XOXO, Puppet Girl #5

LN Lupa

29 Oct 2025 — 7 min read

He would eat Namtar in a second.

Farscape 1x09 & 1x10

Now the wheels of Farscape truly begin to turn. The villain of this episode is a 7-foot-tall, quadruple-kneed ratman wearing a yellow fishnet body-stocking and a baroque set of nipple clamps. His name? Namtar.

Moya’s crew visit Namtar in the hope that he’ll use his proprietary mad scientist device to locate their farflung homeworlds and help them chart a path back home. Namtar’s happy to do this, but the DNA he needs is located only in the eyeball. Graphic eyeball torture: the first time for Farscape but not the last!

Namtar shows them a beautiful galactic map, fueled by their DNA, but withholds it, demanding they pay an even higher price: one of Pilot’s arms.

John and Aeryn sit this out, going to the bar instead. Namtar couldn’t find Earth, even with John’s eyeball, and Aeryn is exiled from her home forever. Neither is in good spirits.

But Rygel, Zhaan, and D’Argo are unrepentant and undeterred: they go and chop off one of Pilot’s arms while he screams in terror. Namtar graciously provides them a crystal paperweight filled with location data in return. John is deeply disturbed by the violence between his companions, but when he asks Pilot about it, Pilot pretends that he’s fine with it. After all, he can regenerate limbs. But can one ever regenerate a broken trust?

Aeryn, tormented by the prospect of a lonely, wandering life with only John for company (at best), returns to Namtar and asks him to use his eyeball stabbing machine to find her a Sebacean planet outside Peacekeeper control. Instead, he injects her with an experimental Pilot-derived serum, while his mutated assistant, Kornata, looks on in horror.

On Moya, Zhaan, D’Argo, and Rygel try to upload the homeworld maps provided by Namtar to the ship’s databanks. Pilot, rather cattily, informs them the crystal is overloaded and only one map is salvageable. Internecine strife hits new highs, with Rygel purloining the crystal while D’Argo and Zhaan try to threaten or seduce its location out of him.

John, looking for someone still sane, finds Aeryn and quickly realizes she’s ill. She’s in fact so ill that she’s growing a third freaky little arm and her thoughts are becoming overwhelmed with Pilot-like consciousness of all Moya’s systems. John takes her to confront Namtar, but Namtar trashes them easily with his long crazy arms and his Wolverine-like regeneration. He abducts Aeryn, intent on gestating the Pilot DNA within her so he can absorb Pilot’s multi-tasking skill from her hybrid form.

John confronts Kornata and recruits her to help him defeat Namtar. She reveals that Namtar was once her test subject, but when her experiments worked too well, he took over the colony, torturing its inhabitants. The two of them head back to Moya, where Pilot alerts John to Rygel’s attempt to upload a map from the crystal. Kornata warns John that the crystal is booby-trapped: no matter what map is chosen, it will actually upload a virus to wipe all of Moya’s memories.

John rushes to the bridge, where he flings the crystal from Rygel’s hands. Zhaan and D’Argo arrive just in time to see the crystal shatter and, in a beautiful moment of pure Farscape expressionism, release a hologram of the galaxy, which floats up for a moment, taunting them all with the prospect of their homes, until dissolving into pure particles.

John and Kornata, mysterious serums in hand, return to Namtar’s lair. John taunts him with a vintage science-fiction television monologue about a certain Earth fellow named Mengele who got too into the scientific quest for genetic superiority. Namtar, putting himself in a shit-club with many IRL idiots, thinks that Mengele guy sounds lit.

In this moment of distraction, Kornata is able to stab Namtar with the serum she cooked up on Moya and he melts, horrifically, into a weird little puppet, his crazy nipple harness left empty. He’s not shit!

Poor Aeryn is nearly at the point of full Pilot-ization and so slimy about it. Kornata provides John with an antidote serum, but obviously it can only, once again, go in through the eye. He injects her and holds her as she goes through yet another wracking transformation.

Moya and her crew depart. John tries to cheer Aeryn up with a food cube smiley face, and they talk out her loneliness. He assures her that she would always have a place on Earth with him, if she wanted.

D’Argo visits Pilot, and tells Pilot that he knows taking Pilot’s arm was cruel, but that he could do not differently, based on what he thought at the time. He sits beside Pilot and plays him a traditional Luxan song on his newly-constructed space instrument. It’s not a great apology, but pobody on Moya is nerfect.

I teared up a little at the end. We’ve invested enough time that we can start to see the other sides of the characters. Zhaan’s evil side, threatened last episode, here impels her to an act of grotesque selfishness. D’Argo, whose willingness to dismember we never doubted, displays the greatest sensitivity to his own mistakes. Aeryn admits her terrible fear of loneliness, after a life of service and community (though it was an evil community).

This is the best Season 1 will get, until Episode 16. Maybe even Episode 19.

They’ve Got a Secret

Really, you could call this episode “They’ve Got Sons”, but I get ahead of myself.

