It’s that time again (Farscape time). Hopefully you’re all still with me, although I’m assuming if this is your first time through the series, you’ve already finished by now. You might have even lapped me. Anyway, I’m excited to get back into this project. I’ve really missed seeing Crichton’s handsome mug on a regular basis (and other parts of him as well). Besides, all this time away has made me think, and what I’ve concluded is that The Farscape Rewatch is basically a 200,000 word love letter to John Crichton.* And I’m okay with that.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to either of these episodes. They just seemed to be in the way of the awesomeness about to come (‘the awesomeness’ referring to the “Liars, Guns and Money” trilogy, and the beyond epic season finale, and series classic, “Die Me, Dichotomy”), but I was pleasantly surprised on both counts, especially concerning “The Ugly Truth,” which I remember being slightly bored with the first time around.

*Including this post, I have written approximately 99,880 words about this show. If I keep going at the same rate, by the end, I will have written more than 200,000 words. That is like four novels worth of words (or one novel if you’re Terry Goodkind or George R.R. Martin).

2X17 — “THE UGLY TRUTH”

Moya and her crew meet up with Talyn and Crais for the first time since “Mind the Baby.” Crais is concerned that Talyn is becoming harder to reason with and wishes to obtain a dampening net in order to prevent him from just blowing people up all the time because he’s a crazy teenage space-ship. This idea is met with confusion and hostility all around, and then before we know it, Talyn‘s fired his giant cannon at the approaching Plokavian arms-dealer ship that’s there to sell Crais his dampening net. The Plokavian ship goes BOOM, Crais and Talyn flee, and all the Moyans excepting Chiana and Rygel (who are still aboard Moya) are picked up by more Plokavians, who are intent on figuring out who is responsible for the slaughter of their fellow Plokavians and enacting justice. One by one, Aeryn, Zhaan, Stark, D’Argo, and Crichton tell their version of what happened in the moments before Talyn‘s cannon was fired. Aeryn, Zhaan, and Crichton all claim that no one is to blame and that it must have been a malfunction, while Stark blames Crais and D’Argo blames Stark. The Plokavians are frustrated that no one’s stories match exactly and threaten to execute them all for lying, until Stark steps in and takes the blame so the others might live (he does so because he believes that due to his power as a Banik, there is a chance he might survive the dispersal process). Later on Moya, while mourning Stark’s death, the others learn that it was Talyn who — having discovered that the Plokavian ship carried a substance lethal to Leviathans, and wishing to protect his mother — fired upon the Plokavian ship.

Trivia

• “The Ugly Truth” was written by Gabrielle Stanton (formerly of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and since of such shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Moonlight, and Ugly Betty) and Harry Werksman, Jr (also of Grey’s, Moonlight, and Ugly Betty; most recently he’s been linked to Castle). Stanton and Werksman were actually married at the time this episode was written, although they have since divorced. The episode was directed by Tony Tilse (“PK Tech Girl,” “Family Ties,” “The Way We Weren’t,” “Look at the Princess,” etc).
• [SPOILER!] Linda Cropper (the scary as all get-out female Plokavian, Fento) later returns as Aeryn’s mother, Xhalax Sun.
• This episode is a clear homage to the classic Japanese film Rashomon, which depicts the same story about a crime told over and over, but each time it’s told from a different character’s point of view, with slightly different details. Many other television shows have paid homage to Rashomon, including The X-Files (twice, in fact: “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” and “Bad Blood”), Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Veronica Mars, M.A.S.H., Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Leverage, and Life on Mars.
• In the interrogation scenes, the cast was actually situated above a tank of water on the studio floor.
• Dave Elsey’s makeup for the Plokavians was inspired by the creations seen in the 1977 sci-fi/horror flick The Incredible Melting Man.
• We learn the nature of the second of the six cargoes forbidden to Leviathans: Novatrin Gas, a weapon that destroys flesh from the inside out. The first to be revealed was Clorium, which can be used as a painkiller by Leviathans, in the episode “I, E.T.”
• One of the episode’s goals, according to executive producer David Kemper, was to explain a lot about Talyn and Crais, and to show Stark as someone who would literally die for the crew.

Metaphorically Speaking

Any genre show worth its salt has to pay homage to Rashomon. It’s like a law or something. A large part of this has to do with Rashomon being a classic film that provides a nice basis for an hour of television, a nice “gimmick.” But gimmick is a negative word, and for the most part, the Rashomon formula is a successful one because the ideas it necessitates just by its very premise make for engaging television. The reason that genre shows gravitate towards Rashomon, especially shows that regularly make a habit of waxing philosophical, is that questioning the nature of truth, of perception and language, is something that genre shows are always already interested in anyway. “The Ugly Truth” is certainly no “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space‘” or “Bad Blood” (probably the best examples of Rashomon homage done right), but it holds its own, and in doing so, nicely explores the group dynamics of the characters.

The episode is structured around five characters (Aeryn, Zhaan, Stark, D’Argo and Crichton) each telling their own version of the two to three minute span of events leading up to the destruction of the Plokavian ship. The style behind all of this is very different from Farscape‘s usual thing. Instead of being objective observers as audiences normally are, the shifting of the story into each character’s POV makes us complicit in the events as well. We are literally seeing through these people’s eyes. Each scene was shot through different angles, with different reaction shots, and different performances: five distinct scenes all purporting to represent the same sequence of events. Depending on which character’s POV it is, the portrayal of the other four characters is affected in different ways. Exaggerated movements and dialogue force our perspective into alignment with each character-narrator. The result of this forced perspective is that when we see Crichton through Zhaan’s eyes, for example, instead of seeing just what Zhaan believes he did or what she thought she heard him say, we are seeing him as she perceives him emotionally. We’re seeing their relationship made flesh. Aside from being fun to watch, that is just fucking nifty. Director Tony Tilse also uses way more close-up shots than is usual for a typical episode of Farscape, and more often than not, those faces are profiled against a black background, with the focus on their eyes. And he doesn’t just do this in the Plokavian house of horrors, either. He does it during each character’s POV story as well, further heightening the emotional stakes of each narrative. All of this taken together basically paints a bullseye on the overall theme of the episode.

Let’s take it person by person:

• Aeryn: In Aeryn’s version, everybody is very subdued, speaking slowly and evenly. Even their exclamations come off as somewhat rational, at least at first. Even D’Argo’s anger is slow. The rage is there, the loudness is there, but the tempo, the rhythm, is very controlled, just like Aeryn. There are other nice character touches that reveal a little something about Aeryn’s inner life. Crichton’s accent is non-existent, and Crichton makes a comment that he doesn’t make in any other characters POV. “Leave D’Argo alone!” he says. I love that this intimates a perceived boys club between Crichton and D’Argo that Aeryn feels left out of. And I love that Aeryn actually rolls her eyes at Zhaan meditating. Aeryn’s version ends with everybody dragging her out; she seems to turn on Crais at the end, even though the whole time she seemed to have been agreeing with him.
• Zhaan: Lots and lots of close-ups in this one, mostly on Zhaan herself, as if she’s examining the situation. She slips in a line of about how the Plokavians are very advanced in technology, obviously buttering them up, and portrays the crew as giving in quickly to Crais’s plan, which the Plokavians don’t buy. There is a lot of violent language from D’Argo, meekness from John, submissiveness from Stark. Between certain pairs of characters, i.e. D’Argo and John, and Stark and Zhaan herself, there’s a definite touchy-feely vibe which plays nicely with Zhaan’s spiritual intuition. It’s interesting that Zhaan straight up lies; also interesting is that she does so very badly. Everybody is overacting and unnatural, which reflects the false nature of Zhaan’s story. In the end, she haltingly concludes, like Aeryn, that it must have been an accident, that it was nobody’s fault.
• Stark: Everything is very tense from the moment they step aboard Talyn. People are suspicioius and hostile. Crichton is openly so, as is D’Argo. Crais is rather menacing, reflecting Stark’s distrust of Peacekeepers. Stark introduces a new plot twist for the Plokavians, that Crais cut off his deal with them, and then fired Talyn‘s weapons himself. By doing this, he lays the blame squarely on Mr. Ponytail’s shoulders. He says the others are lying in order to protect Talyn, whom they don’t wish to see disintegrated. The question we as viewers have at this point is whether he is saying this because he knows the Plokavians will never be able to find Talyn (thus putting the blame on someone who can’t be punished), or whether he’s trying to sacrifice himself on purpose by making himself look incredibly guilty, for whatever reason. Either way, it’s an interesting juxtaposition that Stark and Zhaan are both the obvious liars and the spiritual beings of the group.
• D’Argo: D’Argo’s version begins with Stark raving, upset about the barbarian Plokavians, builders of “horrific weapons.” Crichton is acting like a self-important tiny man, an inferior trying to be superior. D’Argo portrays himself as the leader whom Crichton agrees with. In D’Argo’s mind, he was standing front and center with the others in the background (whereas in all the others’ versions, Crichton held this position). His version introduces the novatrin gas which will “eat you from the inside out.” D’Argo, likely because he just really doesn’t like Stark, tells the Plokavians that it was Stark who pushed the button. D’Argo’s version is the most unselfconsciously clouded (likely because of his anger). I believe he genuinely thinks Stark to blame.

So, what is the truth? Not surprisingly, when faced with the Plokavian’s questions, Crichton is the only one who calls them on it. He says they’ll never know what really happened because “nobody sees things the exact same way.” (“We do,” the creepy pus-heads respond.) He talks them down from basically just killing everyone by saying that he’ll tell them, not the truth, but the truth as he sees it. And that will have to be good enough. Crichton’s version is different. Because he gets to hear his friends’ testimonies (projected on his face, in a cool bit of cinematography) he gets to piece it together, which is fitting for his character. Maybe I’m just biased, but Crichton’s version of events seems the most accurate to me. He is the one that sees things, the most perceptive. Because he’s able to see and understand so much of what’s going on around him at any given time, and because he’s aware of how much a person’s emotions affect how they perceive events, of course his version would be the most accurate. But that’s just my interpretation.

No matter how accurate Crichton’s version of events may be, the point is that we can never know how accurate it might be, how accurate any of their stories might be, not fully. This episode is pushing a lot buttons, about the unreliability of memory, and of language to express it (even if an idea is clearly expressed to convey meaning — and that’s a big if — it’s still not reliable because of the human mind behind it, forming the words); about how memories are always, always influenced by emotion; and about how much of we see is based on a projection of what we think we’re going to see, or about what we want to see. (Remember, Cylon psychology is based on projection.) Is perception lying? How can we tell the difference between lies and differences of perception? How can we ever really trust one another? According to Crichton, humans have no central “truths” because we are incapable of forming memory without being influenced by our own experiences. So, if there is an impersonal “truth” out there to be found, we can’t know it, at least not on our own. That’s what communities are for, for sharing perspectives and agreeing on common truths. That’s how truths are made. Hell, that’s how stories are made.

Other stuff: Crichton is jealous of Crais; he thinks he shares a bond with Aeryn, because of Talyn, and because of the Peacekeeper thing. And UGH, they’re so manly and masculine about it it, it’s disgusting. The “Plakovoids” are yet another example of Crichton being unable to get alien names right. The first time he did it was back in “Throne For a Loss,” I believe. He calls the Tavleks “Tavloids.” What is with Crichton and “-oids”? It’s fitting that D’Argo is the only who got it really wrong (the others were either lying or fibbing gently to conceal the “truth,” which varies for each person). It was Talyn who destroyed the Plakovian ship, not Stark, but D’Argo’s still so hot-headed; he’s unwilling to see beyond his own perception. Hey, look, it’s a patented Crichton scream: “AEEERRYYYN!!” Is that the first time we’ve had one of those? What saves this episode from being a ‘meh’ episode of Farscape is the emotional center provided by Stark. His sacrifice and eventual dispersal radiate out from that one moment, coloring our memories of his actions in the rest of the episode. It’s fitting then that the episode doesn’t end with the characters wondering about what really happened aboard Talyn, thus placing more emphasis on the problem represented by the Plakovians  — that would have been the easy way out. Instead, the episode concludes with the image of Stark’s empty mask. I’d imagine if you’re not really a fan of Stark, or if you don’t like episodes that seem so overtly repetitive, then you’re not much of a fan of “The Ugly Truth.” While this episode certainly is no series classic, I think it’s certainly a solid effort from Team Sex Muppet* that holds up pretty well even ten years later.

*Coining it!

Trash Bin

The interrogation chair is a joke. Who’s idea was that thing? I get what they were going for, I really do. The giant eye staring at them? Yes, it’s thematically appropriate, but really? I mean, first of all it’s okay when the men are sitting in it, sort of. But when a woman is sitting in it, I’m just like: ‘Hell-O, gynecologist! Are we doing a PAP SMEAR TODAY?’ The fact that the eyeball is pointed almost at crotch level certainly doesn’t help, either. Also, the female Plokavian’s neck looks like a vagina. I wish I was joking.

Chiana’s gray body suit has been showing lately. It didn’t bug me the first time through the series. I don’t even think I noticed it, actually, but I hope they get a handle on it soon. It’s distracting.

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2X18 — “A CLOCKWORK NEBARI”

Crichton, Aeryn, Chiana, and Rygel are fresh from hunting information about the whereabouts of D’Argo’s son. Crichton and Chiana are arguing about the interesting means Chiana used in procuring said information, forcing Rygel and Aeryn to stay behind and cover their retreat. While they’re arguing, Aeryn and Rygel enter, strangely calm. They’re acting like deranged space hippies, and for good reason: they ran into some Nebari who treated them to the pleasures of a temporary mind cleanse, and they want Chiana. The female, Varla, is the designated HBIC, now that she’s taken Aeryn out of the picture, and the male, Meelak, is her subordinate. They quickly subdue the crew and begin subjecting the rest of them to the mind cleanse — a truly horrifying process involving a removal of one’s eyeballs from one’s skull and a drug injected into one’s optic nerve, and which we get to see in full bloody color — leaving Chiana hanging in one of Moya‘s cells. While all of this is going on, we get some much-needed back-story from Chiana. Years ago, the government of Nebari Prime let Chiana and Nerri — along with hundreds, maybe thousands of other young, rebellious Nebari — believe that they had escaped their planet, when in fact they let them all escape after infecting them with a contagion designed to eventually subdue a large chunk of the galaxy. When Crichton realizes the cleanse doesn’t affect him, and that Rygel has quickly metabolized the drug, he sets about fucking up the Nebari’s shit. In the midst of this, we learn that not only is Meelak a member of the resistance, but Nerri is alive, and the leader of the Nebari resistance, which is why they wanted Chiana so badly, believing they could use her to find him. The episode ends with Crichton and Pilot staging a Peacekeeper attack, and Meelak shooting Varla in the back. He then leaves to continue his spy work for the resistance, refusing to take a broken-hearted Chiana with him.

Trivia

• “A Clockwork Nebari” was written by Lily Taylor (who at the time was a script and story editor for the series — this was her first script; she would go on to write one more in the show’s third season, after which she was promoted to associate producer), and directed by Rowan Woods (who also directed “A Human Reaction,” and has most recently worked as a director on the wonderfully disgusting and epic Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which also films in Australia).
• The title “A Clockwork Nebari” is an reference to the 1962 Novel, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess in which violent impulses were tortured out of the main character, Alex, through a process called Ludovico’s Technique, where the subject learns to associate violence with pain. It was later made in to a movie by Stanley Kubrick. The mind cleansing is almost identical visually to the procedure in the film.
• Simon Bossell (Nerri) uses an American accent that Gigi Edgley originated for Chiana, in order to indicate his non-brainwashed nature.
• This is the first episode where we see Crichton’s favorite pulse pistol, Winona. The pistol is named after actress Winona Ryder, and was apparently an addition by Browder himself. It was not in the script.
• Although the human eye can be pulled out of its socket, it is not possible for the eye, attached to the optic nerve, to be pulled out as far as is shown with Crichton. Presumably some Nebari or Delvian healing technology must have also been used, otherwise the area around Crichton’s eyes should have been severely bruised.
• According to Claudia Black, ADR engineer Angus Robertson wondered if she had really taken drugs to give such a convincing performance as spaced-out Aeryn.

Metaphorically Speaking

“A Clockwork Nebari” is basically “Durka Returns” Redux, minus Rygel’s emotional baggage, and then multiplied by one thousand. What I mean by that is that the Nebari as portrayed in “Durka Returns” are like tame pandas compared to the rabid, world-dominating pandas that this episode shows them to be (thanks to Dan for the panda image . . . I tried to think of a better one, but couldn’t, so instead I am stealing it from you). This episode really makes clear what the last one didn’t, that the Nebari are a powerful force in this part of the galaxy. They come off as actually threatening, rather than quaint and delusional. I say this, of course, well aware that we never hear from the Nebari again in the rest of the series, so while an effect of the episode is to make us aware of the potential threat those cheeky little Nebari and their Sexually Transmitted Totalitarianism* pose to the galaxy, the more important and lasting effect is how the episode furthers Chiana as a character, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the crew and the philosophy of the show.

*A distant relative of Sexually Transmitted Crazy-Mouth.

Actually, what this episode does with Chiana is threefold. First, on a storytelling level, it provides her with some much needed back-story. Until this point, we’ve known exactly three concrete facts about Chiana’s life pre-Moya: 1) That she had a brother she was close to, 2) That her brother died, and 3) That according to her own people, she is a runaway and and/or a criminal. Of course, we had assumptions about what most of that entailed (sexual promiscuity, theft, refusal to assimilate . . . that kind of thing), but we never had much in the way of specifics. Now that we have those specifics, things are a little clearer. We learn that Nebari Prime secretly manipulated wayward youth into leaving Nebari, while allowing them to believe in the illusion of their own escape, an escape which was, unknown to them, sponsored by the very people and institutions they were attempting to escape from. Chiana and Nerri’s bodies are used as weapons, to spread the contagion that if activated would supposedly subdue a large part of the galaxy and make it ready for Nebari domination. That they are using the transgressive behaviors of their problem citizens is frankly genius, using the very traits they are trying to eliminate in order to eliminate them. Which brings me the second level of Chiana-ness in this episode, which is the unbelievable level of wrongness achieved by taking what’s good about Chiana and what defines her as a person — her freedom, her fluidity, her inability to be bound by convention, and the paradoxical innocence that seems to follow from all of that — and using it to harm the universe. Suddenly, everything Chiana did up until she discovered and freed herself from the contagion becomes contaminated by the malignant motives of those who infected her with it. It’s like she never escaped at all.

Chiana and the crew of Moya are prime examples of how somebody can be a prisoner without actually being physically imprisoned. They are prisoners of circumstance, of unchangeable systems and power hierarchies. This is the third level of Chiana-ness in “A Clockwork Nebari.” Like it’s namesake, A Clockwork Orange, this episode is concerned with exploring the intersection between powerful, controlling forces and individual human bodies and minds, and as I talked about extensively in my “Durka Returns” post, with the connection between morality and the power of choice. The Nebari government believes it can create the perfect state, made up of perfect, obedient, happy and sin-free citizens by imposing its power on those citizens, by taking away their ability to do evil. They aren’t seeking genuine loyalty or peace of mind for their citizens; they’re simply interested in control. It all hits home for me in that last scene, where with one line, Crichton manages to tie up all the loose threads of this episode into one satisfying package. “I know,” he says, with almost no inflection in his voice or expression on his face, “But since when do people like us get what we want?” Browder’s delivery of this line is just heartbreaking. People like them, the powerless, disenfranchised, impoverished delinquents, who have almost no hope of gaining legitimacy in any kind of civilized society, all they have is what they were born with. That, and each other.

And so, once again, the Moyans are on the bottom of the heap. They aren’t the heroes, at least not in the traditional sense. They are the face of powerlessness, which is why it is absolutely perfect that this episode includes such a plethora of disgusting bodily functions and fixations from various characters. The Nebari are all about perfection and control; the Moyans are about farting and sexing and grabbing and grunting. The Moyans are about thieving and loving and eating, burping, flailing and screaming and going crazy, balls out in the wind. The Nebari have nothing but boundaries, and the Moyans have none. If one of our crew does something bad, no law will punish them, and the only thing stopping them from committing foul deeds of whatever sort against one another is their own in-bred sense of decency, their affection for each other. You take away their ability to do any of those things, as the Nebari do in this episode? You pull out their eyeballs and take away their flaws, the things that make them individuals and not automatons? You are doing something evil. If our memories, our flaws and our experiences, make us who we are, then the reason Aeryn smiling is so scary is because it means she’s forgotten the thing that makes her her. Aeryn doesn’t smile because she’s in pain and she has regrets, but that pain is helping her to grow as a person. The reason that D’Argo crying isn’t funny is because if he had a choice in the matter, he would never act that way (even though I want very, very badly to laugh at that scene). And it’s the reason that it’s so fitting that Crichton fights back against the Nebari by claiming control over his own body at every turn: proving his own sanity by punching (and then groping) Chiana, talking like a stoner, throwing Rygel around. It’s also why his being saved by Harvey once again is so threatening. If there is a spectrum of control, the Nebari would be on one end, threatening to take away your flaws and control you by limiting, and Harvey would be on the other, threatening to control you by taking away your ability to control yourself. Insanity is what happens when you have no boundaries at all, and it’s so genius that this episode gives us both at the same time.

Other stuff: Loved Winona shooting blanks; is that a metaphor for anything, you think? Except for a couple scenes, there’s not much of Aeryn, D’Argo or Zhaan in this episode; it’s all about Chiana and Crichton. I always love it when the Chiana/Crichton relationship gets pushed to the forefront. Those two are so good together. And I love how Crichton calling Chiana “my little trollop” is contrasted with his calling Varla a “foul skank” later. Similar word choice, much different meaning. I had a realization during this episode that 99% of the time I’m watching, it doesn’t register on a conscious level that Pilot is not real. I only remembered he was a puppet this time because of the scene when the Nebari collar digs into his neck. All the time that was happening, I was thinking how much it looked like it hurt, and then, oh yeah. He’s not real, fool. Also loved the small continuity of Crichton being a mama’s boy. And lastly, just because: John Crichton. Astronaut. Master of the Universe.

Trash Bin

Gigi Edgley, whom I love, does overact just a bit in some most of her scenes, particularly the ones involving severe emotional pain. If she would have toned it down just a little bit even, this episode would have been absolutely devastating. Instead, the most emotionally devastating reaction comes from Browder, who completely steals the last scene away from her — and it’s supposed to be her moment. It’s still a very nice moment (see below), but it could have been even nicer. Then again, Varla threatens to fall into melodrama every now and then as well, so maybe it’s just a Nebari female thing . . . ? Nope, total Fanwank.

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Crichtonisms

• “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
• “Chiana, my little trollop, he will care.”
• “No, my thoughts are as dirty as ever.”
• “No, Pilot, I’m here to tell you that the Nebari are a bunch of GEEKS, and their damn mind-cleansing don’t work on Mama Crichton‘s baby boy. John Crichton! Astronaut! Master of the Universe!”
• “We would Starburst away from your rendezvous point . . . you foul skank.”

PuppetWatch!

• The Plokavians are absolutely disgusting, and their voices are great: screechy and preachy. Their faces are deformed and lopsided, and they drip pus (GUH). There’s something wonderful about so awful a creature trying to uphold moral order.
• Rygel’s looking a bit shiny in “The Ugly Truth.” New/old puppet skin?
• Rygel: “I’m nobody’s puppet!” Puppet meta-humor!

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“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• Interstellar Swearing:  “Bleefiks,” is used by Chiana (as in “chattering away like a couple of bleefiks”), possibly analogous to monkeys? “Grobash” is a derogatory name, used by Chiana as well.
• Pop Culture References: A Clockwork Orange, Gunsmoke, Winona Ryder, the O.K. Corral, The $100,000 Pyramid, Debbie Harry/Blondie, Star Trek‘s Prime Directive, The Full Monty, The Three Stooges, John Belushi.
• Like Rashomon, another story that genre shows are fond of spoofing is “The Naked Time,” a first season episode of the original Star Trek, which finds its characters influenced into hilarious mind-altering behavior. Examples from other shows are too numerous to name. Farscape alone did several takes on the “The Naked Time” concept, probably the best known of which is “Crackers Don’t Matter.”
• The camera work in “The Ugly Truth” is wonderful (which is saying something, I think, as the monotony of the episode’s sets leaves a little something to be desired). It’s not something you really notice unless you’re looking for it, because it’s so simple and understated. Just faces against black, hands on surfaces, people in chairs . . . simple things lit beautifully.
• It’s the debut of Aeryn’s pony-braid in “The Ugly Truth.” Man, do I hate that thing. But as much as I hate it, it is symbolically relevant. All that hair so tightly pulled back and in control . . . yeah. I could actually probably write an entire essay about the evolution of Aeryn’s hair and wardrobe in relation to her growth as a character (95% sure that I won’t, though).
• In “The Ugly Truth” when John notes that they’re all going to have to go to the bathroom soon enough, D’Argo laughs at first, and then after the briefest of pauses, says: “I really wish you hadn’t said that.”
• I can’t tell you how much I love that everyone in Crichton’s version of events says “Plakovoids” instead of “Plakovians,” and that the Plakovians don’t even object to Crichton’s mangling of their name.
• After D’Argo and Aeryn are knocked out by the electricity in “A Clockwork Nebari,” Crichton says “Bitchin.’” What makes this scene even better is when, just barely before we cut out, we hear Rygel repeat it.
• I love it when Crichton calls the mind-cleanse “The Nebari Prime Directive.” He’s such a punny guy.
• John Crichton. Astronaut. Master of the Universe.
• Number of times each character has “died” as of “A Clockwork Nebari”: Crichton, 9; D’Argo, 4; Rygel, 3; Aeryn, 2; Zhaan, 1; Pilot, 1; Moya, 1; Chiana, 1; Stark, 1 (+1 for being dispersed by the Plokavians).

