XOXO, Puppet Girl #13
Today we see one of the worst episodes and one of my favorites. Truly, Farscape taketh and she giveth away. She’s vers like that.
Taking the Stone
We open to Chiana having a mental breakdown which causes her to do surgery on herself and pull a giant red cough drop out of her abdomen. John ignores her because he’s working on a project. Distraught, she steals Aeryn’s prowler and flies down to a planet.
The cough drop is a magic sci-fi device that two people get implanted which confirms to each implantee that they’re both alive, no matter how far apart they are. Chiana’s died, so the person she loves also died. John feels bad about ignoring her now, which he should.
Conveniently, the planet Chiana fled to is a cemetery planet so it fits her mood. She’s ambushed by a bunch of white kids in orange face who sport pink surfer dreads. Yes, it’s a white kids with dreads episode.
John, Aeryn, and Rygel come down to the planet to find Chiana now also pink-dreaded and doing weird hazing rituals with the orange-white kids, who like eating mushrooms that usually make you high but sometimes kill you. Chiana’s appropriately mad at John. The kids think it’s funny that John and Aeryn are so old, i.e. adults. There’s no one old on the planet. Chiana admits the cough drop corresponds to her brother, Nerri, who has evidently now died. She heads off to another hazing ritual. It’s about jumping off a cliff and maybe getting caught by an invisible force screen called a sonic net. A lot of this scene proceeds in slow motion or weird repetitive cuts back to the same shot with different angles. I have a four-year degree in cinema & media studies and I don’t really know why. Also, a couple of these white kids are pregnant and their bellies are see-through. Again, I don’t know why.
Anyway, two guys jump: one guy survives and one guy dies because sometimes the sonic net works and sometimes it doesn’t. Now Chiana wants to do the hazing ritual too. Chiana hooks up with one of the pink-dreaded white kids and John walks in on it, marking the second episode in a row where John has to endure a friend’s ill-advised hook-up.
In a dad-like way, John demands Chiana come home to Moya. This works about as well for him as it does for every other dad. When he storms off, he meets a weird sickly girl who explains that if the white kids with pink surfer dreads don’t jump off the cliff by the age of 22, they shrivel up and start leaking green fluid. He confronts the lead white kid, who forces him to eat a Russian roulette mushroom. John gets high as shit.
Aeryn finds John passed out and wakes him up. He sends a sample from the sickly girl back to Moya so they can learn if there’s a cure for the shriveling disease. Chiana affirms to John that she’s going to jump off the cliff, so he drugs her. He is not a psychiatrist, his ideas are not good. Luckily, Aeryn intervenes and stops him from taking Chiana up to the ship. Her reasoning for letting Chiana commit suicide isn’t good either, but she does stand up for not kidnapping people. Mental health intervention is hard.
Zhaan and D’Argo report back on their study of the orange-white kid tissue sample. The suicide cliff chamber amplifies natural radiation, poisoning the people who live in and around it. John pitches moving out of the radioactive caves to the gathered clan of white kids, which is prepping for Chiana to do her suicide leap. John handles this badly too. He’s got one of his worst haircuts going this season. The year 2000 was not kind to men’s hair.
Anyway, the white kids with pink surfer dreads decide not to move out of the radiation caves. John and Chiana discuss whether she’s still suicidal while she considers jumping. She reminisces about how much she loved her dead brother, then she jumps. The net kicks on and she doesn’t die. John cheers for her survival.
Chiana buries her brother’s cough drop on the cemetery planet. John and Aeryn, waiting for her, discuss John’s own mental health. He’s worried about how quickly he went along with eating the psychedelic/instant death mushrooms. He should be.
This episode isn’t as bad as “Jeremiah Crichton”, but only because it’s not as directly racist as that one. It’s indirectly racist, because it’s full of white kids who are aliens because they have pink surfer dreads. Also, in a dumb subplot I did not deign to describe, Rygel robs graves and gets haunted by an artifact that is just an African mask with some extra shit glued on it. The episode’s rhetoric on suicidality is confusing. Kids, listen to me: if your friends are having a mental health crisis, don’t kidnap them, but also don’t let them try suicide on a lark either. There’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes.
Crackers Don’t Matter
Thankfully, we are blessed now by an all-time classic which introduces a new character whom we love so much.
D’Argo invites a weird scientist, T’raltixx, onboard to install an invisibility device on Moya. Chiana restocks their food supplies and because she’s absolutely a girl dinner girl she buys only crackers. John is pissed about both these decisions.
T’raltixx has a big-ass head and no eyes and pointy ears and a weird mustache. He suffers from intense sensory sensitivities. John instantly hates him, because John was definitely an 8th grade bully, but Zhaan insists on letting T’raltixx test his device on John’s module. You know how protective John is of his module. The device succeeds in turning John’s module invisible, so he has to let T’raltixx stay.
John goes to convince Pilot to let them fly to T’raltixx’s lab planet. Pilot is skeptical because to get there they have to fly through a system of five super-bright pulsars. T’raltixx mentions that the light from the pulsars drives lesser beings insane. He defines lesser beings as “genetic laborers, ungifted menials”, so we can hate him now too. He’s even British. He assures our heroes that any effects will be minor. Zhaan’s excited to get back to nutting in the sunlight, which we all know is her favorite hobby.
John bullies T’raltixx about his blindness, then yells at Chiana for eating too many crackers. D’Argo and Chiana scheme together. When John takes the scientist on a tour of the ship to find the perfect spot for his lab, Rygel menaces T’raltixx. John hypes up Chiana’s gluttony and Rygel rushes to get his fair share of crackers.