We open to find the crew of Moya searching the ship for any lingering Peacekeeper devices. For reasons which are unclear to John himself, Aeryn insists on climbing onto John’s shoulders to remove a device from the ceiling. Once again, she is trying to kill him with her thighs.

D’Argo, bumbling along on his own (though at least he’s safe from Aeryn and John’s toxic chemistry), creeps into the deeper tunnels of Moya’s body and falls down a loooong tube. He grabs onto a Peacekeeper device to avoid falling forever, but the Peacekeeper device rips open, squirting out…some…liquid…

Moya ejects D’Argo and the liquid, and he goes tumbling into the empty vacuum of space.

He’s fine, though. They get him back inside and resuscitate him. He’s overcome by hallucinations that Zhaan is his beautiful wife, Lo’Laan. Zhaan discovers D’Argo is coated in a liquid “biomechanoid virus”, whatever that means, which has infected Moya from within that Peacekeeper device.

Pilot begins acting weird, and so do his little DRD helper robots. Aeryn gets glued to the floor by mad DRDs and John must delicately sponge solvent onto her to free her. Then they chat a bit about disease control among the Peacekeepers, as compared to disease control on Earth. It’s reasonably sexual.

More systems begin to break down, and Pilot faints! Moya can barely fly and the atmospheric system malfunctions such that no new oxygen is being produced. D’Argo misidentifies Rygel as his lost son, Jothee, whom he still loves in a tender and sincere daddish manner. Then he tucks Rygel into bed and goes to look for his beautiful wife.

Instead, D’Argo mistakes John for his jerk brother-in-law, Macton, but for a moment turns lucid and explains what happened in Moya’s shaft before he shot into space. Then he falls back into his hallucination mode and descends into misery because his beautiful wife Lo’Laan is, and you’ll be shocked to hear this, dead. R.I.P. Lo’Laan. We hardly knew ye, and that is because you are the dead wife of a guy in a TV show.

John goes to retrace D’Argo’s steps and discovers a flock of hostile DRDs blocking his path. He creeps into the walls like D’Argo did, and in a glowing neon-red otherworld a mass of murderous DRDs hold him at gunpoint. Aeryn, managing Pilot’s station, shuts down the DRDs just in time. John realizes Moya herself is shutting down the environmental controls and directing the DRDs to attack them. Has she gone mad from the biomechanoid virus?!

John advocates for shutting Moya down temporarily, which disturbs Aeryn and Zhaan. John agrees to try one other thing with Zhaan, so they go find D’Argo and Rygel playing Papa and Son. Together Zhaan and John play into their roles as sweet Lo’Laan and evil Macton to force D’Argo out of his hallucination. In the process, D’Argo reveals that Macton murdered Lo’Laan to end her relationship with D’Argo, and then framed D’Argo for the killing. D’Argo’s last act before his capture was to send Jothee into hiding. All this happened because, as D’Argo at last reveals, Lo’Laan was a Sebacean like Aeryn. Macton’s hatred of D’Argo was due to the inter-species nature of his relationship with Lo’Laan.

John, as a good ole boy from Florida, is not well-equipped to deal with this revelation, but luckily the catharsis of explaining allows D’Argo to process his grief and return to normal. Which is good, because the crew is out of options and may have to permanently harm Moya to save themselves. Aeryn begins preparations to sever Moya’s nervous system while D’Argo leads the others to the site of the ejection incident. Rappelling down the tube, John finds the device D’Argo activated and another opening. He creeps inside and discovers the real source of Moya’s strange behavior: she is gestating a mini-Leviathan ship. The space ship is pregnant.

John reveals this to his crewmates, preventing Aeryn from destroying Moya’s nervous system and instructing her to instead reactivate the DRDs, who care for the fetal spaceship. He beseeches Moya, asking her to find a way to preserve all their lives and promising to protect her and her baby. Moya restores the air flow and allows Pilot to regain consciousness.

Our crew gathers to ask the recovered Pilot what to expect as the baby Leviathan develops. Pilot has no idea.

D’Argo retires to seclusion to ponder his lost family, but Aeryn comes to check on him. He thanks her for rescuing him when he was shot into space. He and Aeryn discuss the Peacekeeper eugenics regime and Aeryn expresses her support for D’Argo and his lost son. This is the most affecting part of the episode, hands down.

This is a pretty medium episode, mostly notable for the plot material it adds. Obviously, Moya’s baby and D’Argo’s broken family will come back later. It is also the first really big Acting! episode for Anthony Simcoe, who plays D’Argo. The role of Big Tough Dude on a sci-fi show is unrewarding. Think of how dull Worf is until he joins Deep Space 9, despite Michael Dorn’s best efforts. Anthony Simcoe brings significant acting talent to his performance as D’Argo, and here he gets an opportunity to flex it.

Lastly, we must now say it: obviously that biomechanoid virus stuff that D’Argo released and was coated in is some kind of Leviathan ejaculate.