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Classic Moments in Farscape, #20

[Meelak is about to board his ship, when Chiana comes running into the cargo bay.]
Chiana: I’m coming with you.
Meelak: Nerri asked me not to bring you. [He turns to face her.] He’s my leader; I do what he says.
Chiana: [Running to catch up with him.] Hey, hey, hey, hey. Nerri doesn’t know what he’s talking about, alright? I’m three cycles younger than him, and I had to teach him how to, how to cinch his shoes.
Meelak: I figure if I limp across the Nebari boundary, and tell them everybody else was killed they might believe me. And, I still have information vital to the resistance.
Chiana: [Interrupting, yelling.] But I want to help!
Crichton: [Comes in from behind, and she turns away from Meelak to face him.] Chiana. He’s right. It’s for the best; if you go into Nebari territory you will be recognized and arrested.
Chiana: Nerri’s alive. I just, I want to see him.
Crichton: I understand. But you cannot compromise what he’s doing. Your brother’s alive. He’s alive. Take that. It’s more than you had yesterday.
Chiana: I want to go to him.
Crichton: I know. But since when do people like us get what we want?
[The sound of Meelak's ship makes Chiana turn around. She realizes while they were talking, Meelak took the opportunity to leave unnoticed. The ship takes off and Crichton folds a crying Chiana up in his arms. They walk away.]

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Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Liars, Guns and Money,” Parts I-III

It’s the second week of October already, and I was really hoping to have gotten through season two by now. I was really hoping also that I wouldn’t have just completely stopped writing in this blog for two months (honestly, the only thing that brought me back was Bones, and that was only because a certain person practically begged me to), but life sometimes gets in the way. My life in particular is an asshole that way, and that’s not going to change any time soon. I started studying for my Masters exams last week, and I don’t anticipate having much time for anything else. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about this project yet, but I do know that I want to get through Farscape season two before I make any final decisions.

Which brings us to “The Locket.” It’s a pretty simple episode, as these things go. But in its simpleness, there’s a great deal of pleasure to be found. As I noted in my last Farscape post, this episode is a favorite of mine. It’s not that there’s anything particularly stunning going on here, just the pleasure of watching a really well-executed story, one with strong, quiet moments that sneak up on you.

2X16 — “THE LOCKET”

Moya and her crew encounter a strange stellar mist floating in an uncharted region of space and stop to investigate. Aeryn has gone out scouting in one of Moya‘s pods and the rest of the crew is waiting for her to return. When we join them, they’ve been waiting for an entire solar day and are starting to get worried that something has happened to her. When she finally does return, she seems to have aged decades and claims to have lived out her life on the planet below, with children and grandchildren, and she urges the Moyans to get out of there while they still can. They’re just like WHAT IN THE FUZZY HELL and think she’s all delusional and stuff. When she escapes, Crichton follows her down to the planet, which is dumb, because he’s stuck, too. The hole in the stellar mist that Moya is resting in only opens up every eight hours for them — but eight hours in Moya time is fifty-five years down on the planet. Aeryn takes Crichton to her home to meet her family, and they grow old together. Meanwhile, all this time Aeryn has been wearing an old locket that Chiana gave her, and when Crichton becomes curious about it, she tells him that the picture inside is of the love of her life. Crichton won’t look inside; he claims he doesn’t want to see her dead husband’s ugly face. When it comes time for the hole to open up, Crichton and Aeryn return to Moya, but Aeryn dies in the pod on the way up. Crichton is devastated, and when he opens the locket, he sees his own face. With Aeryn dead, the Moyans have to focus on getting out of the mist, which is hardening around them. They do so by reverse starbursting. How this is supposed to make any sense is beyond me. Just go with it. Once everything has been reversed, Zhaan and Stark — who made some mystical hoodoo earlier — remember everything and warn the others not to head into the mist. Meanwhile, Crichton and Aeryn puzzle over the crumbling remains of the picture in Aeryn’s locket. It is so torturous.

Trivia

• “The Locket” was written by Justin Monjo (the man simultaneously responsible for “A Human Reaction” and “Taking the Stone”), and directed by Ian Watson.
• Paul Goddard begins his first brief return to the series as Stark. According to Ben Browder in the DVD commentary, a scene explaining why Stark had returned was written but cut; the scene also would have established a romantic connection between Stark and Zhaan which is heavily implied in later scenes in the episode.
• The outdoor scenes were filmed at Sydney’s Centennial Park.
• The scene where Chiana originally gave Aeryn the locket was scripted but never filmed.
• To make Ben Browder and Claudia Black look old, the makeup department used Hot Flesh, the same stuff used for Scorpius’ makeup.
• As he follows Aeryn through the grove, John sings a traditional sea shanty known as “The Maid of Amsterdam.”
• When Zhaan and Stark ask Old John to go to command, the line as scripted and performed by Browder was, “I’m too old for this shit.” According to Browder’s commentary for the episode, in dubbing (ADR), he was asked to replace the expletive with the word “ship”, but in the end “shit” remained in the final edit (though presumably not the version aired on Sci-Fi). It is one of only a couple of occasions in which a strong expletive has been heard on the series without it being replaced by a substitute word like “frell” or “dren.”
• The DVD commentary by Black and Browder actually contains examples of real-life foreshadowing. The recording was made soon after Black had made her first appearance as Vala on Stargate SG-1. Browder and Black riff on this, with Browder poking fun at Black’s Stargate co-star Michael Shanks, effectively calling Shanks’ Stargate character a Crichton wannabe. Afterwards, Browder ended up being cast in Stargate SG-1 alongside Black, whose character graduated from recurring to a regular, and in the anniversary episode “200″, they had a chance to parody Farscape — with Shanks playing Crichton.
• [SPOILER] Though it initially appears that everyone but Stark and Zhaan forget the events of the episode, and they’re never mentioned again, this is slightly appeased in season Three’s “The Choice”, when Aeryn remembers some of the events from here in that episode, also written by Justin Monjo.

Metaphorically Speaking

I think the first question to ask about this episode is: What’s the point? It’s a question we ask ourselves about all TV episodes that give us major revelations only to take them back by the end of the episode (the famous “reset button“). Most of the characters don’t even remember the events of the episode by the next go-round, so again, what’s the point? The one episode that comes to mind (although I am sure there are many, many others) is “Tempus Fugitive” from the second season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. In that episode, Lois and Clark travel back in time to save Clark as a baby from a supervillain intent on preventing Superman from ever existing. Of course, Lois learns that Clark is really Superman and there’s drama and growing and all that romantic stuff that you would expect and the story is moving forward! Only, by an act of insane troll logic on the part of the writers, when they are dropped back in time it is “before the events of the episode,” so they won’t remember any of it. Beyond the fact that this makes absolutely NO SENSE in any possible universe, what is the point? I have two answers: 1) It’s fun and it’s entertaining — this should be a good enough answer, but on top of that we also have: 2) The fact that even though the characters don’t necessarily “remember” the events of the episode, what we learn about them as characters doesn’t go away, and the possible future that we see is very revealing (significantly more so in Farscape, which is — despite my love for L&C — a higher quality of show in almost every regard). In fact, the whole thing is secretly about the importance of possibility.

So, what do we learn about John Crichton and Aeryn Sun? And–even though they forget by the end of the hour–what do they learn about each other? We get to see them at the end of their lives, a time of life when it’s natural to reflect on everything that’s come before: regrets, what was really important . . . In both cases, what we see is kind of unexpected. Aeryn — the Warrior with a capital ‘W’, the closed book — married and raised a family. She “had three sons and watched them die.” She has grandchildren. We even get to meet one: a grown woman, named Ennix. And she seems pretty okay with it, for the most part, except for the little crinkles of sadness she lets slip through every now and then. She’s around 250 years old by the time she dies in Moya‘s pod. She’s lived an entire life. Hell, even before she lives those last fifty-five years out with Crichton, she’s practically done. And through the whole thing, she wears that locket . . . but I’ll get back to that later.  As for Crichton — the domestic one, the homebody — he’s miserable. Completely and utterly despondent, and only still alive because of Aeryn, if we’re to believe him (which I do). The events of this episode make it clear to us that as much as Crichton wishes to go back to Earth, his new home is on Moya, journeying through the stars. He could never be confined to just one planet again. And of course, he realizes by the end that Aeryn loved him, and he never told her he felt the same way. Again, I’ll cover this in more detail later.

The main focus of this episode is the John/Aeryn romantic relationship. It’s been hinted before, but we get confirmation for the first time that Aeryn loves Crichton. It’s hard for me to remember when I didn’t know this, but we didn’t always know it, and neither did Crichton. But what I think is great about the way they handle the whole “love of my life” issue is that they kind of sneak up to it, sidle up to it if you will. Until that scene in the forest (see below for Classic Moment #19), we have no idea why this episode is called “The Locket.” It’s kind of a red herring. And then Aeryn busts out with her speechifying, taunting Crichton to open the locket and see her true love’s face, but he can’t. He wants to, but if he opens it and it’s not his own face in there, then he’s done. He’d rather just not know. That the locket is the central image of this episode tells us that it’s not really about death or aging or time travel or any of the other technical things going on here; it’s not even really about love. Aeryn and John aren’t together in this possible future. Sure, they’re together in a companion-ate sense, but the relationship is decidedly unfulfilled by the time Aeryn dies in Crichton’s arms — which, by the way, is the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, except for ten seconds later when he opens the fucking locket. Their lives in this possible timeline are just a culmination of one missed possibility after another. Crichton in this moment physically kills me, for two reasons. First, it’s like when one of your grandparents dies — your totally in love, married for fifty-five years grandparents — and the other one just loses it because their partner, their constant, is just gone. Even without being in a romantic relationship, it’s blatantly obvious that older Crichton and Aeryn were as close as two people could get, understanding and supporting one another, and they’re so freaking cute together. “Damn, baby,” says Crichton, “I miss you already. Who else am I gonna tell this crap to?” She was his person. She can’t be replaced. Which brings me to the second thing, which is the unfulfilled possibility that her death represents. The moment he opens that locket and sees his own face, he knows that he should have looked sooner, that their life together could have been very different, and that they’ll never get it back. It’s fucking tragical.

But it’s not just about unfulfilled romantic potential, although that’s the certainly the climax of it. The whole dang episode is full of possibility. The locket is the perfect example. Crichton doesn’t open the locket when Aeryn tells him to, not just because he’s afraid it won’t be him in there, but because the second he does, the possibility of what is in there, the dream, the image he has in his head, will be gone forever. If he never opens it, he never has to lose hope. Of course, as we see in the end, because he never opened it, he missed out on a host of other possibilities. This is how we live our lives. We don’t want to know anything for sure, because we don’t like knowing our own limits. We don’t like knowing we’re only human, that we’ll die some day. We don’t like having our fantasies stripped away. We don’t like being shown that we’re living in a dream world. It’s the same reason that Crichton is so miserable stuck on that planet, full of nothing but gardeners. What is it about Ben Browder that resists being put in a cage? Aeryn is a realist; it’s why she’s able to survive down on that planet, adapt, but Crichton is a dreamer. He doesn’t do well in cages because he can still see what he’s missing, he can feel it. It’s about possibilities for him, about being able to move around and experience things, it’s about not being stuck in one place, limited. Done.

Probably my favorite moment of the episode is when he tells Aeryn, “I was what I wanted to be. I ain’t gonna forget that.” John Crichton is a man who knows exactly who he is and what he wants, so to be trapped on this planet as far away from that identity is just about the worst thing that could happen to him. Aeryn, on the other hand, was just discovering who she is, just molding herself into the person she was going to become. We do get that lovely moment from her at the end: “I am a Peacekeeper. I was born in space and I will die in space.” She and Crichton are more alike than they realize, I think. They’re both not meant to be chained in one place. They’re meant to be up there, exploring the universe. Their home isn’t down on the ground, it’s on Moya. This is actually made explicit just before they head back: “Let’s get back to Moya,” says Aeryn. “Going home! Goin’ home,” replies John. Not ten episodes before this, “home” meant Earth, humanity. But he can’t ever go back there, not really. Not now that he’s seen what’s out there, the universe full of possibility he has left to explore. And then, at the very end of the episode, both of them stare in confusion at the crumbled contents of Aeryn’s locket, and only we know what it used to contain, what it will contain. That crumbled locket represents the future; they just don’t know it yet.

Other stuff: I love the southern accent out in full force, the older and crazier Crichton gets. It’s such a nice touch. And the fact that Harvey is still with him all this time just adds to the crazy. I love the moment when Aeryn tells Crichton that she’s forgotten how young and beautiful he was; it’s just so astoundingly sad. Crichton IS young and beautiful, but he’s not going to remain that way. It’s 165 years later for Aeryn, and he’s this ghost out of her past, something she thought she’d never see again. I can’t even describe it properly. And even though I’m about to complain about time travel down below, I do have to say that there are nice touches all the way through the episode that make it feel real, despite its ridiculousness. Like the locket, and the plant that Zhaan gives Aeryn for her headache growing wild all over the pod. I love the “shit” Browder just threw in there, even though he wasn’t supposed to, an early example of minor swear words on cable? The return of Naked Zhaan Meditation Hour is also a nice bit of continuity, and the return of Stark. I’m normally pretty apathetic about Farscape‘s score, but it’s pretty haunting in this episode, less techno, more sad. There’s also a pretty significant Chiana/D’Argo moment when they both realize that D’Argo wants more from Chiana than she’s willing to give. “We’re not gonna make it, are we?” she says. But this conversation is erased. We’re the only ones who remember them having this revelation, so we can sense what’s coming by the end of the season before they can. And lastly, I just have to mention, Crichton and Aeryn, man, they just have kids floating out in space everywhere. If the mist really was a center halo, then there’s a pretty strong chance that Aeryn’s sons were still born, and that there are now descendants of Aeryn living out their lives while she remains perfectly unaware of it. I think that might be even worse than Crichton and the daughter he’ll never meet.

Trash Bin

Old people make-up always makes people look ugly. Why is that? Contrary to popular opinion, most old people aren’t ugly. Also, most old people aren’t as wrinkly as most make-up artists (at least television ones) seem to think they are. (Unless they’re smokers. Don’t smoke, kids. Your neck will end up looking like a vagina.)

Why no sexy times for Aeryn and Crichton? They had fifty-five years down there; what else were they gonna do? Missed opportunity. I guess they were both too old and ugly to start anything new? But it’s not even like they’ve never done it before! They totally have. It probably would have taken away from the impact of the ending, though, so it makes sense. I just felt like complaining for no reason?

Time travel, time travel, TIME TRAVEL, I HATE YOU YOU MAKE NO SENSE! So many logical inconsistencies in this episode. I suppose the reverse Starburst thing MIGHT make sense if I squint really hard, but the crumbled locket picture (as moving as it is) should just not be there at all. And does this mean that Aeryn’s children and grandchildren still exist out there, or did that get reversed as well? You have to suspend a lot of disbelief for this episode, but it’s worth it to me for what we get out of it.

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Crichtonisms

• “Don’t you ‘Old Man’ me, woman! You’re two hundred cycles older than I am!”
• “I was what I wanted to be. I ain’t gonna forget that.”
• “Pilot can you hear me? Pilot, anyone, can you pick up the damn phone, you useless pieces of sh– !”
• “I am too old for this shit!”

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“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• A Farscape Glossary: “Snurching” is slang for stealing.
• It’s in this episode that we’re first introduced to the fact that Aeryn as a Sebacean will age much more slowly than Crichton. She could possibly outlive him by 150 years, and that is just really sad for her, and for him. It’s Superman and Lois Lane all over again! (I’m sure there are other examples, but that’s the first one that comes to mind.) Aeryn is going to stay young and hot for twice as long as Crichton. I’m sure Crichton doesn’t mind this at all . . . but we see what Aeryn gets to deal with in the future: a crotchety, pervy, Southern old geezer. At least he’ll probably be nicer than the Old John we see here, because he won’t be stuck on a stupid planet instead of traveling around the galaxy. Probably.
• I love how this shot mirrors this shot; one at the beginning, and one at the end. Ooh! And this one with this one.
• I love this. I just love it: “Aeryn? We’re gonna try to get out of this. I told ‘em our plan, and, uh . . . well. Aw, baby. There are so many . . . places that I wanted you to see. People. There’s this lake in Maine. Used to spend summers there when I was a kid. Had more mosquitoes than a dog had fleas. Dad and I, we’d camp out there. One night, the astronauts landed on the moon. I remember looking up at the sky — I knew right then what I was gonna do with the rest of my life. I couldn’t have been more than four years old. Huh. Yeah, I really wanted you to see that. Damn, baby. I — I miss you already. Who else am I gonna tell this crap to? I love you.”
• And of course, then he opens the locket and sees his own face staring back. It’s too late now.
• The grove of purple trees was a really nice choice for the setting. It’s very pretty and very calm. Very unexciting, but beautiful. Beautiful and useless.
• Number of times each character has “died” as of “The Locket”: Crichton, 9; D’Argo, 4; Rygel, 3; Aeryn, 2 (+1 for dying of old age in Crichton’s arms); Zhaan, 1; Pilot, 1; Moya; 1; Chiana, 1.

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Classic Moments in Farscape, #19

[Old Aeryn and Old Crichton are walking in the grove. Crichton is singing about roving with maidens. They stop to rest by a couple of tree stumps.]
Crichton: Ennixx and that sleepin’ pill she married have arrived.
Aeryn: He’s not that bad.
Crichton: He’s boring, just like everything else around here. B-o-o-ring.
Aeryn: Well, I warned you. I tried to make you go back.
Crichton: I know you did.
Aeryn: I gave up being who I was, what I was, a hundred cycles ago. Why haven’t you?
Crichton: ’cause I ain’t a gardener. I never wanted to be one. That’s all we do around here — garden. Plant things. I was a pilot, Aeryn. Astronaut. I was what I wanted to be. I ain’t goin’ to forget that, and I can’t accept this.
Aeryn: Do you regret this?
Crichton: What?
Aeryn: [pauses before she answers] Spending the last fifty cycles here with me.
Crichton: Aeryn. You are the one thing which has kept me from doing a kamikaze in the transport. I just have to try to get back to my old life, just for a day. That’s the hope. Hope. That’s what keeps me goin’.
Aeryn: Right. Just don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t happen. If you can’t — Oh.
[Aeryn stops and clutches her chest.]
Crichton: You all right?
Aeryn: Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s the just the same old pain. Same pain.
Crichton: Let’s, uh, get you back to the house. You can lie down. Come on.
[Getting up, Aeryn's locket falls to the ground and Crichton bends to pick it up.]
Crichton: I got it.
Aeryn: [simultaneously, and a little bit agitated] Give it to me.
Crichton: I got it. I got your locket. [He is still holding the locket.] Whose image you got in here anyway?
Aeryn: You know who’s in there.
Crichton: Your husband? He’s been dead ninety cycles, why would you have his image in there?
Aeryn: Just to drive you crazy.
[He looks at her for a moment, then smirks.]
Crichton: You know what I think? I don’t think it’s him in there. I think you got my picture.
Aeryn: Don’t flatter yourself.
Crichton: YEAH. Yeah, my picture. Surrounded by roses and hearts and yotz.
Aeryn: Open it, then. Take a look inside. You’ll see his image, the only love of my life.
[Crichton looks at the locket, seriously considering it. She stares back.]
Crichton: No. No, I don’t wanna see his ugly face. [He gives her the locket.] Come on, let’s get you back to the house.

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Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “The Ugly Truth,” “A Clockwork Nebari”

I said Wednesday, but wouldn’t you know, I actually meant Friday. Funny how things work out, but I should have known to give myself extra time and not commit. I did, after all, have an extra episode tacked on in this post, and I also tried out something new with the episode summary. I did all three episodes by memory instead of writing them as I was watching. I think it added something that was missing before, a little pizazz. A little panache. Some more swearing.

“Look at the Princess” as a whole is good, and really fun to watch, but it’s not perfect. “A Kiss is But a Kiss” and “I Do, I Think” are the strongest of the three, with some really nice reflective moments for the characters, but “The Maltese Crichton” takes the problem spot; there are some weird holes in that thing that even I can’t ignore. The final minutes of the trilogy manage to make up for almost any flub that occurred, but while the first 2/3 of the episode is happening, you can’t help but think . . . really? “I Do, I Think” also manages to stand out for the sheer insanity of what happens to Crichton, and I mean that quite literally. All in all, these three episodes are a pretty good representative of where the series is at at this point in its run. It’s capable of some seriously awesome things, but there’s still some clunking going on in there as they figure some things out.

2X11 — “LOOK AT THE PRINCESS: A KISS IS BUT A KISS”

The crew, sans Zhaan and Moya, become stranded on a Sebacean Breakaway Colony planet when Scorpius shows up in his Command Carrier. After fighting with Aeryn over some kissing related matters, Crichton & Co. head down to the Royal Planet, which is in the middle of a coronation. The inhabitants, among other weird practices, kiss one another to determine genetic viability as potential mates. Crichton is soon being kissed by every woman who sees him, which disgusts a still frustrated Aeryn, and his presence doesn’t go unnoticed by the Prince Clavor (brother to the Princess Katralla, soon to be Empress) his fiance Jena, and their Scarran cohort, Cargn. Clavor, with the help of Cargn, has poisoned his sister’s DNA so that she might not be able to find a viable mate in any Sebacean male, and so be ineligible for the throne. Unluckily for him, Crichton is human, and when Katralla kisses him, it is quickly apparent that he is a genetic match.

Of course then Crichton is swept up in all this genetic espionage, and the Empress tells him it’s either marry Katralla, or she’ll turn him over to Scorpius. This terrifies him, apparently even more than the prospect of being made into a statue for eighty years (to preside over the Royal Senate and learn the intricacies of the law). On top of all this, he’s got D’Argo and Rygel telling him to go for it, and Aeryn telling him he’s stupid (because she’s just now realized that she does in fact, want him). But the Empress and Katralla don’t really care about any of that. The Empress just wants to keep Clavor off the throne because she knows the first thing he’ll do is make an alliance with the Scarrans, and Katralla just wants babies (which Crichton can give her), even if her one true love, Tyno, can’t. It’s a big, fun mess that all ends with Crichton’s face being swoozled and barbecued, thanks to Clavor, and then TO BE CONTINUED. Oh, and also, Moya meets her maker, literally.

Trivia

• All three parts of the trilogy were written by David Kemper and co-directed by Tony Tilse and Andrew Prowse.
• While filming the scene where Aeryn kisses Rygel, Claudia Black’s cell phone rang while in her possession, and they had to do another take. As punishment, she had to buy a case of beer for the crew.
• The royal servant, ro-NA is played by Ben Browder’s wife, Francesca Buller, last seen in season one’s “Bone to be Wild.” Aaron Cash, who plays Dregon, was last seen playing Bitaal in the episode “Rhapsody In Blue.”
• “A Kiss is But a Kiss” is a lyric taken from the song “As Time Goes By” by Herman Hupfeld, a song that was made famous when Sam played it again in Casablanca.
• The trilogy title “Look at the Princess” comes from an inside joke between Rockne O’Bannon and David Kemper.
• In a chat session on June 15, 2000, David Kemper said that “The ‘Princess’ Trilogy is my love poem to the cast.”

Metaphorically Speaking

I think the key to “getting” this episode on more than just a superficial level actually lies in the title of the trilogy: “Look at the Princess.” The title doesn’t make much sense out of context, but when you hear the referent line (which is almost inaudible), everything just sort of clicks, especially on a second viewing. It comes just after Crichton has kissed Katralla: you hear a woman in the crowd, off to the left somewhere, “Look. Look at the Princess. She’s smiling.” The undercurrent that becomes clear in this scene, and that runs through the episode, is that thin line between fear and hope, how it takes just a little bit to push you over on either side. And because Crichton gives Katralla something she’s been missing — hope — a whole bunch of shit starts happening. Hope is a good thing. It’s what keeps you from slitting your wrists when something bad happens, or from becoming that lonely asshole in a recliner drinking two six packs of beer a day, but hope is also dangerous. It can lead you on, tell you things are going to be all right when they’re not. It’s the thing that allows to you take chances, but it’s also what makes you vulnerable. So sometimes (a lot of the times) giving into the fear is actually the easier option, because hey, then at least you know what side of the line you’re on. And all of that is what Crichton gives to Katralla when he kisses her.