Aeryn, as always the only broadly functional person onboard, spends some time studying Scorpius’ latest Wanted beacon. Rygel’s eating crackers and it pisses D’Argo off. He stuffs Rygel’s face full of crackers violently. Visceral puppet abuse! Zhaan falls into a masturbatory coma in T’raltixx’s lab, and he takes this opportunity to plant hateful thoughts in Pilot’s head about the rest of the crew. When John tries to call Pilot up, he pretends not to hear him. Now Chiana and Aeryn are having a fight, and when John tries to defuse it Chiana only gets more paranoid. D’Argo makes it even worse, slapping John around, which knocks some sense back into him. T’raltixx is on the ceiling and he’s killing DRDs with his invisible laser eyes. Nobody notices, though.
Aeryn hunts Rygel through the halls and bullies him into becoming her ally. D’Argo and Chiana continue ginning up their own paranoia, turning against John and Aeryn, then Zhaan. D’Argo knocks Zhaan out with his magic tongue.
Up in Pilot’s hideout, John forces him to scan the light from the pulsars while Pilot bitches him out with the facility of an absolute harridan. John realizes something more suspicious is up: Pilot isn’t exposed to the external pulsar light while sealed up in his hole, so why’s he going quazy?
Aeryn and Rygel hoard crackers and threaten John’s life, so he begins to go crazier. T’raltixx is suborning Moya’s systems to make super-bright light, while distracting Pilot into further betraying the crew. There’s a thing on T’raltixx’s head which I cannot describe: it looks like if a bellows were a sandwich.
Aeryn, Rygel, D’Argo, and Chiana fall into various bouts of paranoiac bickering, endangering John. He escapes, only to find Chiana playing with Scorpius’ Wanted beacon. Chiana crushes John’s nuts and leaves. Crawling around on the ground, John complains about how crazy everybody else is, which is when the hologram of Scorpius starts talking to him. Scorpius follows John around and reminisces with him about his enemies and how to destroy them.
Painstakingly, John forces all his friends to cooperate while ignoring Scorpius’ advice to murder them, even though Scorpius promises him pizza and margaritas and nudie girls. John does not do this perfectly. He shoots D’Argo a little and threatens Chiana sexually. He needles Aeryn about her many betrayals, which causes her to unload on him with the kind of brutal dunks only your girlfriend can get you with, starting with “Your dad was cooler than you!” We know this is a sensitive topic for John, but he chooses to shoot the Scorpius hallucination instead of Aeryn. She chooses to try and shoot John. They trash the entire room firing on each other and then they brawl. John gets the upper hand during the commercial break.
Now John has everyone prisoner in the mess hall and he’s lightly torturing them while demanding that they get along. He forces them to listen to his revelations: they’ve already passed well beyond the light of the pulsars, so it’s T’raltixx making them crazy. Zhaan attests to the fact that T’raltixx himself produces some kind of noxious light and his mad design is causing all of Moya to glow with it. John releases Aeryn from her imprisonment and she bullies him in an insanely hot way as revenge for threatening her. You can see his soul turning into dust.
But at last everybody agrees that John’s weak human eyesight protects him from the worst effects of T’raltixx’s schemes so he’ll have to lead the charge. They cover him in Zhaan’s green barf and slap some goggles on him. He also gets a shield, a cape, a helm, and D’Argo’s sword. He is the galaxy’s most dismal knight. With T’raltixx’s invisibility device on him like an amulet, John sets out to defeat our villain.
Creeping invisibly into T’raltixx’s lair, John begins to rip up the wiring producing T’raltixx’s light, then viciously merks T’raltixx himself.
Pilot apologizes to everyone for his paranoia. D’Argo even apologizes to Rygel. Our heroes spend a lot of time rearranging the furniture and fixing the ship up. When Chiana asks John how he came up with all the scary-crazy stuff he said while under the influence of imaginary Scorpius, he reflects that “it was just there.” John tries to apologize to Aeryn, but it ends up kind of weird. There’s no way to take things back once you’ve said them aloud.
Wait: T’raltixx got merked, so who was the exciting new character introduced in this episode? Hmm…
“Crackers Don’t Matter” lays out a critical story structure for Season Two: Funny-Funny-Sad. Much more effective than the Sad-Stupid-Stupid-Sad structure of “Taking the Stone”, Funny-Funny-Sad paves the path we’re taking. Everything happening in “Crackers Don’t Matter” happens at loudness level 11 out of 10, so furiously and wackily that we forget what our heroes say and do affects others, that it’s hard to go back to loving each other after a gunfight, even a really funny one. Just when all our characters seemed to gel, they’re pulled apart, lonelier than ever.
John behaves unlikably in these two episodes. He lashes out violently at people; he says genuinely offensive things, especially to Chiana and Aeryn; he almost follows imaginary Scorpius’ advice. I’m glad. Farscape means a lot to me as a show about mental illness. We had to go to space to see it, but there it is: how deep the struggle just to function can be. John wishes he could be a manic pixie dream astronaut, but life is really hard and part of him is being eaten alive by evil thoughts. The evil thoughts look like Scorpius in a Hawaiian shirt.
Accounting for Farscape’s Crimes
Times I Have Said “What Is Happening” Out Loud to Myself So Far: 10
Times John Crichton Experiences a Sexual or Romantic Violation by a Villain: 2
Times John Crichton Threatens Suicide: 1.5
Times John Crichton Gets High: 1
Doubles Episodes So Far: 4.5
Weird Sex Things So Far: 23
Tears Shed So Far: 5
