XOXO, Puppet Girl #14
Farscape 2x05 & 2x06
The Way We Weren’t
What do you call a grey version of sepia? Greepia? Okay, greepia it is. We open to a greepia view of Peacekeeper marines, led by a hot guy scientist, marching down the halls of Moya to Pilot’s lair. But it’s not Pilot inside, it’s a different, female Pilot character who castigates the Peacekeeper hot guy for the evil he intends to do to the Leviathan she assists. Periodic cuts to weird grainy versions of the scene imply this is an actual recording of the past, not just a greepia flashback.
The hot guy tries to negotiate, threatening the Pilot with a replacement. Crais(!!) bursts in and orders the marines to kill the resistant Pilot. The hot guy looks away mournfully. After admonishing them all with his usual hamtastic derangement, Crais leaves and the hot guy preps the marines to remove the dead Pilot. One of the marines removes their helmet: it’s Aeryn! Gasp!
Her face disappears in a wash of static, resolving into John’s. He’s not greepia; it’s now-times and he’s upset. This footage is a recording Chiana found while exploring Moya. Chiana wants to confront Aeryn about it. So they bring all the crew together to watch. Aeryn insists she didn’t know this was the same Leviathan, but Rygel, Zhaan, and D’Argo take her to task for her complicity in their miserable imprisonment. John calls for a timeout. Chiana suggests it was rather naive of them to think Aeryn didn’t do anything bad during her time as an actual human jackboot.
We flash back to the greepia timeline as she chats with the hot guy officer in Moya’s cargo bay. She discovers that the cargo she delivered was none other than current Pilot, the puppet whom we all know and love. In the present timeline, she claims she did not recognize him either.
In the past, Aeryn watches the hot guy, whose name is Velorek, engage with Pilot. Crais demands Velorek get the new Pilot installed as quickly as possible so they can complete Crais’ evil scheme, implying his evil scheme is Moya’s impregnation. Crais ignores Aeryn’s request to return to her regular assignment, leaving her on Velorek’s team. The other marines harass her in a misogyny-tinged fashion.
In the present, Aeryn suffers an epic breakdown, weeping openly while John comforts her. She admits she’s kept John at a distance because lasting romantic relationships are forbidden by Peacekeeper policy and all her prior relationships ended in pain.
Including the one she had with Velorek, the hot scientist! Upon reflection, Aeryn admits that she even loved him.
Pilot interrupts, enraged and in possession of the video. Aeryn heads down to face him. She appeals to Pilot based on their current deep relationship, their DNA connection, but Pilot goes apeshit. He’s having his own greepia flashback to being installed in Moya, a painful and bondage-y (duh) process.
Velorek is kind to him, releasing him from his puppet ball gag and soothing his anxiety by introducing him to Moya.
But in the present Pilot’s trying to kill Aeryn. John and D’Argo rush down to save her.
And in the past Velorek admits the Peacekeepers will use artificial bonding to forcibly install Pilot into Moya, who is so sedated she doesn’t even know her old Pilot is dead. Velorek reaches into Pilot’s Pilussy and pulls out a bunch of crazy tubes.
Present Pilot insists Aeryn be banished forever, or he will not fly the ship. Rygel of course cops to showing the video to Pilot and Chiana tortures him a bit. Zhaan acts cruelly to Aeryn and regrets it, admitting that there was no other way for Aeryn to survive as a Peacekeeper.
In greepia, Velorek tries to convince Aeryn to remain in bed with him, as they indulge in their romantic feelings. He sees something special in her. Velorek reveals that he’s planning to sabotage Crais’ secret project in order to save Moya’s life. Then he’ll escape, and he could take Aeryn too.
Later, Velorek continues working on Pilot’s Pilussy, revealing he will be in constant pain, soon intensified by Moya’s awakening. Moya’s not happy about the Pilot switch, Velorek torturing her into accepting Pilot.
Present Pilot engages in self-harm, ripping out his connection to Moya to redeem himself for his complicity in her past suffering. Moya’s on the loose, unable to self-regulate without Pilot’s support. But Pilot’s no longer in pain, for the first time in cycles.
To be clear, Velorek was not hurting Pilot on purpose. Whenever Crais is away, he tries to soothe Pilot and protect him from the secret project, which greepia Aeryn observes.
John and D’Argo play rock paper scissors for who’s going to try and mend the relationships between Aeryn, Pilot, and Moya. John wins. He and Aeryn venture back down into Pilot’s lair, but when Aeryn endorses talking to Pilot about the past as a strategy for healing him, John turns her therapeutic thoughts back around and insists she talk through her feelings too.
Even though everyone else says Velorek as “veh-LOR-ek”, John says it “veh-lor-EK” and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s Southern or because he’s jealous.
Aeryn and Velorek have a sexy greepia massage, during which Aeryn admits she wants to stay with him. He promises her a wonderful future free of the Peacekeepers. She begs him to walk back his plan to sabotage Crais’ evil scheme, which is when Crais bursts in. Aeryn sold Velorek out to get her old assignment back. Velorek’s obviously very upset by this. Claudia Black gives Aeryn an amazing and heartbreaking regret face for this scene. If you only know her as a (fantastic) voice performer, you’re missing out.