Straddling that line between hope and fear is exactly what most of the characters in “A Kiss is But a Kiss” are doing, and it is seriously messing with their heads. Aeryn is afraid of giving in to Crichton and starting a relationship; she’s never had one before. It’s a new experience, and it could go very, very badly, something she isn’t ready for. The more you want something, the more disappointed you’ll be when it goes to hell. And she wants Crichton very badly. Crichton wants Aeryn, obviously, but nothing about love has ever terrified him. He loves love, he loves relationships. He’s a giant girl. No, what scares Crichton is what he can lose: his sanity, his family, the chance at going home again . . . that’s what keeps him going. Giving into his fear of Scorpius, his fear of having his brain scraped around in and raped, necessitates leaving all he loves behind, his family (both Moyan and Earth-bound), the dream of Home, Aeryn . . . Crichton and Aeryn are the most central to the story of “Look at the Princess,” but fear (or hope, in some cases) is on everyone else’s mind as well. The Empress fears the future if her son were to take the throne; Katralla fears failing at her duties as heir, but part of her still hopes she may find a way to be with Tyno; Rygel fears for the safety of his own green little hide; and as for Chiana and D’Argo, well . . . with Chiana there’s always the fear of not surviving, but she also fears being tied down (remember her advice to Crichton about taking it fast with the body and slow with the soul?), and D’Argo basically fears the opposite: that he’s doomed forever to be untethered, searching and searching for his son and a home. [SPOILER!] It’s really interesting to me that what is attracting these two together now in their little “game” is exactly what will come between them by the end of the season.

Some final thoughts: Like any good fairy tale (which is what this trilogy is, a sci-fi fairy tale), it’s got princesses and magic kisses and evil, conniving princes, and most importantly, a big bad scary villain. I absolutely love the ‘magic kiss’ thing; taking that fairy-tale element and finding a way to make it believable sci-fi is a stroke of genius, as far as I’m concerned. And I love how this whole episode (this whole trilogy, really) is just filled to the brim with kissing. All the set-up this episode does, not just for the trilogy but also for the rest of the season, should also be noted. So many new characters were introduced (Clavor, Tyno, Katralla, Cargn the Scarran), and we get some backstory on Scorpius finally (he’s half Sebacean, on his mother’s side). The fact that he’s a half-breed, and that we get to meet the race that comprises his other half in this very episode, begins to lay a lot of pieces on the table that will be picked up and expanded upon greatly in the future. Moreover, the episode does all this introducing, along with the actual plotting of the story, in an extremely competent and fun manner. The script is extremely well-paced and very witty, with just the right amount of suspense in all the right places. David Kemper really went all out in giving us some great individual moments as well, like Aeryn kissing Rygel to get all the men to leave her alone, Chiana and D’Argo’s sexcapades, the beautifully singing Zhaan (one of the few times you will see me giving her a compliment), and my personal favorite scene: the second time Crichton interrupts the sexcapades. It’s hilarious; he just plops right down in the middle of it, not even seeming to notice or care that Chiana is buck naked and writhing around, because he’s just so damned stressed out and needs advice from his best buddy (naked D’Argo is naked). No sense of privacy; it’s all very un-American. I also want to comment on something that I’ve been ragging on for the past couple of posts: the set design. The sense of atmosphere is perfect, absolutely complimentary to what’s going on in the script: the costumes, the sets, the tone, the acting, the music . . . everything. And finally, some stellar acting on Claudia Black’s part, as usual (sad Aeryn is sad).

- – -

2X12 — “LOOK AT THE PRINCESS: I DO, I THINK”

After not one, but two, attempts on Crichton’s life, Rygel and the Empress cook up a scheme to hide him from everybody, including his friends. Cargn the Scarran was orchestrator of both plots. The first attempt: guys attacking him at the end of “A Kiss is But a Kiss,” which he was saved from by Jenavian, who turns out not to be a dippy idiot engaged to the prince, but a PK special ops agent assigned to pretend to a dippy idiot engaged to the prince so that she would easily be able to kill him should he ascend the throne. Second attempt: some sort of mini gas Death Star, and that one almost got Katralla, too, but ro-NA, the extremely weird and squeaky Jakensch royal servant, saves them. But it turns out she only did it for Scorpius, who wants Crichton very much alive. Together, she and Scorpius hijack Rygel and the Empress’s plan and steal Crichton away in an untraceable ship, which turns out to have Lt. Braca aboard. At this point, Crichton goes crazy — like for real — and fights Braca until he jumps out of the ship with the only space-suit. In all the fracas, ro-NA gets her weird blue self electrocuted, and then for real, Crichton jumps out of the ship into empty space without a space-suit because HE IS A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH.

Meanwhile, Moya has met Kahaynu, one of the beings who helped give Leviathans souls, and he’s pissed because he created them to be “emissaries of peace” and how DARE she give birth to a gunship? He convinces her to decommission herself, despite Zhaan’s protests, and it is simultaneously stupid and really fucking sad. Back in Crazy Town, population John Crichton, Crichton has floated back over to Moya‘s transport pods, from which he can safely get back to the planet and seek both medical and psychological care. He talks with both D’Argo (who urges him to think of all possible consequences) and Aeryn (who tells him not to give up, and in response he just says, “I’m tired”) about his choices. In the end, he decides to marry Katralla, because it’s both easy and right, and he’s very, very tired. He doesn’t want to be responsible for starting a war when he could have prevented it. He marries Katralla, but Aeryn doesn’t attend the ceremony because she is MONDO pissed. The episode ends with Moya sinking in space as Crichton is frozen in bronze, much like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, except nobody is going to try to save him.

Trivia

• Jonathan Hardy, who voices the regular character Rygel, makes an on-screen appearance as Kahaynu, Moya’s builder. The “Look At The Princess” trilogy is the only time we get to see what he actually looks like. Hardy gave the character a Welsh accent after he saw his costume for the part.
• Originally, Dave Elsey, one of the Creature Shop artists was to play ro-NA. He was unable to hit this into his schedule, however, and Francesca Buller (M’Lee from “Bone to be Wild”) was asked to play her second role on the show.
• Crichton’s reference to a 1962 T-Bird was an ad-lib by Ben Browder, and refers to a college friend of his who owned one of these classic cars. (This also means that Francesca Buller’s lines as ro-NA, in which she plays with the syllables in ‘T-Bird,’ were also ad-libbed.)
• Kahaynu’s face in the steam is a homage to the 1999 movie The Mummy, which includes a scene in which Imhotep’s face appears in the sand.
• John’s response of “I know” to Chiana’s “I love you” before being turned to stone is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Han Solo and Princess Leia’s exchange in The Empire Strikes Back. John’s squinting expression with bared teeth is also similar to Han’s once encased in carbonite.

Metaphorically Speaking

This episode is a bit weird to get a handle on, both because it comes in the middle, where plot-things traditionally take on a brooding or wallowing or stewing or even falafelling nature, and also because there originally WAS no second episode when this “trilogy” was conceived. There is some definite falafelling going on in this episode, mostly by Crichton, who has found himself trapped in a situation that is the absolute epitome of the whole rock/hard place thingy-mabob. Of course this is also the most interesting part of the episode. We’ve seen before that Crichton’s response to sticky situations is to go crazy, but it’s never been as bad as this before. There’s a certain type of insanity that comes from being locked inside a cage with nowhere to go, and if you add that on top of Crichton’s penchant for already being a little bit insane, well, you get a screaming Southerner jumping out of a space-ship without anything but a gun. That scene with Crichton’s space-dive is the hub of this episode. It’s the climax of all the frustration he’s felt at being trapped on this planet with these people, so of course when he literally becomes trapped on a space-ship, about to be delivered to his arch-nemesis Scorpius, his brain breaks. He tells Braca to shoot him, holding the gun to first his head, then his heart, and then other more humorous (and more scary) regions. (“Kill my sex life! Kill my sex life!” referring not to his penis — which was represented by the Vienna Boys Choir — but to his hand. You gotta love this show.) But the best thing about Crichton’s space-dive is that it’s not something that he magically comes up with as a move to save his life, no, it’s the last move of a desperate man, and you can see it in his eyes, he genuinely doesn’t care if he lives or dies. Frankly, dying would be easier. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about doing the wrong thing.

“I Do, I Think” also touches on a couple of other ideas, but none of them are fully developed, but of course they are all tied in to this big choice Crichton has to make by the end. Should he leave or should he run? He spends a lot of the time (when he’s not crazy) thinking about the idea of power and responsibility, and musing on the things that really matter. The discussion he has with ro-NA pops into my mind. She’s lying through her teeth about to betray him, but he’s dead serious. “To what end does possessory wealth serve?” she asks. He says that in his experience — you know, losing all of his possessions and his friends and family and being forced to exist on the fringes of an alien society while running for his life — you discover quickly what you need, the things that matter. Doesn’t stop her from fucking him over, though. She’s tired of being the run-down servant, and I guess I can’t blame her. And when his insanity spell is over, and jumping into cold space didn’t kill him, all that’s left is one tired Crichton. It becomes even more apparent in this episode that the Royal Planet is a hub of political relations, that the Scarrans or the Peacekeepers having them for allies is important to both factions, and Crichton has to take that into consideration. He has to consider the ramifications of any action he might take.

I didn’t really get into the Moya storyline for “A Kiss is But a Kiss” because nothing really happened, but in this episode shit starts to get real, and some of it is way awesome. I also think parts of it are really awful. The way Kahaynu is written (at least in this episode) is just really awful and kind of dumb. If he’s some all powerful and benevolent being, then you’d think he would take the time to listen to Zhaan and hear the entire story, like you know, how it wasn’t Moya‘s fault, and how, hey, your request to shut Moya down is completely illogical because the Peacekeepers will just DO IT TO ANOTHER SHIP, so by your logic lets just kill all the motherfucking Leviathans. It’ll be a party. It is SO DUMB and it makes me hate Kahaynu. A lot. On the other hand, because of that dick, we do get the amazingly moving scene that sees both Zhaan and Pilot hearing Moya‘s true voice for the first time, and it’s to tell them that she’s okay with dying if it’s the right thing to do. “Moya willing,” she says. And the actual sequence of her systems being shut down, as we see her sinking tail first into dead-space, is just kind of haunting and horrible, especially when paired with John’s mental breakdown. And it’s kind of the same thing, both Moya and Crichton are giving up, but it’s more like taking the choice that’s not really a choice: it’s impossible for these two to being anything other than what they are, to do anything but what is “right.”

It’s also interesting to think about Aeryn’s actions in this episode. She gives a couple of funny scenes in the midst of her despair. First, she rejects Dregon in the best way ever, then she waltzes into the ladies room and smashes the two primping, made-up princess girls into the mirror. It’s just a wonderful visual image, because Katralla and Jenavian are there for at least a minute before Aeryn comes in, pulling their curls and examining the minutest details of their skin with no results whatsover, and then Aeryn comes barreling in in the least glamorous way possible, her hair all crappy, wearing no make-up and black leather clothes that aren’t exactly couture, and she just kicks their asses. Unfortunately for Aeryn, this awesome moment is prompted out of genuine misery. She’s about to lose her closest friend in the universe, the person who quite literally made her the person she is today, and she is phenomenally pissed about it. You can see how much Aeryn admires the general Crichton spirit when she tells him how proud she is that he keeps “putting yourself into position to get your ass kicked. Fighting. Never giving up.” For a moment she lets herself believe that this means he will run away with her, back to their old life of carefree criminaldom. But here’s the thing, she can’t even say that it’s for her, this running away. She lumps all of the Moyans into it because it’s easy and safe. “Run away with you?” Crichton asks. “With all of us, ” she says. She loves the crew and doesn’t want her stable “family” rocked, but it also means that she doesn’t want to submit to the idea that she loves John, or at least is too proud and scared to admit that she wants him to know, even though he totally does know. She still can’t say it. And she’s so upset that she can’t see he’s doing the right thing by marrying Katralla; all she can see is that he’s abandoning her, and it feels awful.

Other stuff: Crichton bitch-slapping Clavor is one of the great moments of Farscape. That dude doesn’t even deserve a proper punch and Crichton knows it. I loved the emergence of The Dominar in Rygel. “Magnificent, I smell power again.” He does have his uses, it turns out. ro-NA is absolutely delightful; kind of wish they hadn’t killed her off so soon. And everybody say it with me now, “Awww, Crichton’s first wedding.” How cute. Also cute, or maybe SEXAY would be the right word, the expression on Crichton’s face as he’s frozen in bronze. Not a dignified memorial, not even in the least. [SPOILER!] This episode also marks the first time time we meet “Harvey,” although if you haven’t seen the series before, you have no idea what I’m talking about because it’s almost a throwaway moment that entirely fits in with Crichton going completely crazy.

Trash Bin

The Foley guys went a little nuts with the hitting sounds at the beginning of this episode. Whenever Katralla smacks Crichton in the face it sounds like WAKTOOOSH. It’s completely ridiculous.

- – -

2X13 — “LOOK AT THE PRINCESS: THE MALTESE CRICHTON”

After Crichton gets his bronzed head chopped off by an angry Scarran, and then dropped into a pool of acid by Clavor, a confusing series of events and alliances are set into motion. Everybody wants Crichton’s head, and for different reasons. Scorpius rescues it from the acid pool only to have it taken away from him by Jenavian, who, still intent on fulfilling her mission, insists on putting Crichton back together and reconstituting him. Then they go and hide for a while and everybody else freaks out. The Empress halts all traffic off-world until Crichton’s head can be found, and she’s just a step away from executing every off-worlder in retribution. This causes everyone to do very strange things. Cargn murders the prince, Scorpius and D’Argo make an uneasy alliance, and Chiana gets kidnapped and tortured for information by the Scarran as a result of D’Argo inexplicably telling him that she knew where Crichton was. Even though this makes no sense, Scorpius and D’Argo are soon off to the acid pool chamber. Scorpius attacks Cargn but is overcome by the heat of the room. Crichton, who has magically appeared from his naked poolside frolicking vacation with Jenavian, fails to kill Scorpius, but does manage to kill Cargn. D’Argo rescues Chiana.

Meanwhile, Aeryn and Dregon have been rock climbing all over the continent. Well, actually, Dregon turns out to be the biggest wuss of all time, despite his overly muscular body, and gets both himself and Aeryn seriously injured falling off a giant cliff. She literally has to drag him home with a broken leg. And then of course, since he’s a Teutonic pansy, he starts lecturing Aeryn about emotion, but he’s actually right. He tells her that she may be trained to deal with physical injury, but that is exactly why emotional injury scares her so badly. You can’t prepare for it. The whole Moya thing turns out to be a trick. After Kahaynu “decommissions” her, out of anger Zhaan sucks him into an engine, which is weirdly what he wanted because it turns out that he was testing Zhaan, not Moya. He was fully aware of his ridiculous behavior, understanding that Moya wasn’t to blame for giving birth to Talyn. Instead, he simply wanted to be sure that Zhaan and her friends could be trusted with Moya‘s gentle, loyal friendship. They head back to the Royal Planet and pick up the others. The episode ends with Aeryn holding up a kissing vial for Crichton, and their smiles afterwards seem to confirm that they are, in fact, compatible.

Trivia

• Both Claudia Black and Aaron Cash (Dregon) took an indoor rock-climbing lesson before shooting their climbing scenes, which were filmed in Darling Bay, an area north of Sydney that has some notoriety as a dumping ground for dead bodies.
• It took the make-up department two hours to free Ben Browder from the body cast after he posed for the statue, because they used the wrong material.
• The Crichton statue remained at the top of the stairs at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop at Homebush Bay for the rest of the series’ shooting.
• The “Look at the Princess” story was originally written by David Kemper as a two-parter, however after filming, there was about eighteen minutes of footage left over, all of which was considered good, and so the decision was made to expand the story, and in three weeks David Kemper wrote eleven extra scenes and threaded them in throughout the story. The bulk of the “new” scenes take place in Part II, and it’s because of this that it is out of sequence in terms of production number (Parts I and III were already assigned ’10210′ and ’10211′ respectively, and the late Part II was assigned ’10221′).
• The title is a reference to the 1941 John Huston film noir, The Maltese Falcon, in which private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) gets involved in a hunt for a valuable statuette. The film was based on a novel by pulp writer Dashiell Hammett, and was actually the third filmed version of Hammett’s book (so much for remakes being inferior), the previous two being The Maltese Falcon (1931) and Satan Met a Lady (1936).
• The love scene between Jena and Crichton took four hours to shoot.

Metaphorically Speaking

It’s the end of the trilogy, it’s time for endings. Clavor and Cargn are taken care of, Scorpius is outwitted for the present, and Crichton is given an, admittedly painful, way out of the whole Katralla/Eighty Years as a Statue/Ruler of a Planet thing. Oh, and something’s going on with Scorpy and Crichton, but Scorpy’s not telling. Crichton is finally out of danger, and when Tyno gives him a way out — the bronzing process would supposedly kill him a second time — he immediately takes it. Until he finds out about his daughter, that is. That is like John Crichton’s Holy Grail, his sine qua non, his windmill dragons: Family. John Crichton has a kid? John Crichton is taking care of that kid. He fucking loves babies. He’s a nester; he makes nests. It’s what he does. You rip apart his nest, tell him he can’t have his “Without Which Not“? He gets upset. In that moment, there’s no question that he’s going to be a statue for eighty years and wake up to take care of that baby. But he can’t. It’s horribly tragic, but lucky for Aeryn, who probably would have become an assassin or something just to get out all her lady love pain. And even when she gets him back, she STILL can’t say it, not with words (and she’s not talking to him anyway). But at least she can tell him with lips.

I will admit to you guys now, because I have absolutely no shame, that I cried like a little bitch the first time I saw “The Maltese Crichton.” Specifically, I cried like a little bitch when Crichton got to see his daughter, and then he never gets to see her again. I know I’m doomed when I start crying at things like this. And then he says things like “And I have a child that I will never know” and “Take care of my little girl,” I just LOSE it. It’s also kind of hilarious to think of a whole line of Crichton’s rolling into the future, ruling an entire planet for centuries to come. He’s even worse than Kirk with the seed planting. But at least that kiss with Aeryn at the end gives him hope. Some day maybe they can make another baby, together. Awwwww. In that way, the end scene satisfies the two main themes: that line between hope and despair is still there, but at least our heroes aren’t giving up.

Other stuff: We learn some more secrets about Scorpius’s biology. Cargn the Scarran tells D’Argo and Crichton that his Scarran half seeks out heat while his Sebacean half is destroyed by it. It’s a miracle of science that he’s even alive, with those cooling rods in his brain, and his temperature regulating suit. It’s not much, but it is important. Also important is the fact that Crichton is unable to kill Scorpius. This has multiple ramifications, none of which I want to get into right now because they’re spoilery. There’s not much to say about the Zhaan/Moya/Kahaynu plot, other than it was nice to hear Moya‘s voice again, and how it was laughable that Zhaan though she could kill a god (essentially) by sucking some vapor into a puny little engine. And lastly, what was the point of the Aeryn/Dregon story? To show how Aeryn is better than everyone? That’s pretty much a good enough reason, but I also think it was a nice contrast, kind of a character illumination. Aeryn may be physically more capable than Dregon, but he’s leagues ahead in terms of emotion. I think it was good for her to hear it from someone outside their group. Oh, it’s because Dregon is a giant girl, too, like Crichton except worse. Aeryn is attracted to those. Or, they’re attracted to her. Dragging Dregon across half the continent lends new credence to the phrase “emotional baggage.”

Trash Bin

Um, why don’t they just ask Katralla who chopped Crichton’s head off? “It was Cargn and Clavor, Mum!” “Thanks, baby.” “You’re welcome.” The whole thing could have been resolved in like five seconds! Or did you guys forget that you could do that, even though we just saw they could do that five minutes before when D’Argo and Chiana talked to Crichton? Or ten minutes from now when Jena talks to Crichton’s severed head? And hey, look, a convenient acid bathtub! Let’s drop things in there! (Okay, seriously, though. What is that thing?) I have some other questions: How does everyone and their mother know about Clavor’s alliance with Cargn EXCEPT CLAVOR’S MOTHER? The local animals are carnivorous after dark so we can’t go back to the castle, but we can strip naked and make sexy times in the lake . . . okay. And while I’m at it . . . Hey, Zhaan! Instead of just saying, hey, you shouldn’t do this, you evil bad man, why don’t you give him a REASON. Oh, wait, because then he wouldn’t be able to trick you as much. Got it.

This episode has so many plot-holes, and I wasn’t even trying to look for them. And I’m famous for my ability to leap many plot-holes in a single bound. Sooo much taaaalking. Not enough doing. As soon as the Scarran dies, though, the episode picks up and gets back to territories of awesome, and we can forget any of those nasty plot-holes even happened.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “What, at a timeshare in his condo in Hell?”
• “I am the reverse King Arthur. I’m the one who can put the sword into the stone.”
• “On my planet, we don’t marry people we don’t love. Unless they’re critically ill billionaires.”
• “Eighty cycles. My college loans will be delinquent. I’ll miss the strippers on my hundredth birthday. I’ll get a utility bill for three trillion dollars for a single porch light that I left on and everybody I know will be dead.”
• “Do not try to kill me again. It makes me angry.”
• “No, no, no. Human, Sebacean, Human, Sebacean! We’re different. One wound and I bleed out! ‘Oh, officer Fraka, what the frell have you–’ Hmm? Hmmm? Fine! Let’s do it! Let’s do this thing! C’mon, shoot me, right here, right here — no, no, not the brain, he wants the brain — the heart. Here, here, shoot me in the heart — okay, kinda your left, right, my left, your right! Here, John Wayne Bobbit, Vienna Boys Choir — Ohhhhooooooo!!!!! Kill my sex life, now quick, kill my sex life now, shoot it, just shoot me! Mercy! Back, get back or the white boy gets it! Oh man, oh man don’t let him kill me — You people are so dumb!”
• “We’re so screwed! And we’re gonna die!”

PuppetWatch!

• The Scarran puppet head didn’t bother me at all the first time through, but after having seen the whole series and the Scarran make-up that is to come, it looks incredibly stupid. His mouth can barely move and his head is ridiculously large.

- – -

“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• Interstellar Swearing: “Crag’s ass” is a Sebacean vulgarity analogous to “rat’s ass;” “for the love of Chilnack” is analogous to “for the love of Pete;” and “Vigelar” is a Hynerian personal insult.
• Pop Culture References: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cameron Diaz, Star Wars, Blazing Saddles, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Apocalypse Now, Batman, and Casablanca.
• D’Argo dancing in “A Kiss is But a Kiss” is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and it’s a completely throw away moment.
• Cargn has an absolutely GIGANTIC head. Later Scarrans will look much less stupid.
• CARGN: I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.
  AERYN: Yes, I’ve heard that about Scarrans.
• “Now, don’t feel bad, it’s not you, it’s me. I don’t like you.”
• Crichton’s space dive is seriously the most insane thing I’ve ever seen on TV.
• AERYN: There’s never been anything we couldn’t overcome together.
  CRICHTON: Except each other.
• “I had one request for a wedding present. That you be banned from this planet forever. Do you know what they said? ‘Yes, Your Highness.’”
• “Pieces of different kindling often build the strongest fire.” Yeah, no shit, Katralla. That’s why he and AERYN are so fucking awesome together. Hope you have fun being an inanimate object for eighty years.
• D’ARGO: Well, now I can only speak truth, and that comes as good and bad news.
  CRICHTON: All right, give me the bad news first.
  D’ARGO: The bad news is that you’re married, and you must endure as a statue for eighty cycles in a strange world.
  CRICHTON: What’s the good news?
  D’ARGO: Chiana and I are having . . . fantastic sex.

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #17

[Crichton enters the maintenance bay where Aeryn is doing pull-ups.]
Crichton: Zhaan says the surgical re-constructors did an excellent job on your leg. There’s no sign that it was ever broken.
[He climbs into the Farscape-1 module and starts fiddling with things.]
Crichton: Yeah, I was, uh, worried about you when you didn’t show up for the wedding.
[Aeryn continues exercising and does not respond in the slightest to anything Crichton is saying.]
Crichton: Anyway, I’m . . . I’m just glad you’re okay. And I have noticed that you’re not talking to me.
[Aeryn stops what she's doing, picks up one of the Royal Planet kissing vials, and holds it up for him to see without saying a word.]
[When Crichton understands, he just kind of sits back and waits for her to come to him. She holds out the vial and he takes it, placing one drop on his tongue and then one on hers. Both of them are still very silent. They kiss.]
[Neither Crichton nor Aeryn's expression changes in the least after the kiss is done, but when Aeryn turns away from Crichton, she allows herself a small, happy smile. After she's walked away, Crichton touches his lips and he smiles, too. They're compatible.]

