fraternity, she stays loyal to Blake,
even though this is not apparent straight away.
As the series progresses Jenna’s role tends to become more of
the damsel in distress. In Duel she’s captured by Travis,
in Deliverance by the Scavengers on Cephlon, and as result gets radiation
sickness, along with Avon, Vila
and Gan who try to rescue her. In the
second series, she does have the odd moment of glory. In Redemption,
her skill is needed to pilot the Liberator in order to make good their
escape from Spaceworld, while in Pressure Point she single handedly
forces Servalan to order the
release of the remaining members of the crew after Travis
has lured them into what they think is the Federation’s control
centre.
After
the climatic final episode of the second series, Star One, we see
no more of Jenna. I often wonder whether it is significant that Jenna
also leaves the Liberator crew at the same time as Blake,
at the end of the Second Series. Do they secretly elope? In Aftermath,
Avon learns that she has been picked
up by a freighter, but that is the last we hear of her until the final
episode of the fourth season, Blake,
where Blake tells Avon
that Jenna is now dead, a fate soon to be shared by all the others
except Avon. Blake does not elaborate
on how Jenna died, but I hope that if she did die, her death was a
heroic one.
Richard Putley
Sally
Knyvette's Entry in the Internet Movie Database
"Jenna
Stannis"
