XOXO, Puppet Girl #6
Farscape 1x11 and 1x12
Both episodes this week are rather dismal, yet we’re still one installment of this blog away from the episode widely considered Farscape’s worst. First seasons of science fiction television shows are functionally endurance tests.
Til the Blood Runs Clear
When Zhaan is in extremely bright sunlight, such as the light of a solar flare, she is overcome with sexual ecstasy to the point of delirium.
Oh yeah: also John and Aeryn are off testing John’s module (that’s not a euphemism!) by flying it around outside Moya, and they manage to create a small unstable wormhole thanks to the intense solar flares emanating from the nearest sun. John goes into a wormhole fugue as he imagines returning home. At the last second, Aeryn’s pleading breaks his reverie and they escape. The module is damaged, and John and Aeryn are forced to make an emergency landing on a nearby planet.
Aeryn calls John out for his irresponsibility and selfishness in nearly flying them into the wormhole without any care for her safety. She’s right. The two of them land on this Tatooine-ass planet and meet with the mechanic Furlow, played by Babe and Babe 2 star-to-me Magda Szubanski. Furlow thinks John’s module is a piece of junk (still not a euphemism) and that it will take a long time to repair. She also mentions that the solar flares are not a regular occurrence, so John doesn’t have long to make another wormhole.
John and Aeryn head outside and discover a Wild West-style “wanted beacon” advertising the huge reward Crais will deliver to anyone who catches D’Argo, Zhaan, or Rygel. Aeryn tries to secure and sabotage the beacon.
They’re confronted by a pair of alien bounty hunters with scary red eyes. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether these characters are racialized and racist or not. They are long-haired Wild West characters who wear outfits that sort of vaguely reference Native American styles, but so incoherently that I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not. They’re also dog-coded, which I think probably makes them racist on some level no matter the intentions of the show’s creators.
Anyway, the alien dog-people think that John and Aeryn are competitors, and the dog-man’s wife attacks Aeryn in a dominance thing. John has to play macho and claim that Aeryn is his “mate” to scare them off. It’s lame.
Meanwhile on Moya jack-shit is occurring. D’Argo’s having a toxic masculinity flare-up and is mad at John for no reason. Zhaan has gone up to the terrace to nudely masturbate in full sun. Rygel is irrelevant. D’Argo decides to go down to the planet in Aeryn’s Prowler to aggro John himself.
John and Aeryn form an uneasy detente with the dog-people and they eat a barbecued dude together. John has to continue his manly posturing to trick the dog-people into allying with him. After the dog-people leave for the day, he and Aeryn discuss the nature of the alpha male in the middle of an empty soundstage which includes some kind of weird sex restraint as a prop. Aeryn cracks Crais’ wanted beacon and finds a secret message for her hidden inside: amnesty in exchange for John.
D’Argo lands on the planet and immediately gets captured by the dog-people. Inside Furlow’s workshop, she’s smoking a fat stogie in the coolest way possible and pressing John to sell her his module because it shows signs of wormhole exposure (need I even say it?). Furlow mentions that she’s just come into a secondhand Prowler, and John realizes D’Argo’s done something stupid. He goes to confront the dog-people and D’Argo berates him, almost blowing John’s cover. The dog-people lock D’Argo up in the sex rack thing and torture him by cutting into his head tentacles. They also demand John torture D’Argo to prove his evil bona fides. John uses the opportunity to massage D’Argo’s wounds and save him from Luxan blood shock while pretending to beat him up.
Zhaan and Rygel have a really cute interaction where he covers his eyes when she enters the room in fear she’s nude and she menaces him with the prospect of her nudity. Then she dumbly goes down to the planet, where the dog-people pursue her. Luckily, the flares come up and she faints nuttingly where the bounty hunters can’t find her.
John goes to rescue D’Argo, and D’Argo of course swings on him. They fight about which of them is more selfish and macho, but in the end settle on being allies, if not friends. John teaches D’Argo to shake on it.
Aeryn cuts a deal with Furlow to modify the wanted beacon with a new message. Outside D’Argo and John get into a shootout with the dog-people. Aeryn wanders through the shootout, temporarily blinded by a solar flare but intent on her mission. She manages to activate the modified beacon. A deepfake Crais appears and announces there will be no reward for the fugitives after all. The dog-people literally just fuck off and leave with zero fanfare like the writer couldn’t think how to end the episode. Zhaan arrives and announces the flares are done for this cycle, so John’s wormhole dreams are over for now.