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Beware of Dog,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

At this point in the series I keep having the urge to just watch the DVDs straight through and not give a shit about writing anything, because let’s be honest, writing is hard. It takes willpower and energy and organization, all three of which I am in extremely short supply of at the moment. Also, this is about the point, starting with next week’s episodes (the “Look at the Princess” trilogy, which I will actually have posted by Wednesday at the latest), where the mondo-serialization starts to kick in and things get even nuttier than they already are. Like, if Farscape were peanut butter, at this point it would fully come out as that kind with all the crunchy nuts (and don’t even get me started on seasons three and four, which basically turn into the kind that comes with the jelly already mixed in . . . that stuff is whack).

So this week we have “Out of Their Minds” and “My Three Crichtons.” Together, these two episodes represent the ‘status quo’ of Farscape (which is decidedly not ‘quo’). HOWEVER, the ‘status quo’ on Farscape is to constantly kill the status quo, if that makes any sense at all. Their favorite thing to do on this show is to take standard sci-fi tropes and kick them in the face. (And as Dan noted a couple recaps ago, “I’ll even go so far as suggesting that a lot of the ‘misses’ were episodes that didn’t stray far enough from standard television sci-fi storytelling.”) I would say that both of these episodes happen to succeed at inverting cliches, even if one does so much better than the other (and even if one happens to be a personal favorite episode and the other is . . . not).

2X09 — “OUT OF THEIR MINDS”

Moya has been locked and targeted by an unknown vessel. With the defense screen not working, their only hope is Zhaan’s diplomacy aboard the alien ship. She learns that the aliens, called Halosians, were attacked by Crais and Talyn, hence their targeting of Moya. When they learn from the idiot Zhaan that she and the others are defenseless, they fire on a barely shielded Moya, with some unexpected results. Everyone aboard switches bodies. Aeryn into Rygel, Rygel into Crichton, and Crichton into Aeryn. All I have to say is VERY YES. While Rygel is freaking out about being displaced from his own royal body and Aeryn and Crichton try to figure out some sort of plan, we learn that Chiana, Rygel, and Pilot have also been affected: Pilot into Chiana’s body, Chiana into D’Argo’s, and D’Argo into Pilot’s. They take pictures of themselves using the DRDs and hang them around their neck for identification. While D’Argo is learning to control Moya‘s functions in Pilot’s body, the others set about attempting to repair the damage done to the defense screen. Over on the Halosian ship, Zhaan convinces the Halosian commander, Tak, to come aboard Moya in order to prove that they are peaceful. Yoz, the female Halosian, shows Zhaan that Tak was lying: Talyn only fired in self-defense. Zhaan quickly surmises that this also means Moya is still in danger, so she takes the opportunity presented by Tak’s absence to influence Yoz to challenge Tak as commander.

Upon finishing the defense screen, Crichton cops a feel of Aeryn’s body, which he is presently occupying, but gets caught by Aeryn and Chiana, who are disgusted. “I’m a guy! We dream about this sort of thing!” he says, and then accuses Chiana of probably having molested D’Argo’s body as well. Rygel-in-Crichton is showing Tak around Moya when Tak throws up right into Moya‘s neural nexus, and Rygel is too stupid to figure out it’s a trick. The “vomit” starts creeping up and insinuating itself everywhere and Moya‘s systems, once again, go to Hell. Chiana-in-D’Argo is freaking out and tries to proposition Rygel-in-Crichton to run away with her, but despite the crotch-grabbing that ensues, Rygel is steadfast. He wants his body back. They finally detect the creeping vomit just in time to re-route the defense screen, at which point Tak fires and they all switch bodies. Again. This time it’s Rygel-in-Aeryn, Aeryn-in-Crichton, Crichton-in-Rygel, and Chiana has jumped into Pilot, Pilot into D’Argo (who remains passed out, and probably dying), and D’Argo into Chiana. Meanwhile, aboard the Halosian vessel, Yoz kills Tak, but still plans on ramming Moya, so Zhaan rips her arm out of the cuffs that hold her and knocks Yoz unconscious. The Moyans set the defense screen at 62% (to get their bodies back) and Zhaan fires the Halosian weapons. Everyone switches back and then proceed to touch each other as much as possible. Chiana and D’Argo go off to have sex, and Aeryn basically tells Crichton that she didn’t let the merchandise go unexamined, either, if you know what I mean. (And I think you do.)

Trivia

• Although freelancer Michael Cassutt wrote the original script, it underwent a heavy re-write to get it right in context of the Farscape characters and what they would say. The re-write was done by Justin Monjo. Farscape did not often take spec-scripts due to its serialized nature and the location of the production in Australia.
• The episode was directed by Ian Watson, who also directed “Crackers Don’t Matter.”
• The cast prepared for this episode by videotaping each other to observe and copy their characters’ mannerisms.
• This episode’s title is a tribute to a novel of the same name by sci-fi author Clifford Simak, which is one of Michael Cassutt’s favorite books.
• The Halosians were an homage to the Skeksis, the major villains in an earlier Henson feature, The Dark Crystal.

Metaphorically Speaking

“Out of Their Minds” is one of my very favorite Farscape episodes. It might even be in my top ten. I know it’s not the most wonderfully crafted episode, the writing isn’t necessarily all that deep or profound, and the Skeksis the Halosians aren’t in the least bit terrifying (they’re ultimately just kind of silly and harmless). But it’s just so much FUN. “Out of Their Minds” is what I would call ‘quintessential’ Farscape. Every episode in the series can be basically categorized into one of two types: 1) The kind that rips your heart out, cuts slivers in it with sharp and serrated knives, pours lemon juice all over those cuts, throws it on the floor and stomps on it a little, and then feeds it to ravenous Wolverines; or 2) The kind that are made out of Lewis Carroll’s most vivid LCD dreams, except funny (but maybe still a little bit horrifying). “Out of Their Minds” is one of the latter. It takes a basic sci-fi/fantasy cliche (body switching) and totally owns it, and it does so largely by capitalizing on the very parts that most television or film narratives avoid at all costs: the nasty and sexy bits, or as I like to think of it, the bits having to do with the actual ‘body’ part of the body switching.

Most of the humor in this episode comes from seeing the actors behave in ways they normally wouldn’t, but also in seeing the way each personality manifests itself in the new body. There is a distinct disconnect between, say, the way Chiana moves and acts as compared to D’Argo, so when Chiana’s mind is inside D’Argo’s body, we immediately recognize that disconnect not just on a story level, but also on a more visceral, physical level. For example, Anthony Simcoe as Chiana has the weird bendy movement, the big eyes, and the sexual slinkiness down cold, and because D’Argo’s body usually acts in a distinctive loud, masculine way, we laugh. It’s also a pretty jarring moment when D’Argo-in-Pilot (the normally serene and quiet Pilot) yells at Chiana to SHUT UP. Or we have Aeryn’s body calling Rygel “buddy,” which is a very John thing to do, but we’re seeing it come out of Aeryn’s mouth. There is also an extensive list of instances involving Rygel: Rygel-in-Crichton picking Crichton’s nose and Crichton-in-Aeryn just watching in bemusement, Rygel smelling Crichton’s boot, Rygel not knowing how to pee, putting his hands down Crichton’s pants, peeing in the cargo bay, etc. Rygel violates all sorts of taboos that we hold sacred as human beings because he isn’t human, and there’s a great joy to be found there, a sort of cognitive dissonance where we both wish to see these taboos being broken as a kind of wish fulfillment, while at the same understanding why Rygel’s behavior is so awful for Crichton. We can have it both ways.

This discussion isn’t intended to be an extended discussion of WHY THINGS ARE FUNNY, because that’s not why you guys show up here, but I do think it’s important to pinpoint the nature of the humor in this episode in order to understand the point of it all. Obviously, it’s funny (and it’s okay sometimes if a story exists just to make you laugh, but things are funny for a reason most of the time), but I also think the writers used this episode and the cliche of it all to their advantage. Breaking those taboos and exploring the disconnect between what we see and what we know provides both an excellent showcase for examining character growth and a sort of mission statement for Farscape itself (I’ll get back to that one later). I’ll give you a great example of how this body switching conceit is used to show character growth. Take the scene where Chiana (in D’Argo’s body) corners Rygel (in Crichton’s body) and asks him to leave Moya with her. This scene is working on multiple levels. First, you’ve got the funny, obvious one. What we see is D’Argo coyly propositioning Crichton and then physically grabbing his crotch, which is something that wouldn’t happen between those two characters in an everyday situation. This is what makes it possible for us to laugh. It’s also quite funny that Chiana is willing to abandon her body and live the rest of her life out in D’Argo’s, and that she urges Rygel to do the same, letting him know that “this body’s better anyway.” But Rygel rejects her.  The moment is revealing for both of them. Despite the events of “Home on the Remains,” Chiana’s flight instincts are still very intact. Chiana values survival over her physical identity, but whatever other issues Rygel has, he is very possessive over his own identity. He likes his body, which is firmly attached to how he sees himself. He can’t very well be a Hynerian Dominar without a Hynerian body. “I’m not me,” he says, even though he still retains all of his memories. I could probably get way more into the mind/body/identity discussion, but I’m not writing a book here (despite the fact that I have technically written a book-length amount of words over the course of this project).

But I think the most interesting part about this episode, and about the series in general, is the way that it treats the body. I have this whole huge theory about this being the thing that sets Farscape apart from other science fiction television programs. Although both the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse circled closely around the same themes, ultimately those shows were more concerned with the ethical and moral implications of the body/identity divide, and both ultimately seemed to be suggesting that the body itself is irrelevant when it comes down to it; it’s what’s inside that counts. That existentialist viewpoint is generally considered the epitome of intelligence in science-fiction, and while I’m not saying it’s a wrong conclusion (I do, after all, love both of those shows), I will say that it seems awfully one-sided. Farscape, more often than not, shuns the cerebral in favor of celebrating the body as an indispensable part of life, and that is built into it’s very premise. I think that’s exactly what makes this episode so enjoyable. “Out of Their Minds” doesn’t just tiptoe around the fantasies inherent in the body-swap trope, it devotes whole scenes to them, right out there in the open. What’s more, those scenes are central to understanding the kinds of resolution that these characters have by the end of the episode. Because we’ve seen deliciously awkward moments such as Crichton (in Aeryn’s body) teaching Rygel (in Crichton’s body) how to handle his new human penis, we’re then able to appreciate the relief both men feel upon getting their own bodies back. We also know instinctively that both men have learned something about themselves and their places within the group dynamic: Rygel has learned that both his small stature and small behavior has led to a loss of respect within the group (the exact opposite of what he intended), and that Crichton is looked up to, and his opinion trusted and respected. It was only the outside perspective gained by the body switch, and through interacting with a clueless Zhaan, that they were able to realize this.

It’s the same for Chiana and D’Argo and Crichton and Aeryn, the two pairs both seem at the end to have come to a mutual understanding about their relationships, thanks to literally inhabiting each others bodies for a few hours. All the blatant sexual references and gags in this episode are just another manifestation of that whole fantasy/body thing, only it’s not just the characters who are living out the fantasies. We’re right there along for the ride. I mean, the best scene in the whole dang episode involves Crichton essentially molesting Aeryn’s body out of primal male curiosity, but it’s not sinister. What Crichton did in that room, aside from making me cry from laughter, is live out a fantasy that, as he says, most guys only dream about. Think about that for a moment. When we’re born, we’re (largely) stuck with what we’ve been given, and it’s only through imagination that we can change anything about the bodies we inhabit throughout our lives. We can imagine ourselves with longer legs or smaller noses or bigger breasts . . . or what it would like to be a different gender. That is like, the unknowable boundary. It’s not even about sex, at that point, it’s about knowing the thing you aren’t supposed to know. I mean, fuck! I’m surprised Crichton waited two hours! And don’t lie and pretend to be all righteous like Chiana, who Crichton rightfully accuses of doing the same thing to D’Argo’s body. There is nothing cerebral about imagination. True imagination is all about emotions: irrational, unpredictable, primal emotions, and that’s exactly what that Crichton/Aeryn’s boobs moment is all about. This episode also officially brings on the Chiana/D’Argo relationship, via D’Argo’s horny mumblings: “I really really liked being inside your body. Er, what I mean is . . . I really like your body.” Great scene. But the thing I love most about this episode is how it is so non-exploitative. It could have gone just really really bad, but it didn’t, and in the end we learn they all “succumbed,” even Aeryn, so hey, it’s really all about equality and all that jazz. Also, Crichton thinks Aeryn is teh sexy, so . . .

Other stuff. I absolutely love how this episode opens with everyone aboard Moya openly acknowledging their patheticness, even attempting to use it to their advantage. They have no pride whatsoever. I liked the usage of the DRD polaroids (even if I didn’t enjoy the double voiceovers, see below); it really helped keep things more simple, which allowed for more craziness on the part of the actors. I’m also really glad Zhaan was out of the way during all the Shenanigans. It would have been too much. Plus, we just spent like a million episodes with her, so she’s had enough for a while. But mostly, I love how this episode lets character personalities shine through even when in different bodies. The way that this experience illuminates things for them, not only things about their companions, but about their own lives. It’s also just amazing hilarious. The writers are just like, fuck you, TV conventions, we’re gonna FUCK shit UP. In other news, I do plan to post the Farscape paper I wrote for my Television Theory class this spring. It’s called “Bodies in Space: Farscape is not Star Trek.” I’ll probably post it at least after we get through season four, because it is hoo-boy spoilerific. There’s even a Power Point!

Trash Bin

I could have done without the weird double voice thing if they weren’t going to carry it through the whole episode. In fact, it’s distracting even in the short time it’s used. It gets in the way of the actors’ performances. With that said, however, I do understand that it was probably a network thing, requested because, like most networks, they assume that their audience is full of imbeciles who can’t follow a perfectly clear everyone-swaps-bodies-multiple-times storyline. Ahem.

- – -

2X10 — “MY THREE CRICHTONS”

Pilot informs everyone that Moya is being tracked by a weird ball of energy. (It’s always something.) The thingy enters the ship without permission and proceeds to wander around, like, examining people. It’s unclear whether the next thing happens because Aeryn shoots it or because it just likes Crichton, either way, after she shoots the thingy, it gets all big and sucks Crichton in. Later (after the credits), it shoots him back out, way traumatized, along with a hairy beast of some sort, which quickly gallops away. And right away, like they’ve learned nothing, they’re all the creature, THE CREATURE. We must kill it! First clue, when D’Argo tries to smell out the creature, he can only smell Crichton. Which is because that thing IS Crichton. At least, it possess his DNA and all his memories, if not his sense of evolution. (“Me John. Zhaan blue.”) Just as they’ve determined that Caveman Crichton (or “Neandro” as they dubbed him on set) is telling the truth, the green thingy starts gearing up again, and what comes out this time is yet another version of Crichton, this time a future one. He has serious head issues (lack of hair, brain on the outside, narcissism, etc), but he also contains all of Crichton’s memories.

But the sphere, as they’re calling it (I like ‘thingy’ better), is still giving them trouble, and suddenly Futuro starts being a dick. First to Neandro, who he looks on as barely more than an animal, and then to everyone else, because he realizes how fucking smart he is. Meanwhile, the thingy sphere communicates to all three Crichtons that at least one of the samples needs to be returned or the sphere will take all biological material within a metra of its radius. Futuro’s like, suck it, hairy Crichton, you are expendable, but regular Crichton doesn’t want to give up. But even his efforts are for nothing, and when he goes to find Neandro, Chiana has set him free and told him to hide. But John can’t escape who he is; he sets Neandro free and determines to go after Futuro, but even when he has him at gunpoint, he can’t do it, and decides to sacrifice himself instead. Neandro has the same impulse. Neandro kills Futuro and tells John that it’s not his place or his time, and heads into the sphere.

Trivia

• “My Three Crichtons” was written by Grant McAloon (previously of “Vitas Mortis” and “Durka Returns”), and directed by Catherine Millar (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, The Flying Doctors, The New Adventures of Flipper).
• This is the first episode of the series that doesn’t feature any guest stars.
• In production, beast Crichton was dubbed “Neandro” and future Crichton “Futuro.”
• Claudia Black feels that the characters in this episode, other than “Futuro,” were all dumbed down a little in the script, and missed opportunities for conflicts with other characters.
• This marks Ben Browder’s first time in full make-up on Farscape.
• The title of this episode is a play on the long-running sitcom My Three Sons, about a widower and his three boys.

Metaphorically Speaking

I’m going to keep it short on this one, because I went totally nuts on “Out of Their Minds,” but also because there really isn’t that much to say about “My Three Crichtons.” This episode attempts to explore the power of emotion vs. intellect, which is a theme that I can get way, way behind. I feel like I spend half my life justifying the value of emotional things to people who judge value on a separate scale entirely. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that intelligence and education aren’t important (far from it). What I’m saying is that it frustrates the hell out of me when so-called intellectuals piss all over things that I believe hold real, tangible value, just because their worth is not based on the assumption that intellectual concerns are ultimately more important than “sentimental” ones. “Sentimental” is a cheap word that conjures up images of weeping women, and idiots with handkerchiefs. It’s also chauvinistic. The idea that a thing is not valuable solely because mass quantities of people love it is absolutely absurd; dismissing stories like Star Wars and Harry Potter as childish (and therefore not important) is equally absurd. All stories have value in relation to their context, and it is absolutely idiotic and arrogant to dismiss them as worthless without examining that context. It’s about balance, people. You can’t just have one or the other. You have to have BOTH.

With that said, however, this episode doesn’t do a great job of proving my point. Grant McAloon, in his last script for the show, just has no sense of subtlety, and he doesn’t take enough risks with the story. It’s too simple, and it needed to be complex. Essentially, “My Three Crichtons” is asking what makes someone human? And even more importantly, why is Crichton the representative of humanity on this show? What makes Crichton Crichton? I’ve talked before about how Crichton is the heart of Moya, how his superpower is loving everybody (and loving means understanding), but if you take away that capacity for love, what do you have left? According to this episode, a cold fish who is incapable of loyalty and doesn’t value interpersonal connections. When he’s fighting with Futuro, he says, “No, I am widening my perspective. That is what I do, that is what makes me me.” Futuro’s intelligence and quick thinking skips to the most logical outcome and ignores the rest, but the rest is where our Crichton lives. He sees possibilities, he takes dumb chances, he feels his way through. And Neandro does too. As simple as it is, this is a mission statement. Being a good and loving person is more important than being smart.

Other stuff: I absolutely love it when Aeryn is pointing out the obvious differences between Crichton and Futuro and the first two things that come to mind are his lack of hair and his smaller penis (the original of which she has first-hand knowledge, on at least two occasions). I also love Chiana’s relationship with Neandro; she sees that he respects and loves her, even in his most un-evolved state. The symbolism of Futuro and Neandro’s outfits is pretty neat, though, I’ll admit. Neandro wears Crichton’s IASA uniform (representative of a past Crichton has left far behind) and Futuro wears a Peacekeeper uniform (which associates him automatically with the cold, racist ideology of that group). By the way, Future Crichton is annoying. It’s the teeth, and a slower and more southern accent. The slow talking is very calculated and unemotional; some great acting on Browder’s part, I think.

Trash Bin

Why does Crichton assume that going with the sphere means death? I mean, it’s a logical possibility, but it’s also a possibility that the “specimens” might live. They should really be talking about this as a “possible” sacrifice. It should be much more uncertain. (Of course, this would have removed the motivation for Futuro becoming a dickhead, but that is no excuse.)

Just awful, awful CGI of Moya‘s floor cracking. Could have done without those sequences entirely; they totally pulled me out of the text.

I also think the episode simultaneously doesn’t go far enough (in regards to the multiple Crichtons) and goes too far (seriously, would any iteration of Crichton be such an asshole? I find it VERY hard to believe.) And even if I didn’t have a problem with the actual concept of dick Future Crichton, the theory of evolution pretty much takes care of the rest. Futuro is taken completely out of context, and is basically impossible. A species can’t evolve without an environment to evolve in, so the sphere may be creating a genetic variation of Crichton, but in no way is it an accurate assessment of future humanity. In fairness, the episode does acknowledge that it’s just one possible outcome, but still.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “Have we sent the ‘don’t shoot us, we’re pathetic’ transmission yet?” (D’Argo’s response: “It’s the first thing we tried.”)
• “Unzip, pull it out, point it like a gun, and shoot.”

PuppetWatch!

• The Halosians are way cool puppetry. This is the sort of thing that Farscape‘s access to the Jim Henson Creature shop allows that other sci-fi shows just don’t have. (There’s only so much you can do with a CGI alien on a TV budget . . . especially ten years ago.)
• Future John is . . . yucky. Did they make him unattractive on purpose? Probably.

- – -

“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• A Farscape Glossary: The “Nova Cluster” is the portion of Moya that can be used to route power.
• Interstellar Swearing: “Biznack” is a Nebari expletive, as in “How in the biznack did it do that?”
• Pop Culture References: The Three Stooges, My Three Sons, The $64,000 Question, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
• I’m such a sucker for funny bad grammar. (“Why I trust?” “Why have if not warrior vessel?” “You lie! But no care.” etc.) Every time the Halosians speak, I just giggle.
• Rygel, just having watched Tak throw up: “It’s all right. We do that sort of thing all the time here on Moya. I just peed in the maintenance bay.”
• Chiana-in-Pilot is absolutely HILARIOUS, almost as hilarious as Chiana-in-D’Argo.
• Rygel: [peeing in Crichton's body] By the Hynerian gods that is GOOD. Let me just put this thing away . . . [He catches the zipper on Crichton's penis and groans in agony.]
  Crichton: [slightly panicked] Put it away, and be careful, Sparky.
• Crichton: Well, they say you have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes to understand ‘em.
  Aeryn: [smiles] Well, I certainly know what you were doing when you were in my shoes, Crichton.
  Crichton: Gimme a break.
  [Aeryn laughs.]
  Aeryn: It’s okay. It’s okay, you know. You were in my shoes, I was in your pants . . .
  [Aeryn gets up and walks away.]
  Crichton: Excuse me?
• I really hope Caveman Crichton didn’t die. He was sort of lovable.
• Number of times each character has “died” as of “My Three Crichtons”: Crichton, 8 (I’m counting Futuro and Neandro as Crichton here); D’Argo, 4; Rygel, 3; Zhaan, 1; Aeryn, 1; Pilot, 1; Moya; 1; Chiana, 1.

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #16

[Crichton-in-Aeryn's body has just finished fixing the defense screen, and upon realizing he's alone, takes advantage of the situation. He oh-so-slowly pulls back his "facetag" and unzips Aeryn's vest. Unbeknownst to him, Chiana and Aeryn approach from the hallway and watch as he, er, fondles Aeryn's body.]
Crichton: [rips open the vest and starts jiggling around, cackling pervertedly] Heh heh heh heh heh heh.
[He stops and slowly grasps a boob, squeezing.]
Crichton: Oohhhhh, Mama.
Aeryn: [in Rygel's body] Crichton!
[Crichton spins around lightning fast and holds Aeryn's vest closed.]
Chiana: What are you doing?
[Aeryn shakes her/Rygel's head.]
Crichton: Oh, come on, man! I’m . . . they’re here! They’re right . . . here. They’ve been here for a couple of arns, and I just had to . . .
[While Crichton is trying to find the right words, Aeryn interrupts him.]
Aeryn: You are . . . mentally damaged.
Crichton: No, I’m a guy. A guy. Guys dream about this sort of thing.
Aeryn: I’ll tell you one thing, Crichton. If I find you’ve been dreaming anything else to my body, I’ll break your legs, even if they are mine.

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Look at the Princess,” Parts I-III

Two. Episodes. Of. Zhaan. All the time with the Zhaan. I know some of you really like her, but she kind of just makes me go ‘meh.’ Zhaan. Zhaan. Zhaan. It also doesn’t help that the two (Zhaan-centric) episodes we have on our plate this week are just run of the mill and kind of boring, which is probably why I decided to watch Seasons 1-4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of doing this post last week when I should have. Luckily, I enjoy all the remaining episodes of season two (all the clunkers were at the beginning), so there shouldn’t be a problem in getting those ones up on time. Ahem.

“Home on the Remains” isn’t really a Zhaan episode, per se, seeing as how we mostly delve into Chiana’s past, but despite that, Zhaan is till kind of the visual centerpiece. A little confession: I was so bored by “Dream a Little Dream” the first time I watched the series that I kind of just didn’t pay attention at all when it was on and read the summary online instead. Having officially watched it now, I can’t say that I missed all that much on the first go. Both episodes are at least redeemable (unlike “Taking the Stone”) in that I can see where they’re coming from, even if I don’t think they were entirely successful.

