Television

XOXO, Puppet Girl #1

LN Lupa

02 Sep 2025 — 5 min read

hesspacekitty

Farscape 1x01 & 1x02

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars were a sex club? Wonder no longer: Farscape is here to tell you.

I love Farscape, but it’s hard to explain why. Farscape is a show about having a stranger spit in your mouth nonconsensually at a BDSM dungeon filled with strobe lights, a sensory experience which would instantly kill me in real life.

I’ve chosen to review Farscape at this particular moment because I’d like to better articulate why it’s so important to me. Also, it’s currently free to watch in multiple locations. Perhaps most importantly, in this time of ascendant censorship and prudishness, Farscape is something Big Thought Leader wouldn’t want you to see. Neither the rat-faced Hitler-smoking Baptists of Congress nor the terminally virginal hand-wringing back-biters of TikTok want you to be thinking about the seduction of puppets.

I want you to be thinking about the seduction of puppets. So do the creators of Farscape.

Premiere

The pilot episode of a TV show tells you what a show will be about. The pilot episode of Farscape does this with the fervor and fury of a storm siren. Our hero, astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder), leaves Earth in the year 1999 with a warm “end-of-history” vibe. His wise and folksy dad, also a former astronaut, gives him a dadly speech and John replies with his biggest concern: he’s not the same kind of hero as his ‘60s-patriarch father. We will need these words in our rhetorical toolkit for many episodes to come.

John’s maiden voyage goes awry and his ship, the Farscape-1, flies off into a wormhole. He reappears far from home and in the middle of a space battle. A small space fighter collides with the Farscape-1, then crashes into a nearby asteroid explosively. Before John can figure out what’s going on, he’s pulled into an enormous whale-like ship inhabited by several aliens. Moya, the ship, is herself also an alien, with an additional fifth alien hidden in her core to serve as her pilot. He’s named Pilot (Lani Tupu & puppeteers) and he’s the second-most amazing puppet ever.

John gets a speedy introduction to his new crewmates, who are all escaped prisoners fleeing the custody of the evil Peacekeepers. D’Argo (Anthony Simcoe) is the big tough warrior alien who has a tattooed, divoted ballsack on his chin; Zhaan (Virginia Hey) is the mystical and sexual blue priest who gets naked frequently because it’s spiritual to her; and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy & puppeteers) is a grandiose and conniving deposed emperor, as well as the most amazing puppet ever.

They don’t trust John and they throw him in prison with their other captive: the galaxy’s most beautiful operator, Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black). She tries to kill John by smothering him to death with her thighs. I share this information because I know it is of great personal import to my readers.

Aeryn is a Peacekeeper, and thus a lifelong brainwashed fascist who despises and oppresses less-humanoid aliens like D’Argo, Zhaan, and Rygel. But she’s also incredibly sexy, so it’s very difficult for John to decide which side he’s on. While Moya is stopped at a planet, John and Aeryn escape to the surface and D’Argo pursues them. There they’re all cornered by Peacekeeper Captain Bialar Crais (also Lani Tupu), who reveals the fighter John bumped into on arrival belonged to Crais’ brother, who died when his ship went off-course. Now Crais will take his furious revenge on John.

When Aeryn, kneecapped by unexpected compassion for miserable little John, intervenes to lighten his sentence, Crais declares her irreversibly contaminated by alien contact and sentences her to death as well. With no other recourse, Aeryn reluctantly joins John and D’Argo on their escape back to Moya. There, John uses the experimental planetary slingshot technique he was testing at the episode’s beginning to help Moya escape Crais’ ship. Aeryn pilots, using a joystick resembling an amazingly eccentric sex toy.

Zhaan is kind to John, D’Argo is menacing, Aeryn mocks his weakness, and Rygel tries to steal his stuff. John fixes a little maintenance droid he broke when he arrived, and records a voice note to his dad. Get this: he’s feeling rather stressed.

Some have spoken against the Farscape pilot because it’s too direct in stating “This is the show premise. These are the show characters.” But I prefer knowing what’s going on. That clarity won’t last long here.

Remember:

1) The core concerns of this show are freedom and power. We arrive to Moya with her technologically collared and enslaved by Peacekeepers. Zhaan, D’Argo, and Rygel have been incarcerated for “cycles” (they only use made-up space measurements on Farscape). Aeryn is prisoner of a lifetime’s worth of fascist ideology. Only John, our all-American astronaut boy, believes he’s free.

2) Despite his ostentatiously goofy Southern charms, John Crichton is not the average sci-fi chad hero onto which us ectomorphic dweebs can project our insecure masculinity. He would rather be compassionate than violent. This will cost him a great deal.

Exodus from Genesis

This isn’t the second episode broadcast, but it’s the second episode that plays on YouTube and Tubi, so it’s the second episode I’ll review. I was 5 in 1999; I don’t care what order they played in then. The show does not make sense either way.

This is a doubles episode, first and foremost. There are many, many episodes of Farscape about being cloned, duplicated, impersonated, or trapped in a parallel reality. Imposters abound. We will discuss this more in later reviews.

Still avoiding the Peacekeepers, Moya hides behind a large swarm of space bugs. The Peacekeeper scout ship is thrown off the scent, but unbeknownst to our heroes, the bugs fly into Moya. There they begin to sabotage the heating system, turning Moya into a house with no A/C (I have lived in several).

Aeryn reacts especially badly, because her species, the very human-like Sebaceans, can’t survive high heat. If they are too warm for too long, they enter a demented coma called “The Living Death”, for which there is no cure. John and the other crew members furiously search for a cure, sending Rygel into the vents to find the source of the enormous bugs stalking them.

Rygel finds an alien bug nest with an enormous queen laying eggs through a giant MOIST ovipositor. The alien bug queen captures the crew’s DNA and begins producing doppelgangers of our heroes in order to better sabotage the ship.

Just as Aeryn hovers on the brink of collapse, John and Zhaan are able to negotiate a compromise. But that too is sabotaged when the Peacekeeper scouts return and invade the ship. Rygel, the only crew member able to reach the queen, enters her nest via MOIST ovipositor to negotiate a new treaty. While Zhaan cares for Aeryn, John and D’Argo pursue the Peacekeepers, all Sebacean, through the warming ship with the help of a doppelganger army.

With the heat on his side, John chases the Peacekeepers off the ship, refusing to kill them despite D’Argo’s protestations. Aeryn survives, the bugs leave, and we receive the slight but worrying implication that Rygel traded sexual favors to the bug queen in order for her help against the Peacekeepers. John and Aeryn bond on Moya’s terrace, which is a deck on the roof of the ship you can stand on even though it’s in space, because Farscape should never be mistaken for Hard SF. Aeryn begins to see something of value in John Crichton.

I enjoy this episode, but it’s not a work of genius. The crew fails to explore several obvious solutions to keeping Aeryn cool (send her out in one of the away ships! Put her on the terrace!) in order to ramp up the drama of whether John will be able to save her. It’s the second episode: of course he’ll be able to save her, a main character. We can maintain confidence in that kind of plot armor for a few more episodes…