And in the present, Aeryn explains the last of it to John. No Peacekeeper ever found out how Velorek sabotaged Crais’ Leviathan impregnation scheme, but we can now assume that Velorek is the one who placed the Leviathan contraceptive in Moya which D’Argo accidentally ruptured in episode 10. Thanks to Velorek, Moya avoided pregnancy while under the Peacekeepers’ thumbs, though she lost her son to Crais at the start of this season.
Aeryn and John break into Pilot’s lair, having a little gunfight with his DRD robots on the way. They talk it out. Pilot’s hate, as is so often the case, is born of self-hate. He allowed himself to be recruited by Velorek because the Pilot elders judged him too young for Pilothood. Velorek offered him the stars and he signed right up, even though he knew the old Pilot would be murdered. Pilot confronts his own complicity, as heavy as Aeryn’s. Everybody cries. The puppet is crying! Aeryn strokes Pilot lovingly as Velorek once did, because she learned tenderness from him. Pilot strokes Aeryn lovingly too. The puppet is capable of tenderness!
Our heroes hook Pilot back up to Moya, laying the foundation for them to develop a natural bond. Pilot warns them that the new, natural bond will be slow-growing, perhaps adding more danger to all their lives. D’Argo affirms their support for him. And now Pilot experiences no pain.
John tells Aeryn that Velorek was right about her and her potential to be more than a fascist grunt. Aeryn reveals that the most important thing Velorek said to her, “you can be so much more”, is also what John said to her in the pilot episode. John probes (delicately) as to whether Aeryn loving Velorek means she might also love...him...?
But Aeryn doesn’t answer.
I forgot how good this episode is. I did tear up when Aeryn and Pilot reconciled. Their friendship is so powerful and genuine, built on their mutual victimization by the Peacekeepers and later Namtar, their love of space travel and of order, their respect and fondness for Moya and Talyn. I appreciate how much of Pilot’s anger comes from his anger at himself, and how accepting Aeryn’s failures allows him to accept his own. It’s a more holistic and enriching show of forgiveness than just unilaterally giving Aeryn a pass out of the goodness of his heart. It’s (self-)compassion, not martyrdom.
Velorek expands Aeryn’s backstory in a smart way, building out Aeryn’s reasons for helping John and the Moya crew in the pilot episode and ever since. She wants to change her life and slowly she’s learning how. Aeryn cannot ever take back betraying Velorek or killing Moya’s old Pilot, she can never absolve herself, but she can be different in her relations with our Pilot and with John. She will be more than she was.
John tries so hard to be kind to Aeryn in this episode, despite his own jealousy and frustration. I love him more for feeling these things and trying anyway than I would if he could be good reflexively.
Hats off to Naren Shankar for writing this episode. Here we see the skills that would someday make The Expanse such a sick track.
Picture If You Will
This episode pales in comparison to the last one, but it isn’t terrible, just wacky silly. Chiana picks up a cursed painting from a mysterious junk dealer, which leads to her, D’Argo, John, and finally Zhaan becoming trapped in a weird Hilma af Klimt dimension. There, the fiendish wizard Maldis reveals that he will in fact be a recurring villain. He and Zhaan engage in spiritual warfare, during which Zhaan breaks out some amazing and heretofore unknown martial arts skills. With help from John, she also fights through her paralyzing fear of Maldis. Together, our heroes drive him back into the abyss for a few more episodes.
What’s important about this episode? It boasts some lovably weird sets and effects, particularly the Hilma af Klimt dimension and Maldis’ giant hand, which chases our heroes when they escape said dimension.
It advances multiple key relationships, for better and for worse. Aeryn acts uncharitably towards Chiana when she first acquires the evil painting, which sparks a vicious #tooreal argument between Aeryn and John about Aeryn’s emotional repression and reflexive cruelty. Wig…
D’Argo and Chiana, who have been building up a weird vibe for several episodes now, get all the way to blatant flirting and the classic TV/movie device of falling on top of each other suggestively while escaping a terrible danger. You know the feeling when your friends become intent on hooking up and you can immediately see the impending disaster but do nothing to stop it? Chiana and D’Argo are opposites and pretty soon--no spoilers--they will repel instead of attract.
John and Zhaan need each other in a weird way. Though she is at times condescending to him for his goofy guy status, this is not the first time Zhaan has needed John to provide the compassion she can’t give herself. This is one of the things friends are for: seeing the you you can’t see and telling you. 75% of the time you are better than you think you are, and love can be your mirror.
This episode does suffer from an unpleasant transphobic undercurrent, as the junk dealer who sells Chiana the cursed portrait is an illusion created by Maldis and played by the same actor as Maldis but in feminine clothes and makeup. When she’s revealed to be a Maldis-illusion, Aeryn kills her to weaken Maldis. Finding out someone is secretly a different person of a different gender and then killing them is obviously thematically violent and offensive to trans people, and like in “The Flax” pretty disappointing for a show that’s explicitly about difference and alienation. Unfortunately the year 2000 rarely exceeds expectations.
This is probably not the last time we’ll ponder a point like this. Farscape is willing to stretch itself so it can attempt dangerous things. What’s good and bad about stretching yourself is that it makes your weak spots much easier to see.
Crew Roster Check-In: John, Aeryn, D’Argo, Zhaan, Rygel, Pilot, Moya, Chiana
Accounting for Farscape’s Crimes
Times I Have Said “What Is Happening” Out Loud to Myself So Far: 11
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: 27
Tears Shed So Far: 6