2X07 — “HOME ON THE REMAINS”

Everybody is hungry. All the time. They have no food, and they are out of supplies. So it’s probably fitting that Moya is sitting in the mouth of a giant ass space creature called a Budong. A dead Budong. That people live in. Chiana once stayed here (and stole things) with her brother; she says they can get food here. Meanwhile, Zhaan’s face starts to grow flower pimples because that woman needs food, so they’re going into the Budong, Chiana’s enemies not withstanding. This biological reaction of Zhaan’s seems strange. I guess she’s getting ready to plant herself? How do Delvians produce offspring, anyway? Aeryn stays aboard Moya to watch over the flowering Zhaan (because she’s the only one who isn’t allergic to her) while the others head into the Budong. The miners who live in the Budong are seriously ugly, as usual, and not only does the place smell (like a rotting corpse, obviously) and have poisonous walls, but it’s also full of deadly monsters called Keedvas that rip you to shreds while the rest of you dissolves in acidic saliva. Such is the fate of Chiana’s old friend Temmon, who was supposed to help them, but instead, dies. Temmon’s brother, B’Sogg, is an asshole. He looks like Sloth, except not cute. He closes the mines, more out of a sense of power than of keeping people safe. This mean’s Chiana’s friend, Altana, can’t get to her claim (apparently she’s scored big), and Chiana can’t get the share she’s been promised.

Up on Moya, Aeryn has her hands full trying to keep Zhaan’s budding from getting out of control. Nothing she does helps, and some things (like shining light on her) make it worse. The pollen even begins to affect Moya, numbing her inside hull and forcing Pilot to flush the atmosphere. When Crichton brings back food for her, finally, she rejects it, saying she needs meat to stop the budding cycle. There are a bunch of machinations down on the Budong as Crichton, D’Argo, and Chiana try to obtain meat. Mining, possible prostitution, alligator monsters, gambling, jealousy, almost getting eaten, blah blah blah. I really don’t like most of this episode. (Rygel and Crichton biting each other, though, that’s just hilarious.) D’Argo helps Altana collect her crystals, but before they can make it back, they’re attacked by a keedva. Altana dies. Later, Chiana figures out that B’Sogg has been controlling the keedva by whistle, and that he killed Altana and Temmon in order to steal their claims. B’Sogg says the keedva and he have a “mutually beneficial” relationship. Chiana attacks and injures B’Sogg and Crichton kills the keedva, which he brings back to Moya for Zhaan to eat. Barbecue style. D’Argo then informs Chiana of his feelings by making out with her. Chiana just says “Whoa.”

Trivia

• “Home on the Remains” was written by Gabrielle Stanton and Harry Werksman, Jr. (who have both since worked on Grey’s Anatomy, Moonlight, Ugly Betty, Castle, The Vampire Diaries, and most recently, The Gates, as writers and producers). It was directed by Rowan Woods.
• This episode was the only one of the entire run of Farscape to receive an 18 Certificate from the British Board of Film Classification. These are given when the Board wants to issue a warning against allowing viewers under the age of 18 watch the material in question. Presumably this was due to some of the episode’s graphic violence.
• Though Claudia Black usually prefers to produce her own tears naturally when doing a crying scene, in this episode she used menthol under her eyes to create Aeryn’s involuntary reaction to Zhaan’s pollination.
• The title comes from “Home on the Range,” a popular American folksong.

Metaphorically Speaking

Part of the problem with this episode is that the overarching thing isn’t apparent until the last five minutes, the thing in this case being the issues surrounding ‘survival’. And as is always the case with Farscape, it’s also about bodies. The Budong is the symbolic centerpiece of the episode, a giant dead creature, its rotting body inhabited by the dregs of the Uncharted Territories, who mine its poisonous walls for rare and valuable crystals in order to survive in a place that few survive in. When you get down to the bottom of the people scale like this, when you’re a member of a group that is considered on the fringe (as the Moyans certainly are), there are certain things that, if you let them, just cease to matter in practicality. Friendship, community, the question of good and evil . . . they take a backseat when your main concern is whether or not you have a reliable place to sleep, or if you’ll be able to eat that day. And the main thing that you have to worry about is your own body, whether it’s been fed, or if it it’s sick. Bodies are dangerous. Other people’s bodies, your body. Hostile environments distill things to their essence; it’s the animal vs. the intelligence vs. the spiritual. I think it’s important to note that the episode is attempting to make a distinction between the Moyans and everyone else at the bottom of the food chain. Like, this is what you could be. Beware. At least, that’s what the episode is trying to convey. Other things get in the way.

Mainly, “Home on the Remains” is concerned with Chiana and Zhaan. Like the dead Budong, Zhaan is the embodiment of what this episode is trying to get at. Wise, rational, spiritual Zhaan disappears almost completely when hunger forces her biology to take over. I was going to use the word animal, but Zhaan isn’t an animal. She’s a plant. She’s a walking Venus Fly Trap. So it’s actually bigger than animal versus spiritual. It’s nature versus civilization, kill or be killed, and in that moment when Aeryn calls her back to herself and she asks for help, she’s making a choice. There are some things you don’t give up without a fight.

On the Chiana front, it moves a couple of pieces into place, for the first time cementing her status on board Moya in her own eyes. The others may have accepted her a while ago, but she’s still ready to run at any moment. Chiana’s a hard one to get a handle on, mostly because a lot of what you see with her is an act (something this episode delves into in her actions with B’Sogg, and his brother before him). She tells D’Argo that she acts out to protect herself, “out” being the key word. She’s constantly projecting an image of herself onto the people around her, relying heavily on her sexuality and her ability to manipulate people with it. It’s the end result that matters, after all: survival. You put on the face, say the words, and do what you have to. It’s a very lonely way to live. She only lets her guard down when she feel safe, when it’s not about survival anymore. And that’s what this episode does in its flawed way; Chiana realizes that Moya isn’t just another way to keep going anymore, but a home, and it’s D’Argo’s feelings for her that bring the realization about. “Oh, hey, these people like me.” Because home isn’t just about safety, it’s also about love, which in the hierarchy of things, just makes you more human.

Other, smaller stuff: The whole living inside of a giant, rotting corpse and prostituting yourself for food thing could also be a metaphor for Hollywood (I’m just saying). I’d forgotten this, but the Chiana/D’Argo relationship gets off to a nice little start in this episode. I’ve always thought it was fitting that they were drawn to each other, being the youngest and most immature of the crew. It strikes me that this episode was Farscape‘s answer to Star Trek‘s sterilized and homogeneous “final frontier.” Even the most savage Star Trek denizen couldn’t hold a candle to the gross places characters on Farscape often inhabit, both physically and emotionally. There is nothing fun or intellectually stimulating or philosophically meandering about living on a Budong. It’s hell, and it’s shit. I also think it’s a fun exercise to compare the portrayal of savages in the Uncharted Territories (as represented by the inhabitants of the Budong) to the the outer planets of Firefly (even though Firefly didn’t premiere until 2002, at which point Farscape was wrapping up its four season run). All three shows treat the idea of the frontier (and safety and survival) very differently. Finally, even though I have a lot of problems with “Home on the Remains” as a cohesive hour of television, I do have to acknowledge all the little moments that did work, i.e the crew being physically allergic to Zhaan’s pollen and spores, Crichton and Rygel biting each other in an episode that is largely about food, and the wonderful symmetry of the keedva barbecue at the end of the episode.

Trash Bin

No one except for Zhaan looks hungry. Takes some of the tension out the thing, you know? They could have at least tried to give everyone “hungry” make-up, or something. B’Sogg and the other denizens of the Budong are actively repellent. My extreme dislike of them gets in the way of the story, and in an episode where the main point isn’t apparent until the end of the episode, that really isn’t a good thing. In fact, if not for the last five minutes of the episode, the whole thing would have been a total bust. (Luckily, the keedva barbecue and Chiana’s conversation with D’Argo at least shed some light on the thing, but there should have been light a lot sooner than that.)

It also really annoyed me that B’Sogg’s species were saddled with annoying accents of an indeterminate origin, like they were from Jamaica. Or West Virginia.

- – -

2X08 — “DREAM A LITTLE DREAM”

Remember back eight episodes or so ago, when Crichton and D’Argo were hanging out in space and Aeryn couldn’t get to them and everything was awful, and made even more awful when Moya and everyone aboard it just Starbursted away? Well, Zhaan sure does. She dreams that Aeryn’s Prowler was blown up by Peacekeepers, and that Crichton’ s space helmet cracked and exploded his beautiful face. She wakes up screaming. This isn’t the first time she’s dreamed of their deaths. Currently stuck in a transport pod with said beautiful Crichton, she tells him that they searched for twenty days for Aeryn, Crichton, and D’Argo before happening on a planet stupidly called Litigara, whose population was predictably made up of 90% lawyers. Of course, there was no sign of their missing friends on Litigara, but just as they were about to leave, Zhaan went and got herself hit by a car. Apparently getting hit by cars is illegal on Litigara, because Zhaan was arrested and taken to jail, where she goes batshit insane and assaults her lawyer. And THEN she starts hallucinating! Visions of Crichton, D’Argo, and Aeryn, judging her. Randomly, the Litigaran chick who got her arrested in the first place (by changing the walking signal) helps her to escape, but it turns out it’s only so that she can frame her for murder.

The murdered Litigaran, Wesley Kenn, was a civil rights lawyer who championed the “Utilities” (the 10% of the population who aren’t lawyers), so it’s pretty obvious right away why he was murdered. Zhaan will be executed as the scapegoat. Her lawyer refuses to represent her in a plea of innocence (lest he be executed along with her), so Chiana and Rygel take up the cause. While Chiana and Rygel get legal help from a useful Litigaran bartender, Zhaan is still hallucinating (this time, it’s just Aeryn, who blames Zhaan for leaving). As a result of this, Zhaan acts like the biggest idiot ever and confesses in the middle of court that she murdered Wesley Kenn. Finally somebody gags her, thank God, and the trial continues. Chiana tries sexing up the cop who arrested Zhaan, and the info she gets out of him gets her in trouble the next day. Ja Rhumann (effectively the planet’s leader, who had Wesley Kenn killed) calls her into his office and threatens her. Meanwhile, Zhaan’s D’Argo hallucination tells her to pick up her Delvian Seek again, and then makes out with her. At the last minute, Rygel comes up with a plan. Using the Litigarans’ own ancient texts against them, and some trickery involving Moya, they convince the judge that Ja Rhumann is lying and that it was he who murdered Wesley Kenn in an effort to stall movements on the Utilities’ civil rights movement. When Zhaan finished telling Crichton all of this, he tells her that it’s a good thing for her to have picked up the Seek again, and thanks her for her compassion.

Trivia

• The episode’s writer, Steven Rae, is a nom de plume for the series’ creator Rockne S. O’Bannon. The episode was directed by Ian Watson.
• According to Ben Browder, the singing scenes in this episode were not in the script, but ad-libbed the day of filming.
• This episode was first filmed for the season premiere, however it was held to allow “Mind the Baby” to air instead. Several additional scenes were shot and the episode was aired later on as a flashback story.
• The original cut of this episode, “Re: Union”, eventually aired as a special presentation in the US on Sci-Fi June 1, 2001, during reruns of the third season.
• The title of the episode comes from the song that Crichton sings to Zhaan, “Dream a Little Dream.” This was a top ten hit for Frankie Laine in 1950, and was also recorded by dozens of others, including Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and “Mama” Cass Elliot of The Mamas & the Papas. It has most recently been featured on Glee.

Metaphorically Speaking

Basically what it comes down to is that Zhaan has a guilty conscience. Because she no longer has access to the spiritual pathways of the Pa’u, she has no way of reconciling her feelings of grief at the perceived loss of Aeryn, Crichton, and D’Argo, and her guilt at having survived at their expense. She also seems to be placing an undue burden of leadership, and responsibility in general, upon herself. She misses the strong personalities of the others, who she perceived as the decision makers. She even goes so far as to claim that it is her duty to take care of Rygel and Chiana, who are as children to her. Not only does this short-change Rygel and Chiana (who despite their flaws, show themselves to be more than capable of “taking care of things” in the way they save Zhaan from certain execution), it also shows how skewed Zhaan’s sense of perspective has become since giving up the Seek. It is extremely arrogant to be that full of guilt. It’s indicative of an unconscious self-centeredness which presumes that you as an individual are responsible for events that are essentially out of your control. By the end of the episode, Zhaan has her head on straight.

However, if Zhaan’s guilt is going to be the focus of an episode, it needs other story to bounce off of, hence the machinations of the Litigara plot. Essentially, the entire storyline was created for that one moment when Zhaan, overwhelmed by her own sense of guilt for the fate of her friends, declares herself guilty. That is the only connection between the two stories, as it’s played anyway (I’ll get to that more down in the Trash Bin). Even though the two plots don’t really connect as fully as they could, I could see how the idea for this story could have intrigued the writers. The way that Litigaran law is portrayed smacks of satire, although the satire is ultimately ineffective and undirected, as the main focus of the story was on Zhaan, a focus that would have been (and was) hindered by the presence of satire. In an episode about self-discovery, I do love that Rygel and Chiana are fully aware that their strengths lie in trickery and deception, and that this is something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned.

Trash Bin

There are a vast number of things wrong with this episode, and because I can see what they were trying to do, it’s easier for me to pinpoint where it all went wrong (in comparison, this is something I was largely unable to do for “Taking the Stone,” so whether that means “Dream a Little Dream” is better or worse I’ll leave for you to decide). Originally, this episode was meant to function as the season premiere, so whatever else I have to say about it, I think we can all agree that THANK GOD that didn’t happen. The cliffhanger ending of “Family Ties,” and all the suspense that comes with it, would have been absolutely ruined by the flat pacing and narrative pointlessness of this episode. Imagine waiting three months to find out what happened to Aeryn, Crichton, and D’Argo, and getting this for your answer. On top of that, the absence of those three characters is one of the things that is working to this episode’s detriment, so to lack them in a season premiere would have been an absolute disaster. The episode works better as a flashback, but it still doesn’t work.

The thing is, this is kind of a neat idea for a story, but the execution is off in almost every way possible: the music, the lighting, the ambiance, the costumes, the acting . . . I’m sure some of the blame can be laid on Ian Watson (the director), but as I’ve noted before, Farscape was largely a collaborative effort, so if an episode went wrong, it went wrong as a result of mistakes made by multiple people, not just a single man. If the Zhaan-guilt story was going to work, it needed to be subtle and serious. Guilt, unlike say, insanity, isn’t something that can be played for dark laughs. Guilt needs pathos; it needs subtle despair. As I said above, the entire Litigara plot is exactly the opposite of subtle. It is over the top parody, and that just doesn’t mesh with the goals of the episode (for Zhaan’s character, at least). As an illustration of this point, the moment in court when Rygel farts from nervousness and the helium affects Chiana’s voice in the middle of her questioning a witness could have been really effective. Imagine if that courtroom had been more dour, actually scary. Maybe it was dressed in blacks and greys instead of blues and purples. Maybe the lawyers weren’t all wearing ridiculous headdresses. Maybe Zhaan wasn’t being hysterical. In that more subtle atmosphere, Rygel’s fart would have contrasted sharply with the rest of the scene, and that would have made it both funny and affecting. Instead, it plays like an element of the ridiculous just being shoved on top of a bunch of other ridiculous things, and we lose any genuine emotion that might have been conveyed. The same thing could be said for every other semi-interesting moment in the episode, including Zhaan’s hallucinations.

But the thing that really kills the episode for me is Virginia Hey’s performance, which is strange for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the acting on Farscape rarely falters, but I just think that (whether it was her choice or the director’s), Hey is channeling Susan Lucci when she should be channeling, say, Mary McDonnell. It’s just too over the top. Even from her very first scene when she pulls Rygel and Chiana away from the bar, she’s almost hysterical. Scratch that. She is hysterical. It’s a shame, I would have connected more with her as a viewer if she had played it more subtly. The hallucination scenes, the bar scenes, even her psychotic break. And, of course, her confession in the middle of court. “I’M GUILTY.” I mean, jeez, woman. Haven’t you ever heard of the phrase “quiet despair”? It should have been applied liberally here. Instead, we get melodrama, which really sucks because that’s not often a place that Farscape goes.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “No more Captain Kirk chit-chat!”
• “Yep, Carolina style keedva, best barbecue this side of a Budong.”
• “You’re a tenth level Pa’u. You get to eleven, we get a TV ministry.”

PuppetWatch!

• I did really like the keedva. It was cute! Scary, yet stupid looking. Bet it tasted nice, too.
• Nice call on Crichton biting the Rygel puppet in “Home on the Remains.” (Hands on the puppet!) Similarly, Zhaan forcibly picking Rygel up and carrying him out of the bar in “Dream a Little Dream” was awesome.
• The effects when Chiana melts B’Sogg’s arm off were DISGUSTING. B’Sogg was also exceptionally annoying during that scene, like an even more retarded Jar Jar Binks. “You bitch! What you doOoOoOoOo?”

- – -

“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• Pop Culture References: The Andy Griffith Show; Gomer Pyle, USMC; Maverick; Star Trek; and This is Spïnal Tap.
• I really like Chiana’s new outfit in “Home on the Remains.” Much more attractive than her other thing.
• The Budong dwellers really are hideous, but the question remains. Are they ugly because they live in a Budong, or do they live in a Budong because they’re ugly?
• It’s kind of cool that Zhaan can levitate, even if she can only do it when she’s wonko.
• Crichton kicks the keedva in the balls! What a classy fellow.
• Crichton can’t sing. It’s cute.
• Rygel: “I thought we might even pull this off. But you and me . . . not lying! Are you mad?”

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #15

[Aboard the transport pod, Zhaan has just finished her story.]
Crichton: But you still have nightmares.
Zhaan: Yes. I keep seeing you and D’Argo and Aeryn dying horrible deaths. I can’t seem to purge the fear.
Crichton: I live, Zhaan. Touch as proof.
[He touches her nose.]
Zhaan: I know, but the experience proves to me that my spirituality was lacking.
Crichton: Is that why you re-committed yourself to the Delvian Seek?
Zhaan: [nods] Mmhmm.
Crichton: Then maybe it was worth it.
Zhaan: Even though my studies fail to benefit the rest of them?
Crichton: Now who says that?
Zhaan: Well, at various times, Rygel, D’Argo, and Aeryn.
Crichton: Screw ‘em, Zhaany. You’re a tenth level Pa’u. You get to eleven, we get a TV ministry.
Zhaan: If I may be honest, John, most of the time I have no idea what you’re saying.
Crichton: Neither do I.

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Out of Their Minds,” “My Three Crichtons”

I am a wordy person. Sometimes this works to my benefit. I never have to worry about not meeting page limits, for example, in fact I frequently exceed them, most of the time by way, way a lot. I’m verbose, I have trouble being concise, I use more words and sentences than I should in spaces allotted to me, and I probably talk too much. Actually, this entire paragraph proves my point. I could have easily left it at “I am a wordy person,” and moved on from there. But I didn’t. My personal philosophy is that sometimes more is more, but it’s nice to change it up once in a while and talk small. Consider this your notice that I’m changing things up. Since I started this project, I have accidentally and consistently written at least two paragraphs more of episode summary than I wanted to. I wanted that section to be two paragraphs, max, in each post. We all see how that turned out.

Starting with this post, I am keeping the episode summaries to two paragraphs max, dammit. Why? Because A) It takes a lot of time, B) I don’t need to do it, you’re supposed to be watching these episodes as we go along . . . right? And even if you’re not, you don’t need more than a basic summary as a reminder, and C) I get the most out of writing the Metaphorically Speaking and Trash Bin sections anyway. If you want to read great, and way thorough, recaps of Farscape, I’d suggest heading over to TWOP, where Couch Baron, Strega, and Jacob spent a summer revisiting the series a couple years ago. In the meantime, we’ve got “The Way We Weren’t” and “Picture If You Will” on our plates. One is what I like to call a “quiet classic” and the other should then accordingly be called a “quiet dud.” Who thought up that Maldis guy, anyway?

2X05 — “PICTURE IF YOU WILL”

Chiana receives a psychic glass painting as a gift from an ugly motherfucker space gypsy woman named Kyvan who is living aboard a strange space station. The painting keeps changing according to what’s going on, or what’s going to be going on. It predicts that she will find her lost necklace, and that she will break her leg. She becomes very possessive over it, but Crichton and Zhaan are skeptical. D’Argo tells Chiana that keeping the painting is foolish, so she tells him to leave her alone. Meanwhile, Zhaan is off analyzing the tiny fragment of the painting she managed to weasel out of Chiana. She starts hearing weird noises, but Crichton interrupts before they can really get going. He says he doesn’t believe any of this nonsense, but Zhaan vehemently insists that it’s real, and that Chiana is in danger. She makes him promise cryptically to follow her instructions to the letter and without question, when she asks him to. Crichton goes to retrieve the painting, which has changed to show Chiana surrounded by flames. She is very scared, and those fears appear to be warranted when she spontaneously combusts, despite being locked inside of a freezer. When the freezer opens, there’s nothing left of her but ashes and a necklace. No one is exactly sure what’s going on, but it’s clear that the painting has something to do with it. Zhaan lights it on fire. But later, it appears completely un-burnt, and now with an almost complete D’Argo picture. They smash it and shove it out an airlock. It comes back, and this time kills D’Argo.

Aeryn heads back to find Kyvan’s ship to “make restitution,” but in the meanwhile, D’Argo finds himself inside the portrait with Chiana for company. By now the portrait has changed again, this time showing Crichton being immolated by purple beams of light. Upon finding Kyvan, Aeryn manages to learn that Maldis, apparently reconstituted from last time, is behind the painting. Zhaan pulls Crichton’s head towards hers and tells him through their Unity bond to distract Maldis for as long as possible, and to ignore everything she says out loud. Which is good, because the next thing she says is that she gives up. Then she shoves him into a DRD and he explodes, waking up in the painting. He forces Maldis into some villain exposition, but soon Maldis has taken Zhaan as well. Pilot relays Zhaan’s instructions to Aeryn, who kills Kyvan (really Maldis, in another incarnation) and vamooses out of the space station before it folds in on itself and shatters like glass. This weakens Maldis, which is Zhaan’s cue to get all bad ass. She manages to free the others, and Crichton drags her out of the painting with them. A giant Maldis hand comes wanking on out, but Crichton shoots it ZAT ZAT until it explodes, and hopefully Maldis is gone forever because I hate that guy.

Trivia

• “Picture If You Will” was written by Peter Neale (his only Farscape episode) and directed by Andrew Prowse. Prowse directed “Premiere,” along with seventeen other episodes throughout the series’ run, including “DNA Mad Scientist” and the awful “Taking the Stone.” Prowse would go on to become a producer in season four, after having served as assistant producer and co-producer in seasons one through three.
• “Picture, if you will . . .” was frequently the opening of Rod Serling’s monologue at the beginning of each episode of The Twilight Zone.
• Virginia Hey’s martial arts training came in handy for the fight scene with Maldis. As a teenager she studied both Judo and Karate, earning a blue belt in Judo and an orange in karate. She really enjoyed filming the scene because she got to “kick Maldis’ ass.”
• This episode was broadcast after “The Way We Weren’t,” yet it should come before it in production order. Aeryn and Crichton’s scenes here makes more sense if “Picture If You Will” is shown first.

Metaphorically Speaking

Fuckin’ Maldis. That guy ruins everything. “Picture If You Will” started out good. It really did. The painting was an interesting little idea, and it could have gone a bunch of different (and more subtle) ways, but it didn’t. Instead, it turned out to all be about Maldis’s revenge, which took any oomph the freaky glass painting might have had out of the story. In fact, this episode holds together right up until D’Argo shatters and “dies.” It starts out just being creepy, predicting Chiana’s broken leg, but when she actually dies, the sense of terror and guilt the crew feels is wonderful, and underneath that you have Zhaan sensing that something awful is going on, but not being able to talk about it. It just works. I also really like the idea of the painting itself, and the production department created a prop that is visually interesting as well. Sometimes these kind of sci-fi props end up really cheesy and you have to work hard to suspend your disbelief, but this isn’t one of those times. The whole first half of the episode seems to be setting something up. If you haven’t seen it before, you’re expecting something along the lines of “art being a window in time,” because you know, what would be the point of creating an object that could predict the future if you weren’t going to follow through with it, right?

Wrong. Any interesting thematic set-up that occurred as a result of the painting is thrown out the window and ignored when Maldis shows up. He doesn’t care about the future, or even the painting itself. It was just a way for him to trap the others and get his revenge on Zhaan. I suppose you could make the argument that the painting was being used by Maldis as some sort of metaphorical trap, like he knew the others would become obsessed with their supposed “futures,” but it doesn’t turn out that way. The only one fooled is Chiana, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the painting was able to do its work even if its victims didn’t want to see the future it was showing them. You could also argue that not everything is about metaphor, and why don’t I just think simple for once and blah blah blah it was just a way for Maldis to scare the crap out of them, but no. I don’t buy it. Farscape isn’t that kind of show. There’s always something else going on. The main problem with this episode isn’t even really Maldis, it’s that the two halves it’s split into don’t match tonally. The first half is subtle and eerie, and the second half has giant hands trying to kill people. Certainly, Maldis is part of the problem. As I talked about with “That Old Black Magic,” he isn’t a great villain because there’s nothing complex about him. He’s predictable, one-note, boring. In fact, he’s such a simple (if annoying and evil) bastard that as soon as he shows up, any sense of tension goes out the window for me. I know right off the bat that he’s not going to have any lasting impact on these characters, except for maybe Zhaan, because what he represents to them is piddly in comparison to the other stuff this show regularly throws at us.