Furlow finishes the repairs on John’s module. Since the Moya crew has no money, Furlow demands John turn over his wormhole data, keeping no copy for himself. He gives up the data so he can stay ahead of Crais and thus alive, losing all his progress on returning home.
This episode is weak. There’s no real main plot, or any compelling subplots, just a handful of charming scenes in between the utilitarian ones. Aeryn gets sidelined or damselled multiple times, which depresses me. John and D’Argo indulge in too much toxic masculinity. The soundtrack is the most embarrassing and inexplicable faux-metal.
But both Furlow and the dog-people will be back, and in some of the best episodes the show ever produces.
The Flax
This episode is actually not quite as bad as I remembered it. But that’s because the only thing I remembered about it was a joke from the latter half which is pretty transphobic. It depresses me to see in a show that is at heart about the wildness and profundity of the body and the mind. However, the body and the mind could only be so wild and profound on the SciFi Channel in 1999. It’s the ones we love who disappoint us most.
There is one plot in “The Flax” which really works, and it belongs to John and Aeryn. They take one of Moya’s transport pods out so John can practice space driving, but then find themselves stuck within a strange forcefield: the Flax of the episode title. The Flax is operated by some space pirates who interact with D’Argo, Zhaan, and Rygel, but that plot is horseshit, so I’m not gonna talk about it.
In trying to escape from the forcefield, John and Aeryn damage the pod’s environmental controls and their spacesuits. Only Aeryn’s suit is intact. The cockpit is flooding with pure oxygen, and the repairs require welding. Aeryn is forced to temporarily kill John with a weird Peacekeeper device so she can put on her spacesuit, vent all the oxygen, and do the repairs. But as an unskilled welder, she isn’t able to complete the repairs within the time limit necessary to prevent John from suffering permanent brain damage. She rushes to restore the atmosphere and revive him, and when she loses the Peacekeeper revival serum, she has to perform CPR, which John has just taught to her.
Yes, Farscape would do “one character must perform CPR on another character while they have sexual tension”! Some things are classic because they are good.
Aeryn brings John back to life and explains that she wasn’t able to repair the environmental controls. They won’t make it unless someone finds and rescues them. Aeryn asks John what he saw while he was dead, whether it was the Christian-style Heaven of his childhood or the Nothing the Peacekeepers anticipate.
It was Nothing, of course. Farscape is atheist-affirming television.
Caught up in the moment, desperate to fight their looming deaths, John and Aeryn kiss A LOT. They’re about to bust it down sexual-style when D’Argo shows up. Declining an opportunity to find potential guidance back to his homeworld and his son, D’Argo demonstrates that he learned from “DNA Mad Scientist” and chooses to save John and Aeryn instead. He’s super, duper embarrassed to arrive at this exact moment, though.
They all go back to the ship, safe and sound. John and Aeryn vow to never speak of this moment again, but the smiles on their faces say otherwise. I can’t name two people in science fiction television who have better chemistry than Claudia Black and Ben Browder. My mind is permanently warped about what desire should look like because of them.
Anyway, besides John and Aeryn breaking the hook-up ceiling and D’Argo choosing found family over blood family, there’s only one other crucial plot point: John starts saying “arns” instead of “hours”. Have I mentioned this before? That Farscape replaces all profanity and many measurement words with made-up alien ones? It works shockingly well for what should be a deliriously dumb idea. I think it’s one of the things which fascinated me about the show as a youth. Here in this small way the show says that names we take for granted, hold as hard permanent obvious truths, are arbitrary and exceedingly silly. Phenomena precede language. Call your testicles “balls” or call them “mivonks”, they still hurt when somebody stomps them.
You’re the premiere prisoner of your own worldview.
Also, the show poses Aeryn resuscitating John as a move done just in time, saving him from brain damage, but by next season I think you’ll agree that he took more than a couple hits to the old cognitor when he was biologically dead for four minutes.
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Crew Roster Check-In: John, Aeryn, D’Argo, Zhaan, Rygel, Pilot, Moya, Gestating Leviathan Jr.
Accounting for Farscape’s Crimes
Times I Have Said “What Is Happening” Out Loud to Myself So Far: 7
Doubles Episodes So Far: 1
Weird Sex Things So Far: 14
Tears Shed So Far: 3