But let’s talk about the characters for a second, because at least they redeem the episode somewhat, starting with Zhaan. One of the reasons that I do buy the Zhaan/Maldis conflict is that Virginia Hey’s performance is exceptionally solid and believable, but it’s also because she’s the only one he is any real threat to. Zhaan exists on a spiritual plane that the other Moyans don’t inhabit, so she has more to lose from a spiritual predator than anyone. Add to that her own predilection for going kind of evil and heartless, and her terrified reaction by the end of the episode makes perfect sense. But even then, the tension is one-sided. Maldis is not scary to me, even if I do buy that Zhaan is frightened of him. I also like that the episode gives her the opportunity not just to save the day, but to do it in such a way that we can see how much faith the other Moyans have in her. So, even though this episode has Maldis in it, it’s not a total waste. The writers have allowed these characters to grow and interact in such wonderful ways that the end result is an episode that comes nowhere close to the levels of awfulness previously inhabited by “That Old Black Magic.” “Picture If You Will” also gives us a couple small character moments with the others as well. D’Argo and Chiana appear to be growing much, much closer. He is very concerned for her when she breaks her leg, and as their body language indicates, his feelings are more than just friendly crew type feelings. I also liked Rygel openly showing his affection for Chiana after her supposed “death,” and Crichton asking Aeryn if she’s always going to keep the world at a distance. All three of those moments will pay off in upcoming episodes.

Trash Bin

This episode seems to be under the impression that we liked Maldis the first time. Just to be clear, we didn’t. And you know it’s bad when you have to have a character get all meta and clear up the events of the plot. Even cute little nods like “Just sit back and enjoy the happy ending” can’t change the fact that the episode was so unclear that that scene needed to exist in the first place.

- – -

2X06 — “THE WAY WE WEREN’T”

Chiana finds an archive of old PK video surveillance footage from Moya and shows it to Crichton. The footage shows that Moya once had a female pilot, angry at a Peacekeeper named Lt. Velorek. She’s telling him that she doesn’t like the control collar or the “experiment.” Crais enters. He orders the PK squadron surrounding them to kill her, and they do so violently and without remorse. One of the PKs turns out to be Aeryn. Aeryn is very upset when shown the footage, as are D’Argo, Zhaan, and Rygel, who accuse her of being a monster. Only Crichton defends her as the same Aeryn they know and love. She remembers the mission, but claims that she didn’t know it was Moya or she would have said something sooner. She recalls her experience three years before when she was assigned to fly the transport carrying Moya‘s new Pilot. Velorek’s project to install a cooperative Leviathan existed so that Crais could carry out an experiment. Aeryn is so upset by the memory that she breaks down in Crichton’s arms after bloodying her knuckles raw on a punching bag. She tells Crichton about her life with the PKs and relationship with Velorek. She says they were lovers, that she felt something she’d never felt with any of the men she “recreated” with. Pilot interrupts the confession having seen the tape, and she goes to talk to him. Pilot goes nuts, attacking Aeryn in a furious rage. He remembers being installed in Moya, and that it was long and very painful, and Velorek didn’t do it the natural way, which takes one to two years. Pilot demands that Aeryn leave Moya.

Crichton knows there’s more to the story, but Aeryn won’t tell him. Zhaan is a snippy bitch while fixing up Aeryn’s injury, agreeing that Aeryn should leave, but then Aeryn decides to really leave and Zhaan gets her head screwed back on straight. She tells Aeryn she had no choice back then, that she was the only kind of PK she knew how to be. But then flashbacks of her and Velorek making love show he that asked her to be more, to run away with him, and that he thought Crais was a madman. Crichton goes to talk to Pilot. We learn that Velorek accelerated the bonding process to less than a day, and that as a result, Pilot would be in constant pain that won’t go away; he is in pain now. Moya was tortured into accepting him, so he rips out his nerves and severs their connection. We also learn that it was Velorek who installed the birth control shield that D’Argo kicked out back in “They’ve Got a Secret,” so that Crais’s project would never come to fruition. Severed from Pilot, Moya is bobbing about and life support is null. Aeryn goes to talk to Pilot, knowing that she is the only one who can understand what he’s going through. Three years before, Aeryn witnessed Velorek’s treason and turned him in for a promotion. As he was being arrested, he told her she was special, and wasn’t angry. The memory of it is horrifying to her now. Crichton and Aeryn infiltrate Pilot’s den where she tells Pilot to kill her but not the others, but he admits that it’s he who deserves death. He knew the old Pilot would die if he chose to accompany Velorek against the wishes of the elder Pilots, who deemed him not yet worthy to be bonded to any Leviathan. But he wanted to see the stars. Aeryn tells him they’ve come a long way since then, and they still have a long way to go. Later, D’Argo bonds Pilot to Moya naturally, beginning the year long process. In the mess, Crichton and Aeryn share a moment, a long look, and some secret smiles. Both Velorek and Crichton knew she could be more.

Trivia

• “The Way We Weren’t” was written by Naren Shankar (Star Trek: TNG, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, CSI) and directed by Tony Tilse (“PK Tech Girl,” “Family Ties;” he also directed many of Farscape‘s upcoming season two episodes).
• In this episode, we get the first glimpse of Pilot’s misty home world, Doien, which until the events of the “Red Sky at Morning” graphic novel released in 2010, had no name. “Red Sky at Morning” is the fifth volume of the Farscape graphic novel series, following “The Beginning of the End of the Beginning” (1), “Strange Detractors” (2), “Gone and Back” (3), and “Tangled Roots” (4). The original Farscape writing team is involved in the project, which is considered canon and takes place after the events of The Peacekeeper Wars mini-series.
• The film itself for the flashback scenes was processed using a technique known as “bleach bypass” to give them an aged look.
• From this episode on, the musical scores on Farscape are all composed by Guy Gross.
• The title “The Way We Weren’t” is a play on the 1974 film The Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.
• Lani Tupu decided that Velorek’s arrest was the first time Crais met Aeryn and played the scene accordingly. He considers the scene where Velorek visits Pilot’s planet to entice him to come to Moya as one of his favorites in the series.
• Aeryn also met Pilot and Zhaan for the first time during the flashbacks in this episode.

Metaphorically Speaking

I always forget, but I love this episode. It’s one of the rare non-John centric episodes, and it works beautifully from beginning to end. The main focus is Aeryn, and through the use of flashbacks, we can see not only how far she’s come as a person, which is the goal, but we also get a little window into the past, which is enjoyable (despite the subject matter). What’s great about the flashbacks is that they don’t only just show us what we already knew about Aeryn, which was that she used to be a heartless Peacekeeper. Like Rygel, Zhaan, D’Argo, and Chiana (who I’ll get back to later), we as viewers prefer not to think about all the horrible things Aeryn did before we knew her. The flashbacks force us, and the Moyans, to confront their feelings for Aeryn in the face of something real, and more importantly, they force Aeryn to confront her past actions in light of what she knows now. I also enjoy how the flashbacks show us that yes, Aeryn was a heartless PK, but also that meeting Crichton and the other Moyans wasn’t the first time she’d been offered the chance to be a better person. Velorek offered it to her, and she turned around and hung him with it. That together with the fact that “she killed a Pilot” gives us, and the Moyans, some concrete evidence that we just can’t pretend doesn’t exist. As Chiana says, what did we think she was doing all that time she was a Peacekeeper, petting fluffy bunnies?

For whatever reason (and I have some theories), Aeryn could not begin to change on her own. It was only when she was forced by circumstance away from the Peacekeeper influence that she began to change. She was a Peacekeeper, born and bred. She flew Prowlers, took orders, and never asked questions. And she never, ever got attached. She tells Crichton that her relationships before coming aboard Moya were painful, which is an odd choice of words, and Crichton thinks so, too, but it’s present day Aeryn that uses that it; I don’t think three-years-ago Aeryn would have even known that what she was feeling was pain. Her intimacy with Velorek was fine until he brought it to her attention that it was different, and then it became scary. She didn’t understand it, so when he asked her to come with him (something she would never do on her own), she turned him in and buried him. I like to think of Velorek as the proto-Crichton; they have the same type of personality, and I think what draws Aeryn to Crichton is the same thing that drew her to Velorek, consciously or not. She tells Crichton that her priorities, relationships, and values were different back then. She valued being part of a team, the professional connections between officers and subordinates, and above all else, Peacekeeper protocols. Velorek was different; he valued life. We can see this in his actions: when he touches Pilot’s cheek to calm him (and then quickly covers by Tasing him when Crais walks in the room), and installing the shield. One of the reasons this memory is so crushing to Aeryn now is that it takes away the comforting idea that she didn’t know any better. She had a chance and she turned it in for treason, and she can feel without doubt that it was one of the worst mistakes of her life.

The other wonderful part of this episode is what happens with Pilot. At first you kind of get mad at him for being so irrational, just like you get mad at the rest of them. Like, hello? You knew she was a Peacekeeper and that she did awful things, and she is your friend so how about you calm down and LISTEN TO HER. But it soon becomes apparent that something more is going on with him. He’s dealing with his own repressed feelings of guilt and responsibility over the death of Moya‘s first Pilot, and Aeryn’s actions are dredging all those old feelings up. He never wanted to think about any of that ever again. I would assume after having been Moya‘s Pilot for three years, he’s also come to feel guilty as her protector, and as a violator of “the covenant between Leviathan and Pilot.” Never having been bonded with Moya naturally, I can only imagine that he feels like a fraud, an interloper. Not to mention the constant pain. It’s a reminder twenty-four hours a day of what he did. I love that Pilot is young. Because he’s so big and speaks so wonderfully slow, I always assume that he’s old and wise, but it’s just the opposite. He’s just as big of a dumb-ass as the rest of them. And the thing is, I can’t really fault him for his decision. We all make mistakes; it’s how we learn. As far as I’m concerned, you’re only really in trouble if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again, or if you refuse to acknowledge that they’re mistakes in the first place. Growing up is realizing how stupid you used to be.

Other stuff: I thought the reaction of the other crew-members was very well played. They pissed me off, a lot actually, but in the end they realized that she was still the same Aeryn and that she deserved their compassion, not their anger, so everything turned out okay. On a related note, the continuity of Farscape continues to be awesome. I loved Aeryn throwing the whole arm-cutting-off thing back in Zhaan’s face. I laughed out loud. And later, Crichton wonders why Pilot didn’t fly into a murderous rage when they cut his arm off, but he’s doing it now with Aeryn. Recalling these events provides clues for Crichton that something else is going on. It’s a really nice touch. Another continuity moment: Crichton and D’Argo Rock-Paper-Scissoring it, calling back to “Mind the Baby.” The PKs digging the old Pilot’s guts out of Moya’s systems and then wiping them on Aeryn’s clothes was a nice way to show-not-tell us that PKs are assholes, and I especially enjoyed how over the top asshole Lani Tupu got to play Crais. He actually comes across as scary, unlike in most of Season One where all the camp kept getting in the way. But despite all the nonsense with the PKs, this episode is very intimate. The scenes aboard Moya are all very confessional and real emotions pass between characters, and I noticed on this time through that everyone’s faces were exceptionally well-lit. The flashbacks were very intimate as well, what with all their delving into Aeryn’s past. In particular, the scenes between lovers Velorek and PK Aeryn felt very personal, which was surprising. And of course, the final scene between Aeryn and Pilot was what the whole thing was building towards.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “Haven’t you read the Super Villain’s Handbook? This is where you’re supposed to twirl your moustache and gloat.”

PuppetWatch!

• The Creature Shop did an amazing job at building the rest of the Pilot body for “The Way We Weren’t.” He’s like a giant lobster out of water, except likable.

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“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• A Farscape Glossary: “Recreating” is Peacekeeper for “Sex.”
• Pop Culture References: The Way We Were (obviously), Peanuts, Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, and The Sound of Music.
• Claudia Black’s face is the star of “The Way We Weren’t.” It positively glows, even when she’s crying. And it looks like director Tony Tilse was aware of it. He kept her very well lighted throughout. When she and Crichton are up in the vents looking down at Pilot, her face is like glowing from the inside, and during the Pilot confession scene, watching her cry makes me want to jump through the screen and get closer just to look at the pretty.
• Zhaan’s Season Two wardrobe is much more modest than what she wore in Season One. She often wears a blue turtle neck and a dress that leaves nothing but her head and hands uncovered. This was most likely done, I think, to limit Virginia Hey’s exposure to the blue makeup, which I believe was starting to make her ill by this point.
• Number of times each character has “died” as of “The Way We Weren’t”: Crichton, 6; D’Argo, 4; Rygel, 3; Zhaan, 1; Aeryn, 1; Pilot, 1; Moya; 1; Chiana, 1.

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #14

[Pilot's Den. Pilot has just backed down and admitted that it's not Aeryn he is ashamed of, but himself.]
Pilot: I didn’t only replace the old Pilot.
[There is a flash, and suddenly we're on Pilot's homeworld. We see two tiny figures among the misty marshes. One is a pilot, one is a Peacekeeper.]
Young Pilot: The elders have already judged me. They said I was not yet worthy to pilot a Leviathan.
[The camera moves closer and we see that it's Velorek.]
Velorek: If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here right now. So why are you?
Young Pilot: I want to be joined so badly.
Velorek: I can make that happen, young one.
Young Pilot: But the elders. The elders have not yet decreed it to be my destiny.
Velorek: I offer you the chance to make your destiny. Look up. [They both do so.] What do you see?
Young Pilot: [dreamily] Stars.
Velorek: That’s what I offer you. The stars.
Young Pilot: I dream of nothing else.
Velorek: I offer you a Leviathan. All you have to do is agree to help me.
Young Pilot: But you said that for me to be joined, the old one would have to die.
Velorek: That Pilot will die no matter what you do. [Pilot looks down and sighs.] If you don’t come with me, I’ll find someone else who will. Someone who isn’t afraid to take their place amongst the stars.
[Fade back to present day, Pilot's den. Aeryn has tears in her eyes.]
Pilot: The fate of Moya‘s true Pilot was sealed at that moment. So you see, Aeryn, it wasn’t really you who caused her death. It was me. If I hadn’t agreed to come, Velorek may never have found a replacement Pilot, but . . . but I just wanted so desperately to see the stars.
[Long pause.]
Aeryn: Do you remember when you first came aboard Moya? [She reaches out to touch his face.] Velorek stroked your cheek like this to calm you. Back then I couldn’t fathom why he’d do a thing like that. And now I couldn’t fathom not doing it. We’ve come a long way since then, Pilot, and we’ve still got a long way to go. Take the journey with me.
[Pilot reaches out to touch Aeryn's face in turn. They are both crying now.]

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Home on the Remains,” “Dream a Little Dream”

This week’s pair of episodes couldn’t be more different. On the one hand, we’ve got my very least favorite episode of the entire series, and on the other, we have a an all-time classic, a brilliant piece of television that should be immortalized in bronze and hung over some sort of important building. The thing about TV shows, especially ones that crank out twenty-two plus episodes a year, is that due to budget and time constraints, you’re almost always going to get a few duds. For whatever reason, these episodes just don’t work. It could be because of some fundamental flaw at script-level, or because the director didn’t know what to do with the script, or because the art department got the tone wrong, or maybe you have a dud for a guest star . . . the point is, great TV is a collaborative effort, and if you have people in charge that have a plan, most of the time those dud episodes don’t matter in the long run. Such is the case with “Taking the Stone.”

But here’s the other thing about great TV shows: even the bad episodes have merit. A bad Farscape episode still has more going for it than any other episode of, say, CSI: Miami or Desperate Housewives. Even though I hate hate hate “Taking the Stone,” I can see where that episode was coming from and how it fits into the larger structure of season two. Here’s where you guys come in: I’m riding a fine line with this episode. I can’t tell if I hate it because of some strange personal bias, or if it really is that bad. I will attempt to explain my reasons below, but I would love to hear your thoughts (and always remember, if you aren’t commenting, then you are a bad person). As for “Crackers Don’t Matter,” well, there’s not much to say beyond use of the word “genius.” (As a warning, I discovered that I had ahhhlllloooot to say about “Crackers Don’t Matter,” so feel free to skip the summary and just jump to the long-winded analysis as a time-saver. You’ve seen the episode.)

2X03 — “TAKING THE STONE”

Chiana is stumbling around Moya in some sort of distress, and the music is doing this weird heartbeat thing. She happens upon Crichton, who for some reason can’t take the time out of his busy schedule (which apparently consists of getting electrocuted multiple times while trying to hack into one of Moya‘s systems) to talk to her. She flounders off, even more upset, slices herself open and pulls out a flashing beacon, which quickly dies. This makes her go crazy, kill a DRD, and steal Aeryn’s Prowler. After finding the thingy in the hangar bay, we learn from Zhaan that it’s a “life disc” which when implanted creates a link between two people. It quickly becomes obvious that whoever Chiana was linked to is now dead, so of course Crichton feels like an asshole. Meanwhile, Chiana has landed on a really weird planet that seems to be full of nothing but headstones (yes, headstones) and flashing lights, where she is very soon overcome by some young men who move like monkeys and who are dressed like Deadheads dipped in rotten frosting. We are very clearly supposed to believe she is in trouble and feel sorry for her, and maybe some of you do. Relish that feeling for now; the rest of this episode will be murdering it very soon.

Crichton, Aeryn, and Rygel transport themselves down to the planet (which isn’t really a planet, but a moon, despite its creepy status as a “Royal Cemetery Planet,” according to Rygel) to look for Chiana. They quickly find her (discarded) clothes at the entrance to some sort of mine shaft and head on down. Rygel stays behind to rob a grave, as per the usual. When Crichton and Aeryn do manage to find her, she is less than grateful. Her hair is now pink and frostinged up in dreadlocks, to match the weirdos who live down there, weirdos who keep calling Crichton and Aeryn ‘ancient’ and ‘worn-out.’ Since Chiana is pissed at Crichton, it’s Aeryn who talks to her. Chiana tells her about the strange initiations that take place in this gross colony, and asks her to stay a little while. She also says that Nerri, the man she was linked to through her life disc, was her brother. Later, at “the Gathering,” we learn about “taking the stone.” Molnon, the leader of the weirdos, starts going on and on about being left behind and alone, and then this OTHER weirdo just up and jumps off the cliff while the others are chanting with their arms in the air like monkeys. Except, he doesn’t go splat. This weird energy net catches him. Three others follow. Aeryn calls it a sonic net, says it’s sustained by their voices. Then this OTHER other kid, who Crichton caught acting kind of weird in the tunnels earlier, jumps, and just before he’s about to hit the ground, the voices stop, and he splats. Dead as fuck. “Frell,” says Aeryn.

While all of this is going on, Rygel has taken the transport pod up to Moya with all of his stolen loot. D’Argo isn’t happy about it. After Rygel inventories all his loot, which included a nice little slug-bonus meal, his peaceful nap underneath a mask that he found amongst the booty is interrupted by a chanting Zhaan, who believes the stolen treasure to be cursed. Rygel ignores her, and decorates his room with all the stolen shit from the dead royal people. Then all of a sudden, things start flying off the walls and crashing to the ground, and the death mask seems to be the culprit. Rygel glares at it, and then goes to yell at Zhaan and D’Argo for messing with him. He’s finally convinced to take it all back when a bunch of sparkly stabby things almost skewer him to the wall. He’s back in time to pick the others up and bring them back to Moya.

Back on Planet Death, Chiana is now determined to “take the stone.” She’s talking to this gnarly pregnant woman who has armpit hair and a see-through stomach, so you can see the fetus. All in all, the effect is nauseating. Later, Molnon is talking to Chiana, but I seriously can’t understand a word that is coming out of his stupid mouth. He seems to be trying to convince her to stay, and that this “taking the stone” thing is the most awesome idea in the universe. Then he attacks her with his face. I basically hate him. Crichton sees all of this happening. Despite warnings from Aeryn to stay out of it, Crichton confronts Chiana, and she is hella pissed. She reminds him that he once told her she could jump ship any time, and that now is the time. While he’s stewing off some of his anger over this whole dumb situation, he learns a couple things. First, that none of the weirdos are older than twenty-two, because around that time, they start to become very ill. Second, when the first signs of illness start to appear, they either choose to take the stone and end their lives, or to go into hiding and become a “lost person.” After some pseudo science, it becomes apparent that they’re suffering from radiation poisoning, and that if they were to move out of the caves, they would live longer and better lives, but in the end they decide they would rather die young, because they are idiots. You’ll notice that I’m skipping over everything to do with Molnon, because I hate that fucker. Anyway, Aeryn finally manages to convince Crichton to let Chiana jump. When she doesn’t die, everyone is happy, including me, because that means they’re leaving and I don’t ever have to watch this episode again.

Trivia

• Originally, Nerri was supposed to be Chiana’s sister, but on the suggestion of Gigi Edgley, he was re-written as a male instead.
• The concept of a planet devoted to the dead came from Rockne S. O’Bannon’s first trip to Australia. While on a location scouting trip, he discovered a cemetery built into the side of a hill. The image stuck with him.
• Weirdly, this awful episode was written by Justin Monjo and directed by the great Rowan Woods, two of Farscape‘s best creative minds. Really don’t know what happened here, guys.

Metaphorically Speaking

Here’s the thing about “Taking the Stone”: on paper, it doesn’t sound that bad at all. Chiana is the youngest and most emotionally immature of the crew, so of course when her brother dies, she’s not going to react rationally. She’s going to take the most roundabout, awful, teenage way of getting over her grief, and we’re going to have to watch. The episode is set on a planet entirely made up of graves, which in theory gives the story a nice atmosphere, and underground lurks an entire population of idiot young people, which also in theory, seems like a nice setting for Chiana to work her shit out. The death of her brother is crushing, assuming they were close (why else would she be so upset?), but his death also reminds her of her own shortcomings. Again, this makes sense. When people close to us die, we tend to re-evaluate. She lashes out at Crichton and the other Moyans (“Everyone’s so lame on Moya.”) but it’s not really about them. It never is. Chiana has to deal with death for the first time in her life, and she seems to possess a crushing fear of never fully being able to live before that time will come for her. This is why people sky dive and bungee jump, to feel alive, so again, in theory, taking the stone should be an effective way for Chiana to get her yabbos out.

The other parts of the episode that have some meat to them have to do with Chiana, Crichton, and Aeryn’s interactions with one another as they all try to deal with Chiana’s emotional crisis. Again, there’s the family thing, which explains why Crichton is so determined to bring Chiana back aboard Moya, but it’s also that he really cares about her as an individual. He doesn’t want her to throw her life away. I think that’s a nice touch. Older brothers never want to let their sisters go. He thinks by holding on, he can keep her safe, but she needs to come to that decision by herself. It’s kind of strange that Aeryn would be the one to understand what to do, but then again, not only was she herself once a teenage girl, but she lost her entire way of life and had to find a way to move on. “I understand loss,” she says. So does Crichton. The most interesting and intense moment of the episode is what Chiana says to Crichton: “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not your kid, I’m not your sister, and I’m only your, your tralk in your dreams.” At the moment she enunciates the word ‘tralk,’ Gigi Edgley chooses to go down to her knees so that her eyeline, and thus ours, is focused squarely on Crichton’s crotch. It’s a very effective moment, both visually and in terms of the script, in telling us just what Chiana thinks of herself, or rather, what she believes other to think about her.

I’ve talked before about Chiana’s sexualized nature, how she uses her body as a weapon, but here it becomes clear that she’s using it as a defense mechanism. It gives us an insight into her personality that we haven’t necessarily had before. One of the reasons the Crichton/Chiana relationship is so interesting is that you get the feeling Chiana is a character who men treat badly. So what she has in Crichton is a man who not only respects her, but loves her in a way that isn’t demeaning. What we’re seeing in this scene is what Chiana fears most about her relationship with Crichton, the scary possibility that he’s just like all the others who only see her for what they want to see. Again, it’s a very effective moment. Also effective is the scene later in the episode when Crichton has once again failed to convince Chiana not to take the stone, and he becomes so frustrated that he takes it out on Aeryn before stomping away mid-sentence. “If I ever decide to throw myself in front of a bus, I hope you’re not the only one . . .” he spits at her. But I think she understands. I also have to admit, the end scene is nice. “Let’s get out of this dead place,” says Chiana. Of course, I might only like it because it means the episode is over, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

Trash Bin

Honestly? I just hate this episode so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been sympathetic to any kind of teenage rebellion story, or maybe it’s just that everything in this episode is so damn ugly, but I think there is more going on here. Let’s start at the beginning. It’s unlike Crichton to ignore Chiana, let alone a Chiana in obvious pain, so right away there’s a hole in the story’s logic. He doesn’t even seem to be doing anything important, but he needs to ignore her so that the rest of the episode can happen. It’s not that Crichton can’t be an asshole, because he can  — “Crackers Don’t Matter” is certainly proof of that — it’s that we have to understand why. Crichton in his normal state of rest is kind-hearted, sympathetic, and a good listener, so for him to ignore Chiana is a big breach of character. There is absolutely no reason that he would be so engaged in futzing around with Moya‘s systems that he could fail to hear the pain in Chiana’s voice. Pain is Crichton’s archnemesis. He’s the hero, the cowboy. When one of his own is in trouble, he’s there.

In addition to having little patience for teenage rebellion (most likely due to the fact that it was something that never happened to me as a teenager), the we-have-to-kill-ourselves-at-a-certain-age story tropes are my least favorite. Logan’s Run would be the obvious reference here, and The Next Generation did it with “Half a Life,” but I know I’ve seen others; probably Stargate has done it at least three times, and it’s annoyed me every damn time. This trope makes the culture practicing it seem like idiots. It makes me want to throw things, and the weirdos in “Taking the Stone” are no exception to this. It probably also doesn’t help that the weirdos in “Taking the Stone” are incredibly annoying even without the suicidal tendencies. The actor who plays Molnon gives the character this unexplainable dirty quality that just makes me want to stab him, on top of which he also seems stupid. Why should I give a crap about this character or his people? I see no reason. Even the pregnant girl, Vyna, is totally unsympathetic, largely because the see-through uterus thing, which was probably meant to be sort of cool and alien, comes off as creepy and disgusting, and please shave your pits. Molnon’s machinations are additionally stupid. How in the holy heck would Chiana taking his place at the stone help him in any way? Will it save him from dying of the sickness? No. Will it save him from taking the stone in the future? No. Is it made abundantly clear that he loves taking the stone? Yes. So why the fuck does he need Chiana to replace him? It’s confusing and boring at the same time.

The over-arching theme also fails, I think, in large part due to the design of both the aliens and their environment. This place is supposedly making Chiana feel like she wants to live, as evidenced by the many times she tells Crichton that these are people who really live before they die, but it does not do that for the viewer. For us to buy this story, we need to see these people the way Chiana does, and that just doesn’t happen. The mannerisms of the aliens (weirdos) and the general setting in which they live do not make me want to GO OUT AND LIVE, but in fact, make me want to shower in acid. This could just be a personal thing, but I really really hate it. Additionally, I think the episode wasn’t only harmed by things that made it on film, but by things that were missing. We don’t know Chiana or her brother well enough for this episode to really hit home. We really needed backstory on Chiana and Nerri’s relationship in order to understand why Chiana reacts the way she does. We have no context. Flashbacks would have been nice, or at least some specific details coming from Chiana (I do recognize that flashbacks are just not something Farscape is interested in). To put it simply, I don’t give two shits about Nerri, so it annoys me that Chiana does. Some smaller things: the entire Rygel plot is just pointless and doesn’t connect in any way to the larger Chiana/Nerri/Crichton/Aeryn/Weirdo story, and the freeze frame on Chiana after she takes the stone is just awful. Let me elaborate on that last one: FREEZE FRAMING IS NEVER OKAY.

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2X04 — “CRACKERS DON’T MATTER”

The Moyans are desperate people, and sometimes they do stupid things. Like bringing aboard a dude named T’raltixx to adjust Moya‘s electrical systems in order to somehow make her untraceable, even from Scorpius (who has been busy putting wanted beacons everywhere in the universe). Aeryn and Chiana are fresh from the market where all they’ve managed to buy is a bunch of “dried food rectangles,” a thousand units of crackers. Aeryn is working at hacking into a wanted beacon, which is only one of ten that she saw down on the commerce planet, courtesy of Scorpius, and hence the decision to hastily buy crackers and high tail it out of there before somebody recognized them. T’raltixx, the creepiest motherfucker this side of the Uncharted Territories, has this huge head, bat-like ears, bug fluff all over the huge head, and no eyes. And because he’s so ridiculous, you know he’s going to be terrifying later. Right now, he’s ready to show off his device on Crichton’s module, but Crichton doesn’t trust him, and even when we see the device turn half of the module “invisible,” you know this isn’t going to end well.

T’raltixx convinces them that to build the device large enough for Moya, they need to head back to his home planet. The bulk of the journey will be spent in the light of five pulsars, which he says might affect them in strange ways, but begs them not to worry about it. “It’s rare that it would disturb beings of your sentient stature.” They wait a couple seconds after entering the light, and of course Zhaan starts in on her photogasms (accompanied by some great eye-rolling on Crichton and D’Argo’s part), but nothing seems to happen. They go about their business for awhile, Crichton showing T’raltixx around the ship, but we start to notice cranky behavior on the part of the crew. Despite this crankiness, nothing seems to be really out of the ordinary, that is, until D’Argo catches Rygel hoarding food and starts violently shoving crackers into his mouth. It all starts to spiral from there. John is very condescending to Pilot, calling him “Shellhead,” Pilot having just moments earlier admitted to T’raltixx that he didn’t particularly like any of the others. But Crichton seems to be the only one who is aware that something is off. After Crichton diffuses a messy conflict between himself, D’Argo, Aeryn, and Chiana, the camera pans up and we see T’raltixx crawling around on the ceiling. A DRD spots him, so he kills it with light beams from his eyes. Fuckin’ T’raltixx.

The situation is deteriorating rapidly as everyone becomes increasingly paranoid. Aeryn has taken to wandering the ship with a gun. Rygel is hiding in the walls. Chiana and D’Argo are convinced that Aeryn is some sort of Peacekeeper double agent. Pilot is just snotty. And Zhaan, well, she’s just having a grand ole time. Only John is asking questions. He keeps getting the sense knocked back into him, if only temporarily. While everyone else is making alliances and playing Survivor in Space, Crichton becomes increasingly isolated. An encounter with Pilot has him wondering why the large alien has been affected at all; he hasn’t even seen the light from the pulsars. But before Crichton can make any headway on this revelation, he’s sucked back into the madness. Soon he’s singing and yelling about ice cream, disabling his module and the hangar doors, and just doing his best to be in the way of everyone else’s plans. But even in his crazy state, he’s still trying to get people to put down their weapons. Then things start to get REALLY weird. After Chiana knees him in the nuts, Crichton starts hallucinating Scorpius. First, he imagines that the wanted beacon is talking to him, and then a full on Scorpius materializes. “You’re right, John,” he says, “They don’t know how crazy they are.”

Scorpius is now following Crichton around the ship, taunting him with memories from his past and attempting to turn him against the rest of the crew. Meanwhile, T’raltixx keeps screaming that he needs MORE LIGHT. Pilot obeys. In the hangar bay, Crichton confronts D’Argo at the point of a gun, and even though his intent is to get D’Argo to put down his weapon and stop acting crazy, it doesn’t come across too well. Crichton looks pretty crazy himself, especially when he starts talking to an invisible Scorpius, who has suggested that they kill everyone so they can go to the beach. (He knows a place where they can get margaritas and look at naked Sebacean women.) Fresh from shooting D’Argo in the foot (D’Argo escaped, thanks to Scorpy), Crichton corners Chiana in the hallway and practically rapes her. It is horrifying. And just like that it’s not funny anymore. Aeryn knocks Rygel out just in time for Crichton appear, and they say some nasty things to one another. Of course this is when Scorpy shows up, and this time he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he wants to go eat pizza. John shoots him in the head, which explodes into lots of little floating heads. For some reason, this snaps him out of it again, and he tries to talk Aeryn back into sanity as well. It isn’t happening. So he knocks her unconscious and ties her up.

Later. Crichton’s got everyone tied to the table in the kitchen so he can knock some sense into them about this whole T’raltixx thing. “I need you to understand that crackers don’t matter,” he says, shooting the crackers. While he’s trying to get them to help him, T’raltixx screams for MORE LIGHT, and when Pilot complies, Moya starts to glow. It’s actually kind of pretty. The Moyans have finally come around to Crichton’s plan, and start making preparations. Since John is the least affected, he’ll be the one to kill T’raltixx. The others aren’t happy about this until Chiana points out that the reason Crichton is the least affected is because he’s “deficient.” He has the worst eyesight out of all of them. They dress him up in protective gear, including a paste made from Zhaan’s bile, and weapons, so that he can kill T’raltixx and not go blind or burn up in the process. Pretty soon he’s sneaking into T’raltixx’s chamber all invisible with D’Argo’s Qalta blade, and there’s this totally cheesy fight where Crichton just keeps chopping wires and T’raltixx shoots laser beams out of his eyes. Pretty soon the little bugger starts going crazy himself, running up the walls. Crichton shoots him down, and before stabbing him through the guts, T’raltixx is all wah, wah there are THOUSANDS JUST LIKE MEEE. Honestly, you’re not that threatening, dude. You’re basically a giant bug. SQUASH. No more light. Later, after they’ve disposed of the body (like flushing a cockroach . . . yick), Pilot apologizes to D’Argo and Rygel for his behavior. They’ve all been making apologies like this, apparently. D’Argo tells Rygel that he is ashamed of what he did to him and asks for forgiveness, but Rygel says he can’t forgive him, not yet. He’s not the only one. Everyone is ashamed. Crichton sings “Humpty Dumpty” to himself and then asks Zhaan, “How do we take it all back?” “I don’t know,” she says. Don’t worry, John, you’ll put it back together again. It’s just a stupid nursery rhyme.

Trivia

• “Crackers Don’t Matter” is considered the first “Mind Frell” episode of Farscape.
• Writer Justin Monjo had to pen the episode in an extremely short time because delays in the completion of “Picture if You Will” forced the rapid production of a shipbound story.
• Director Ian Watson stated he intentionally made odd production choices, such as ending John and Aeryn’s shoot-out with them both running out of bullets, and the use of martial music in a romantic scene: “I was trying to do the unexpected. Trying to push the style and push everything we did into new places. Rather than saying this is safe science fiction, we were trying to work with opposites, trying to make a likable character unlikeable . . . We were trying to do inappropriate things to shake the drama up.”
• A new Rygel puppet was used in this episode, and was almost broken immediately during the cracker force-feeding scene.
• The “crackers” used in the episode were Cruskits, manufactured by Arnotts.
• Danny Adcock (T’raltixx) had to look through a series of mirrors in order to see out of his costume’s facial prosthetics.
• Ben Browder added Crichton humming “The Ride of the Valkyries” while looping the episode’s dialogue.
• Director Ian Watson describes this episode as The Shining retold. Crichton references this when he does his Nicholson impression: “Heeeeere’s Johnny.”
• Series creator Rockne S. O’Bannon said that the show’s production team was still “trying to find the ultimate tone of the show, how far it could go without going absolutely too far. Things like the near-rape scene could be perceived as over the top but were really a question of muscle flexing to see how far we could push the show. But it would have been wrong to push and stay at that level of intensity.”
• “Crackers Don’t Matter” is considered a fan favorite episode. When Farscape was canceled, fans responded by sending Sci-Fi executives packages of crackers in homage to the episode.
• [SPOILER!] Though at first it seems as though Crichton seeing Scorpius is just a hallucination, it in fact marks the first appearance of the neural clone, implanted in Crichton’s head by Scorpius and a crucial part of the story as the season continues.

Metaphorically Speaking

Aside from the fact that it’s one of the funniest episodes Farscape ever did, what makes “Crackers Don’t Matter” so enjoyable is that it’s perfectly balanced. Yes, it’s funny, but that sense of joyful, manic energy the episode gives off is also tempered by madness, a madness which is fueled by that dark place inside of all of us that wants to give in and do terrible things. Good balance, contrary to popular opinion, is all about contrast. The funny bits are funnier when standing next to the dark bits, and the dark stuff looks even darker if it’s sandwiched five seconds on either side by, say, a constantly orgasming plant-woman, or by a devil dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. (This is one of the many reasons that I prefer shows like Farscape and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos or Mad Men, those supposedly “great” TV shows I’m supposed to love, but in general find self-important and unengaging: balance. Real life is funny, and real life is tragic, not one or the other.) In some cases, the funny and the sinister are one and the same, like when Crichton calls Aeryn a “frigid, flat-butted, Peacekeeper skank,” and because of the way he says it and the cultural connotations of the words, we laugh, but we’re also asking ourselves, should we be laughing at this? It’s a wonderful dichotomy that jumps back and forth over the lines, between appropriate and inappropriate, sanity and madness. And it’s wonderful because it gives us as viewers that experience as well. Half of our selves are laughing because it’s funny to call people names, especially profanity laced references to body parts, but the other half is cringing because in that moment, Crichton is throwing Aeryn’s worst fears back at her. The thing she struggles with everyday: learning how to be a person. But then there’s that balance thing again, because it’s not just Crichton hurling insults. Aeryn does it as well. ALL of them do it; none are blameless by the end.

But let’s go back to the beginning, because one of the things that kills me about “Crackers Don’t Matter” is how it builds to those moments. The tone of the episode is very light in the teaser, lighter than your normal episode of Farscape, even. Everyone is padding around cheerfully, Aeryn is laughing, despite the nature of her work in hacking the warning beacon, which should be acting as a reminder of their danger, but instead seems to suggest that these people have internalized the danger at this point. Danger is the norm, and this is a group that clearly feels a connection to one another. The camaraderie is almost palpable. No one is even that upset upon learning that all they’ll be eating for the next week or so is crackers. This scene acts as a baseline of sorts, of the ideal Moya, a community of friends who trust one another (with the possible exception of Rygel). Seeing this happiness makes the later scenes all the more striking. But in addition to building a trust with the audience, this scene is also necessary as a kind of negative. What we’re NOT seeing are the little things, the fears that these people hold inside, but which nevertheless are brewing under the surface at some sub-conscious level.

Act One begins with a marvelous red herring from T’raltixx, who uses the pulsars as a distraction from the real problem (the crew being in proximity to T’raltixx himself), with an additional little zing thrown in there about the light only affecting “lesser beings.” These people, as former prisoners, are especially sensitive to accusations of inferiority, so this is brilliantly played by T’raltixx. Being a prisoner, or being hunted as a criminal, is a soul-sucking experience (and in the cases of Aeryn, John, and Chiana, being fish out of water places an additional burden). A prisoner is not a person, it is a possession, something outside what is right and good, and even if the actual physical prison gets left behind, a person could easily spend the rest of their lives trying to cleanse the memory of it from their system. The Moyans are not, and never will be, like everyone else. They are the definition of “ragtag.” At the moment, this isn’t a lifestyle choice (although it certainly may become one, by force of habit). They are the perfect prey for T’raltixx. From there, Act One nicely sets up conflicts already present in the crew, so that the viewer might think the pulsar light might actually be real: Crichton accusing Chiana of “stealing” (playing both on Chiana’s fear of not being accepted by the group and Crichton’s brotherly feelings that could easily turn patronizing), Crichton telling Rygel to hurry up and store food (egging on Rygel’s fear of never having enough, and displaying his repressed contempt for the disgusting little creature), Crichton telling T’raltixx that Rygel eats and craps his body weight twice a day (more contempt), Aeryn being short with Zhaan and Zhaan being suspicious of Aeryn and the beacon (the Peacekeeper versus the Priest), Crichton being snippy with Zhaan and telling her to “get [her] big blue butt down here,” etc. For a moment, we might believe that these people are just cranky, but then D’Argo starts shoving crackers down Rygel’s throat in a disturbing show of aggression and domination. What’s great about all of these conflicts is that as far as they go into madness (and they go pretty far), they are all rooted in real, understandable conflict.

Act Two has everyone taking sides in increasing paranoia. They’re seeing what isn’t there, or distorting what is, but it’s still funny in. The crews’ worst qualities begin to come out, but nothing damaging occurs, nothing that can’t be laughed away (and we are certainly laughing). This is also when it becomes clear that Crichton isn’t responding like the others, who are surpassing him in insanity. But when Crichton starts hallucinating Scorpius in Act Three, it becomes a different story altogether. For those of you who have seen the series before, you know the Scorpius hallucination has other implications (and thus affects your interpretation of “Crackers Don’t Matter” in a significant way), but for you noobs who haven’t seen the rest of season two, the Scorpius clone seems to simply be a manifestation of Crichton’s worst fear (and indeed, it can still be read this way, no matter events of later episodes). It’s very interesting to me that what Crichton really fears comes from the outside. Not only does that suggest the depth of his compassion and understanding for his crew-mates, but also the intensity of his trauma with regards to Scorpius. Nobody else currently aboard Moya was tortured half to oblivion in the Aurora chair, nobody else is as hunted a prize. Scorpius is the thing that comes in the night. In terms of structure, the hallucination also keeps Scorpius visible as a threat to us as viewers. We aren’t privy to Crichton’s nightmares; we don’t know how often he thinks about this. It nicely keeps Scorpius in play without him actually having to be there. Act Three then fully descends into madness, as Crichton, spurred on by the hopeless feelings represented by Scorpy, gives into his basest urges. The near rape of Chiana, even if it wasn’t a real rape, or even if Crichton never really intended to harm Chiana in that way, is certainly a mental rape. Crichton uses his body language as well as his words to bring Chiana down in the worst possible way, objectifying her in a way that she never hoped (but always feared) he would. I’d forgotten that he literally humps her; it’s awful. And then of course there are the awful things Crichton and Aeryn say to one another, but as I discussed above, at least they’re equal in that regard.

And then finally, perhaps awoken by the horrible enormity of what he’s done and almost done, Crichton manages to snag the others and convince them of T’raltixx’s malevolence. Act Four is Crichton trying to fix things, all the while fighting off that insanity. He doesn’t want it to take him again, and even though Act Four brings the return of the funny (the nature of everyone being tied to the table as Crichton shoots crackers all over them is undeniably farcical), we have those awful scenes fresh in our minds. We know where this could end up. The brilliance of the ending, which finds everyone working together in this strange affectionate hatred, is that it ends in comedy, in the true and original sense of the word. In Shakespearean terms, a tragedy is about things falling apart (and this episode could easily have become that), but what makes it a comedy is that despite the fracturing of the crew, they do come together in the end. I also love that it’s Crichton, the “inferior” one (in an episode centered around people trying their best to NOT be inferior) who has to kill the source of the madness and distrust. He may have the least amount of literal eyesight, but in terms of “seeing things,” Crichton is very perceptive. I love the sense of metaphor this episode plays with, how it doesn’t treat “light” or “blindness” in any one way. In the beginning it’s more literal and we have Crichton thinking that T’raltixx is harmless just because he’s blind  (when Crichton and the others are the ones being blinded from T’raltixx’s true nature), but from there it goes other places. For one thing, light illuminates, but it also blinds you if you have too much of it in the wrong place. Here, T’raltixx is a literal representation of that former kind of light (his mere presence is enough to give Zhaan oodles of photogasms, and if that isn’t a literal indication of light, I don’t know what to tell you), one which causes more harm by falsely illuminating feelings and ideas that shouldn’t be illuminated without their proper context, and which people keep buried for a reason (most often, this is the thing you are trying to overcome). Because of his poorer eyesight, Crichton is the most sane, the most balanced. He’s still capable of seeing the nuances, the shadows, the bigger picture. He’s the only one who can see that these crackers just don’t matter.

Some smaller observations: The acting in this episode is fabulous. This is very clearly a character piece, and to fully enjoy it you need to know and love these characters. All of the main players (excepting the photogasming Zhaan) slip and slide nicely on that sanity/madness line, and none play it the same. I love the decision to have them eat the crackers throughout. That trivial crunch crunch in between lines just makes for excellent background texture. It’s the little things that mistrust is built on, and that’s why this episode is so hilarious, it’s funny to laugh about squabbles over crackers. The episode wouldn’t have been nearly so successful if it had taken itself seriously. I also love the emerging patriarchalism/chauvinism that becomes glaringly apparent each time D’Argo, Rygel, and Crichton throw the word “bitch” around. It provides several throwaway moments that are nevertheless immensely effective in their offensiveness. Crichton doesn’t just throw “bitch” around lightly, especially at Aeryn. He worships at her feet. But mostly I love the mind frell, the nice slide into madness. Farscape has the distinction of being the only TV show in my mind to simulate insanity quite so effectively, and I love the way that this episode in particular uses light to portray insanity as this overwhelming physical reaction, an inability to distinguish the reality in your individual perception. Also, it’s just really fucking entertaining.

Trash Bin

The only quibble I have with this episode is pretty insignificant. T’raltixx’s sole motivation is to gain access to LIGHT but why he needs this light is never made clear, and why now? Can it only be made in Leviathans? Living beings? Was he planning on taking over Moya forever? We don’t know. Again, it doesn’t really matter because the whole point of the episode was how the crew reacted to the T’raltixx situation, not why T’raltixx was doing his creepy crap.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “You are the pinup girl for frontal assault, you should be dragging her back to the ship yourself!”
• “Where’s my ice cream? Where’s my ice cream!? WHERE’S MY DAMN ICE CREAM?”
• “I hate when villains quote Shakespeare.”
• “That is fantastic coming from a frigid, flat-butted, Peacekeeper skank!”
• “Nobody has margaritas with pizza!”
• “I got great eyes! They’re better than 20/20, and they’re BLUE.”
• “I’m not deficient. I’m SUPERIOR. Humans are superior.”

PuppetWatch!

• The pregnant weirdo, Vyna, I would actually consider a failure. Maybe not because of the puppetry or the make-up, but because what the see-through fetus added to the story was gross on top of gross. I don’t think that’s what they were going for.
• T’raltixx, as I’ve said, is a creepy motherfucker. I hate that guy.
• The best thing they’ve done with the Rygel puppet yet happens in “Crackers Don’t Matter.” When D’Argo is done force-feeding him, we can see that the area around his eyes is wet. He’s been crying. Just fantastic.

- – -

“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• Interstellar Swearing: “Tralk” can be loosely translated as “slut,” but other words such as “skank,” “whore,” and “hussy” could work as well. “Yotza” is an exclamation of pleasurable surprise equivalent to “hot-damn!” “Drad” is annoying-speak for “awesome.”
• Pop Culture References: Cool Hand Luke, the Three Stooges, Star Wars, Brainiac, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, Gilligan’s Island, 2001: A Space Odyssey, William Shakespeare, Dangerous Liaisons, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hawaii Five-O, and of course, The Shining.
• I fucking hate Molnon. Die in a fire, assface.
  
• If you’ll notice, we’ve finally reached the episode that this section is named after. Just thought I’d point that out.
• Pilot: I’m only judging on my experience with you, but I’ve never seen such a deficient species . . .
  Crichton: [biting his arm] Have you run the scan on the pulsar light yet?
  Pilot: How do humans make it through a cycle, even half a cycle, without killing each other?
  Crichton: [with no pauses] We find it difficult have you run the scan?
  Pilot: You have no special abilities, you’re not particularly smart, can hardly smell, can barely see, and you’re not even vaguely physically or spiritually imposing. Is there anything you do well?”
  Crichton: Watch football.
• Ben Browder is SO GOOD at playing crazy. That isn’t the first time I’ve said that, nor will it be the last.
• Aeryn: I’ll kill him. Undo me. [She munches a cracker that was in between her boobs.]
  Crichton: Can I trust you?
  Aeryn: No.
  Crichton: At least you’re honest.
• The DVD commentary for “Crackers Don’t Matter” features Claudia Black and Ian Watson musing on philosophies of acting and directing. It’s really interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing (which I am), but I would have liked more little bits about the actual episode. Their commentary could have been playing over any old episode, but “Crackers Don’t Matter” is iconic. I want to know things!

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #13

[Zhaan is covering Crichton's face in some sort of green goop.]
Crichton: What the hell is this?
Zhaan: Heat deflecting paste. You’ll burn up in there without it.
Crichton: Smells like puke.
Zhaan: I pre-digested it to increase its potency.
Crichton: It’s PUKE!?
D’Argo: We’re gonna have to move fast. All of Moya is glowing.
[D'Argo hands Crichton a pair of goggles which Crichton slips over his head.]
Crichton: I hate these goggles, they look like crap.
D’Argo: Stop whining. You sound like a Zelmat. They’re the only thing that are going to stop you from going blind in there.
Aeryn: [handing him a large shield-like object] Probably will anyway. Here, this may be of some use to you. I made it from a piece of my Prowler, and it will withstand a Zekian laser pulse.
Crichton: Thank you.
Chiana: [wraps a silvery cloak around his shoulders] Solar reflective flare wrap. Pull it on tight.
Crichton: Does this strike any of you superior beings as a little bit ironic.
Chiana: What?
Crichton: That I’m the deficient one and I’m still saving your butts.
Chiana: Bend over. [places an aerial cap of some sort on his head and it is also covered in green goop] We soaked it in Zhaan’s bile for as long as we could.
Crichton: I look ridiculous, don’t I?
[Aeryn nods.]
Rygel: Don’t worry. This is T’raltixx’s disappearing device. [He drapes it over Crichton's neck.] It doesn’t matter how ridiculous you look.
[Crichton begins humming "The Ride of the Valkyries" and strikes a stupid pose. All the other Moyans watch him, non-plussed.]
Aeryn: We are going to die.

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Picture If You Will,” “The Way We Weren’t”

At this very minute, as I sit here writing this, I am preparing physically, mentally, and spiritually for the series finale of Lost. So while this entry won’t be posted until Thursday, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve got more than just Farscape on the brain. Specifically, I also have Sawyer and Jack and Hurley and Juliet and Charlie and Ben and maybe even Kate on the brain. Looking back on both Lost and Farscape, actually, I’m just very grateful that Lost had the chance to finish it’s story in the time it was promised. Farscape had to make do with a three hour mini-series to wrap up what should have been the fifth season it was promised (it wouldn’t even have gotten that if it wasn’t for some seriously devoted/crazy fans who managed to pull together funding from nowhere . . . but we’ll get back to that in a couple of seasons). And hell, Firefly only got half of a piddly (but genius) season, so I guess there’s always a bright side.

Which brings us to the opening episodes of Farscape Season Two. Pat yourselves on the back for making it this far, and remember, if you quit now, I will kill you.

2X01 — “MIND THE BABY”

We drop in in media res. Things are really going to shit on Moya. Who knows how long it’s been since the events of “Family Ties.” Moya is under fire from a Sheyang vessel, unable to Starburst, and Zhaan has literally gone insane, calling out for D’Argo, despite Chiana’s insistence that D’Argo has not been with them for some time now. D’Argo, meanwhile, wakes up on a floor far, far away with a super sweet “suntan” (spacetan?), having been out for days and days. Crichton informs him that, no, they’re not dead. Aeryn managed to save them, and now they’re hiding out on a barren, abandoned asteroid, waiting for her to come back with food. Elsewhere, Aeryn is talking to Crais (who is still aboard Talyn) about something sneaky he’s planning, and some deal she’s made. It’s very foreboding. She’s still acting wonky enough upon returning to the asteroid for Crichton and D’Argo to pick up on it; they want to leave but she says ‘no.’ There’s lots of yelling. Up on Moya, the world is ending: Rygel can’t eat. He’s too pissed at Pilot and Moya, who are heading back to the asteroid field to search for Talyn, despite the danger.

Aboard the Command Carrier, Scorpius is having his cooling rod changed. He and Braca, who has apparently been promoted, are discussing the relative merits of allowing Aeryn’s Prowler to pick Crichton up. Scorpius is pissed that she has managed to evade capture since rescuing his prey. She, meanwhile, is en route to Talyn, where she finds Crais yelling frantically at the poor Leviathan baby. Together, they manage to calm him down enough to learn that he’s being completely freaked out by signals broadcast by the Peacekeepers which have been designed to do just that. It soon becomes clear that whatever deal Aeryn has made involves partnering with Crais, and from the way he leans over her and in way too close, it is also clear that he has more than just platonic partnership in mind. Waiting for Aeryn to come back, Crichton and D’Argo have started a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and D’Argo just says what no one else wants to acknowledge: why the fuck does paper beat rock, anyway? Once Aeryn’s back, Crichton immediately demands to know what she’s hiding from them. She says they’re not going to like it, that she promised to help Talyn learn to follow Crais’s orders in exchange for coordinates to an oxygen rich asteroid. D’Argo’s so pissed that he tongues her. After winning at Rock, Paper, Scissors, Crichton is off to Talyn to kick Crais’s ass while D’Argo waits for an unconscious Aeryn to wake up.

On Moya, Zhaan is in the middle of some sort of meditation ritual, an attempt to once again become a Pa’u. Chiana asks her for help, but she’s completely useless. Over on Talyn, Crais reports in to Scorpius, who wants to know what’s taking so long, so it might be tempting to think that Crais has really been working for the PK’s all this time, but no. He’s just playing all the angles. He’s in the middle of turning Talyn against the PK’s so he and Aeryn and Talyn can all be a big, happy ex-PK family, when Crichton comes storming in, loud as usual. They have a little territorial battle and then Crichton removes Crais from Talyn at gunpoint. With Moya speeding faster back towards Talyn, an unidentified Prowler tries to board her, which turns out to contain Crichton and Crais, who Crichton plans to place in one of Moya‘s cells. After saying hello to a whacked out Zhaan, who seems to think Crichton is dead, he’s off to pick up D’Argo and Aeryn. Just in time, too, because Talyn is freaking the hell out, revealing his position to the PK’s. Scorpius gives orders to cripple the ship and to capture Crichton alive, but he doesn’t care if the others live or die.

It’s a big happy reunion on Moya. When Rygel sees Crichton, D’Argo, and Aeryn, he starts having spasms he’s so emotional. But Talyn is still freaking out. And then a bunch of stuff happens: Aeryn knocks some sense into the blissed out Zhaan, D’Argo has it out with Crais over their differences, and then the Command Carrier shows up, and Talyn fires on Moya, demanding that Crais be sent over to be his Captain. After some more yelling, Aeryn agrees to accompany Crais, to keep him in line, though neither she nor Crichton are happy about it. Refusing to say goodbye yet again, Crichton and Aeryn link fingers in a decidedly non-platonic manner right in front of Crais, and then she’s gone. Once they’re aboard the young Leviathan, Aeryn instructs Talyn to move closer to Moya so they’ll be carried along in her Starburst, but first, Talyn offers Crais the Hand of Friendship, a painful, direct neural link to Talyn himself. Crais is essentially Talyn‘s Pilot now, and both want Aeryn off the ship. As Aeryn reboards Moya, Crais contacts Scorpius to shove everything in his face, but at least he tells Scorpius that Crichton is dead (to piss him off, most likely), and then he and Talyn Starburst away. Moya quickly follows suit. And finally things are quiet again. D’Argo and Zhaan talking about spirituality, Crichton sitting with Aeryn and twirling her hair . . . wait a minute. And then they start cuddling. While talking to Pilot. Like it’s no big deal (that’s my favorite part). Okay, so I literally had to rewind that three times just to understand what they were talking about because I couldn’t stop watching the cuddle. I didn’t remember it being this soon! Anyway Aeryn’s upset about Talyn running away from home, and Crichton wonders if Crais can change, and it’s sweet, but who cares because look at the cuddle!

Trivia

• Chiana displays for the first time her ability to leap prodigious heights and distances without any apparent effort when she jumps across the shuttle bay into Crichton’s arms to welcome him back to Moya.
• This is the first episode where we see the central feature of Scorpius’s suit: a complex device that injects cooling rods straight into his brain. This exact explanation is not revealed until later in Season Two, “Look at the Princess.” We learn how it was installed in “Season of Death.”
• D’Argo’s appearance changes somewhat in this episode. Dave Elsey, the creative supervisor of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, justified the changes as being due to D’Argo’s exposure to space.
• This is the first episode in which the effects are done by Animal Logic, who would do the SFX for the rest of the series’ run. This was also the first episode shot at Homebush Bay, which is located west of Sydney.
• This episode was originally scheduled to be the second episode of the season. An episode called “Re: Union” was supposed to be the premiere, however it was felt to be too weak and was eventually reworked into “Dream a Little Dream,” which aired later in the season. It’s that episode which includes the trial of Zhaan Chiana mentions in “Mind the Baby.”
• A puppeteer’s hand is clearly visible at the bottom of the screen when the Hand of Friendship is offered to Crais.

Metaphorically Speaking

Something that I’ve learned over the course of writing about Farscape‘s first season is that it’s much easier to write about the “MoTW” episodes (for lack of a better term . . . maybe I should call them CoTW “Crisis of the Week” instead?) than it is to write about plot heavy episodes like “Family Ties” and “Mind the Baby.” The finales and premieres in this early stage have so many pieces moving back and forth (and with Farscape you’ve also got the added onus of having more happen in a single episode than happens in entire seasons of other shows) that it can be hard to pin it all down. Later, the show will become very adept (to the point of genius) at juggling the balance between theme and plot, but right now it is mostly all about plot (not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, just messier than I remembered). It’s easier to write about theme than plot because theme is something you dig your teeth into and examine. In writing about plot, it’s difficult to avoid simply summarizing what you’ve already seen on the screen. And in the case of “Mind the Baby,” it’s also about setting up what’s to come and reaffirming the character evolution we saw throughout season one.

Considering the series as a whole, and the season yet to come, this episode is concerned with two things: reuniting the Moya family (an affirmation/reversal of the goodbyes in “Family Ties”) and determining states of trust (who has it, who doesn’t), both of which encompass all of Farscape‘s main characters. But, to a greater extent, this is Aeryn’s episode. I really enjoy how it sort of unconsciously structures the episode in the viewer’s mind through her perspective. When she’s talking to Crais, and when she goes over to Talyn, we’re in on the secret with her, which makes us trust her despite her seemingly treacherous actions. Of course we also trust her because of the twenty-two episodes in season one that fleshed out her character as someone loyal to this dysfunctional family they’ve created. I also love how it sets Crais up as Aeryn’s foil. Even though the events of this episode prove finally that Crais is ready to put the Peacekeepers behind him, with Aeryn right beside him as a contrast, it’s clear not only that his actions are the “wrong” ones, but also that he’s not going to be able to develop as she did by going off on his own with Talyn. He needs people. The scene in which this is most clear is when Crichton and Aeryn are following Crais to the hangar bay and stop to say “goodbye” to one another. Their intimacy, even though it’s technically not romantic yet, is definitely intimate and very apparent. When the camera cuts to Crais, discomfort and puzzlement is written all over Lani Tupu’s face, and yes, there is jealousy there, too. So I guess the Crichton/Crais conflict hasn’t really gone away, it’s just morphed into something more undefinable, but the more threatening for it, I think.

Crais is certainly a threat in this episode. On top of being a threat to the Aeryn/Crichton relationship, he also affects the group in a much larger way. Yes, he helped save D’Argo and Crichton, but he did it for a price, and the ramifications of his commandeering Talyn reverberate long afterwards. The biggest consequence is the possible break up of the Moya family, which has only just reunited itself. Aeryn doesn’t want to leave Moya, but she wishes to protect Talyn, to keep him in the family by tempering Crais’s influence. And when Talyn instead offers Crais the Hand of Friendship, effectively making Aeryn’s presence ineffective, she returns to Moya, who is now even more estranged from her son. Any way you slice it, Crais is a douchebag (but at least he’s an interesting douchebag now).

Other things of note: We gain a clue into Scorpius’s strange physiology in this episode, with the first appearance of the cooling rod technology, although we won’t learn specifics until the middle of the season. Character appearances and behaviors are finally stabilized: Chiana’s accent (which alternated between light Australian and British throughout season one) is now fully Americanized, Aeryn’s eyebrows are much smaller (although her appearance is still changing, and will continue to do so throughout the series), Crichton has a new haircut (they must have found a good barber in the Uncharted Territories), and of course, D’Argo’s new tan (which looks much, much better). On rewatch, I’ve also noticed that Crichton likes to kiss, and not just Aeryn. When he’s angry or stressed or feeling particularly crazy, he kisses. He’s done it to Rygel (twice now), Crais, Zhaan, Aeryn, Chiana . . . I guess all that’s left is Pilot and D’Argo. And, last but not least, even though I didn’t remember the physically affectionate part of the Crichton/Aeryn relationship starting so soon, I suppose it makes sense. There’s nothing like rescuing the guy you had sex with that one time and who you also kinda play house with from hanging balls-out in space to fast track the relationship.

- – -

2X02 — “VITAS MORTIS”

CGI planet, CGI castle: John, D’Argo, and Zhaan approach. Inside, a freaky cat-faced alien greets them. They have come to this planet, all three wearing ugly coats, in search of a Luxan. Inside, they find this old as shit Luxan woman with her snakey hairs all tied up in a swoopy thing. She identifies D’Argo as a general, much to Crichton’s puzzlement, and bids him come closer. He realizes she is an ‘Orican,’ and is afraid, but she is dying. He offers to attend her, whatever that means, but she deems him unworthy after sticking her freaky-ass hand into his chest. She calls him a fraud and then throws him out the door with her voodoo powers. She’s probably a witch.

Back from the credits, Zhaan tries to convince Crichton that Nilaam doesn’t mean to hurt D’Argo, that she’s a holy woman, but she turned me into a newt! (I got better.) D’Argo tells Crichton and Zhaan that he is a fraud. The tattoos on his tentacle beard mark him as a general, but he is not one. He took on the markings to save the real general, who was mortally wounded, from a torture that would certainly have killed him. Their little pep talk convinces him to talk to the Orican again, and it turns out the crazy biznatch was just testing him. Up on Moya, Chiana is washing clothes in Moya‘s amnexus fluid when Aeryn enters and throws some more clothes at her, but Chiana says she’s washing D’Argo’s clothes because she likes him. Conflict! D’Argo agrees to attend the Orican, and John isn’t happy about it. He doesn’t like the sound of “energy transfer,” and doesn’t understand the great honor that D’Argo considers this. He stays down on the planet to, I don’t know, lecture the dying lady? But she ends up winning him over with all her talk about being separated from her own kind. He can relate, so now they’re pals. Sort of. Meanwhile, D’Argo is lying to Chiana and Rygel about the ritual being dangerous, but Rygel doesn’t believe him. Chiana gets a funny look in her eye.

Later, D’Argo and Nilaam cut themselves on D’Argo’s “blade,” starting the ritual. Some freaky stuff happens with like, floating swords and weird chanting, and then BOOM! Granny Applepants decides to change course when she feels D’Argo’s “strong spirit.” Things go all wonky and Crichton breaks down the door, trying to stop the ritual. But it’s too late: the ritual is done, and Nilaam is young again. Up on Moya, Chiana is stuck in Moya‘s amnexus fluid, which has solidified, in a totally non-coincidental manner that has totally everything to do with the wonky ritual, except we’re not supposed to know that yet (even though it’s obvious). John high tails it out of Nilaam’s lair when she starts licking D’Argo’s nipples (for real), and then D’Argo and Nilaam have lots of dirty Luxan sex, ’cause hey, it’s not fair for John and Aeryn to be the only ones getting laid on this show, am I right? And after the sexin’, Nilaam promises D’Argo that she will solve all of his problems, and help his friends get home. While they’re having, er, fun, a number of Moya‘s systems begin to fail, including pieces of her outer skin. Pretty soon there’s a full-on inner hull breach, and everyone is like WHAT IS GOING ON.

And then the best thing ever happens: Rygel gets pulled out of his Thronesled by the escaping atmosphere and his ass plugs the hole Winnie the Pooh style. In the midst of this crisis-type situation, D’Argo enters with Nilaam. She tries to heal Moya‘s outer hull, ignoring some seriously evil looks from Chiana, but it only quickens the deterioration. Nilaam tells D’Argo she needs a place to meditate, and later it’s clear that both of them know they’ve caused Moya‘s sickness, although Nilaam says she didn’t know at the time. She didn’t know that D’Argo and company were in possession of a living ship, otherwise she would have been more careful. Aeryn is expressing doubts about Nilaam’s desire to truly heal Moya when Pilot calls her to his den. He, too, is dying, thanks to his connection with Moya. Upon learning that D’Argo and Nilaam are leaving the ship, Aeryn’s knee-jerk reaction is to kill Nilaam, but Nilaam is a witch, remember? Crichton and Aeryn end up encased temporarily in pillars of glass (or something). Down on the planet, D’Argo and Nilaam fight. D’Argo won’t abandon his friends, and he won’t allow Nilaam to kill Moya simply because she doesn’t want to be old again. She is acting anything but wise, even asking D’Argo to tell her what to do. After some man tears with Crichton, D’Argo and Nilaam once again attempt the Ritual of Passing. Nilaam dies, old again, and D’Argo makes out with her dead body (sort of for real . . . I like hyperbole). Crichton is crying for some reason, supposedly because this is sad. Freed from Nilaam’s “spell,” Chiana, Pilot, Moya, and Rygel are recovering nicely, but D’Argo is all emo. Whatever, he’ll be fine in a couple of hours.

Trivia

• Nilaam is the only female Luxan shown in the entire Farscape series.
• Though two different actresses perform the role of Nilaam (Melissa Jaffer as Old Nilaam & Anna Lise-Phillips as Young Nilaam), Melissa Jaffer provides the voice for both versions.
• Additionally, Melissa Jaffer, who plays “Old” Nilaam would later return as a series regular in the role of Noranti in seasons three and four.
• The episode’s title is a Latin phrase which roughly translates as “life from death,” “life death” or “to seek to escape death.”‘
• Crichton’s reference to ripping out D’Argo’s liver and supping it with Chianti is a reference to Dr. Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.

Metaphorically Speaking

As much as I love those intense and dramatic episodes of Farscape like “The Hidden Memory” for their emotional range and metaphoric resonance, it’s episodes like “Vitas Mortis” that I like to write about best. Over the top, ridiculous what-the-fuck action all over the place, plus a smidgen of “that is really stupid” shoved in here and there, and a huh? over there. It makes for this wacky magical writing space where I get to love episodes I hated or that I just felt ‘meh’ about before just because I’m writing them, or rather, rewriting them. It’s the power of the snark. (I can’t wait to deploy it on “Taking the Stone” next week, my least favorite episode in the series). “Vitas Mortis” has some nice things going for it, but ultimately, there are just a bunch of narrative dead ends mixed in with a main storyline that ultimately isn’t very effective because it doesn’t let the audience in on the fun (more on that second part in the Trash Bin).

Very simply this episode is about learning to appreciate life while you have it, and being able to let it go when it’s time. This is, frankly, one of the main reasons the episode doesn’t work because that theme is way, way too big to ever be effectively conveyed in the space of one episode, and never mind that the main source we’re supposed to be getting this from is a one-off guest character. Despite its best intentions, Nilaam is just too small of a person for this story. Her death has no effect on us. (I mean, hell, it turns out that learning to appreciate life and then letting go were the main themes Lost was working with the whole time and it took them six frakking years to get the most of them, so . . . this episode was basically doomed from the start). Even in the end when we get the scenes of Chiana and Rygel articulating their newfound appreciation for life after their “experiences,” it just doesn’t really matter. Moving on.

The only character whose emotions I bought in this episode were Crichton’s, and he had the least amount of screen time of all four of the main players. This is largely because of his scene with Nilaam in which he empathizes with her loneliness. “Losing those I care about frightens me,” he says to D’Argo. What Nilaam is giving up is pretty intense, being given the chance to do it all over, but seriously, we don’t care. We do care if Moya lives or dies, however. We’re on her side. D’Argo feels torn because she’s the first Luxan he’s met in years and years, and she’s this holy woman to boot. It is kind of nice that the ‘holy woman’ thing doesn’t even matter in the end. In the end, she’s just like one of us, mortal and afraid of dying.

Trash Bin

I start to lose patience with the episode when D’Argo is crying about Nilaam. They’ve known each other for, like, five seconds. I did not feel the emotion that the characters, including Crichton, seemed to be feeling, at the end. Their emotions are disproportionate to the amount of time they’ve spent with this woman. The pieces just don’t fit together.

The conflict between Aeryn and Chiana kinda goes . . . nowhere. I can see where it might be trying to setting up the next episode, which is all about Chiana, but it doesn’t work. We have been given no indication for the reason for Chiana’s dislike of Aeryn. It could be Crichton related, but I think that’s a stretch. It’s just narratively a very weird choice, and I’m pretty sure it’s something the writers don’t return to. And Aeryn’s distrust of Nilaam is kind of out of left field as well. I suppose violence is a reasonable reaction, considering how sick Moya is, but we aren’t shown the process of how that anger came about. She’s just fine one minute, and then BOOM, she’s shooting a very large space grenade launcher (which is admittedly bad ass). Very weird.

- – -

Crichtonisms

• “You wanna have a midlife crisis? Fine! Just, ditch the firm, head off to Maui, shack up with the supermodel . . . but you DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE PORSCHE!”

PuppetWatch!

• I’ve always got to mention a really good Hands on the Puppet! moment, and we have a great one in “Mind the Baby.” During the Crichton/Rygel reunion scene, Browder was squeezing the ever living crap out of that puppet, but it only made the scene funnier.
• Even better is the scene with Rygel’s ass acting as a space plug. Priceless.
• Nilaam’s head is very large for having such a tiny body, but she’s weirdly hard to stop looking at.

- – -

“Crackers Don’t Matter!”

• A Farscape Glossary: “Intonns” is a Hynerian affliction — an airway seizure caused by very strong emotions, which is similar in effect to hiccuping.
• Interstellar Swearing:
• Pop Culture References: Rocky, The Menendez brothers, The Silence of the Lambs.
• Aeryn is very dirty and sweaty in “Mind the Baby,” but she still manages to look awesome. Explain.
• There were way too many awesome Aeryn/Crichton moments in “Mind the Baby,” and I could only pick one for the Classic Farscape moment ↓. Others include when Crichton asks Aeryn how many times they’ve been close, meaning trusting one another, and she’s thinking sex so she responds, whispering, “Just the once.” Makes me laugh so hard. Another is when they say “goodbye” for the second time and link their hands together. They don’t say much, but they don’t really have to.
• Crichton calls D’Argo “brother” in “Vitas Mortis,” and it makes me feel all warm and tingly inside.
• While watching “Vitas Mortis,” I had a realization. The Luxans are an entire species full of angry redheads.
• I always forget that Pilots can live for such a long time (1000+ years). 300 years (Leviathans) is small in comparison.

- – -

Classic Moments in Farscape, #12

[Pilot's den, John and Aeryn are sitting down below Pilot. Aeryn is sitting in front of John, and he is twirling a piece of her hair in his fingers.]
Aeryn: I failed.
Crichton: No, you did everything you could.
Aeryn: In other words, I failed.
Pilot: Officer Sun, Talyn told Moya he was choosing Crais of his own volition.
Crichton: Yeah, for what that’s worth.
Pilot: He will contact her from time to time and let her know he is okay.
Crichton: Well, they say they’ll call home, Pilot, once a week . . . they never do.
Aeryn: [The camera pans out; Aeryn leans back into John's chest. He wraps her in his arms.] Talyn will be all right, won’t he?
Crichton: Well, he’s young. And he’s gonna make mistakes. But he’ll learn. And if Crais ever mistreats him, he’ll bounce him.
Aeryn: Maybe Crais won’t mistreat him. [Crichton grunts.] He could have killed me, you know. He could have killed all of us, and he didn’t.
Crichton: Yeah. Maybe he just needed to save the energy for Starburst.
Aeryn: Or maybe he’s changed. [Crichton snorts in disbelief and rolls his eyes.] Well you do believe people can change? Don’t you, John? [She looks up at him, he smiles and nuzzles her head.] Well?
Crichton: [laughs] Well . . . you have. Hmm. I have. But Crais . . .

- – -

Coming Up on the Farscape Rewatch: “Taking the Stone,” “Crackers Don’t Matter”

Ben Browder is one of the few male actors who can be cute, handsome, or hot…depending on wardrobe, hair and makeup.

Agreed.  He looks good in anything.  I have to admit I didn’t think he was all that back in 1999 when I first started watching Farscape.  I only found him attractive when I saw him appear as Lieutenant Col. Cameron Mitchell in Seasons 9 and 10 of Stargate SG-1. The general populace is aware of him through his role as Sam Brody (Neve Campbell’s character’s boyfriend) in Party of Five.  Browder escaped the trappings of his good looks in choosing the penultimate platform for the pretty boy television actor who wants to be something more: science fiction.   He ended up writing two of some of the best Farscape episodes: “Green-Eyed Monster” (Season 3) and “John Quixote” (Season 4; this episode deserves a Proppian analysis) and a Stargate SG-1 episode: “Bad Guys.” One gets the feeling that he asserted much more creative control behind the scenes.  Rumor has it that he’s agreed to direct Farscape webisodes for Syfy but that the Jim Henson Company is still looking for funds to finance the project.

I may be teasing him, but I admire him as an actor.  He was perfect for Farscape – the tongue-in-cheek attitude, the pop-cultural references that just rolled off his tongue, the inclusion of elements of his Southern background including an accent that is mellifluous but not irritating, his execution of dark humor, fantastic sexual tension with women (and men), and his truly uncanny ability to act with puppets from the Jim Henson Creature Shop.  Browder also did a great job of providing continuity and strength to the final seasons of Stargate SG-1 with the permanent departure of Richard Dean Anderson.

In his late 30s when he started Farscape and now in his late 40s, he looks fantastic for his age. Oh, yes and he looks good in anything: ugly yellow jump suits, leather, plain t-shirts, austere Soviet-looking Peacekeeper attire, black suit and tie, pink vaguely Indian looking attire, military duds, you name it.  Well, maybe not the Easter bunny outfit.  That’s just kind of funny.

I think Jamie Bamber of Battlestar Galactica also fits Sitting Pugs’ bill.

Behold, the way I experience social interaction, as related by former soldier Aeryn Sun:

“What I had to do up there was like a field strategy exercise, only the enemy wasn’t trying to kill me, the enemy was a puzzle, and there were lots of different pieces, and independently — separately — they didn’t, they didn’t make any sense, and I had to think it through really hard, and I had to work out, try different combinations of putting them together, and then finally I worked out what had happened, and I worked out what I had to do.”

(Yes, that’s really all one sentence.)

Hot Hunk Thursday is the brainchild of WiddleShamrock so head on over to see more hot hunks

This weeks hot hunk was made much hotter by his relationship with the out of this world Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black), yep, this week it is the hunky space hero John Crichton (aka Ben Browder).  I’ve only got pictures of the two of them together because IMHO John wouldn’t have been all that hot without Aeryn and she is smoking hot .