XOXO, Puppet Girl #8
Farscape 1x15 & 1x16
Now we’re through the doldrums, the show can get good again. We’re going to immerse ourselves in puppet trauma and human drama.
Durka Returns
Moya has a minor traffic accident as her starburst malfunctions due to her pregnancy. When she allows the ship she collided with to dock, out comes Rygel’s old torturer, Durka. Last seen as a withered skeleton in the wreck of the Zelbinion Peacekeeper command carrier, this Durka is somehow not dead and somehow not a violent fiend. He’s actually very mild.
We discover that Durka has been smoothed out by a man from a weird and powerful powder-blue species called the Nebari. The Nebari are devotees of mind control and torture, which disturbs John and Zhaan deeply. This particular Nebari, Salis, is using Mild Durka as a servant while he transports a Nebari criminal, Chiana, back to the Nebari homeworld. Chiana, who is of course a beautiful girl, begs John for help, but Salis tortures her into silence. Salis announces that the Nebari mothership will soon arrive to take him, Chiana, and Durka to the homeworld.
Meanwhile, Rygel is freaking out about Durka. He plots to kill his nemesis, but Aeryn tries to dissuade him. She thinks of Durka as a Peacekeeper hero, but Rygel resists, reminding her that not only did Durka torture him, but also clearly faked his death and fled the scene of his defeat like a coward.
Surprisingly, when Aeryn asks Durka about this, he agrees with Rygel’s assessment, which disturbs Aeryn.
John delivers some food to the imprisoned Chiana. She’s so bound up that he has to hand-feed her. She makes it sexual, and reveals that her crimes were unruliness and sluttiness. The Nebari are arch-conformists, and they plan to brain-wash Chiana the same way they did Durka. Chiana threatens suicide to avoid the mind control and John tries to comfort her.
Then he goes to ask Durka about the mind control. While he’s there chatting with Durka, a small bomb rolls in and blows up near them both. Rygel inspects his handiwork and Durka attacks him briefly, but no one else sees. John is understandably pissed that Rygel bombed him, and instead of believing Rygel the crew lock him up.
Salis, suspicious Chiana may have done the bombing, checks on her. She tries to seduce him, and so he tortures her. Salis then demands Zhaan let him take Rygel for mind control, but she has no interest in the junk he’s selling.
Chiana breaks out of jail and tries to recruit Rygel, but he sells her out instantly. She disappears into the bowels of the ship, the crew in hot pursuit. John discovers Salis dead in a corridor. The crew grows more concerned. Durka finds Aeryn and Rygel on the command deck and has a light mental breakdown about Salis’ death.
But it’s a ruse to get Aeryn to approach! He attacks and steals her gun, taking over the ship. Durka then rebalds himself to begin torturing Rygel anew. He explains that Rygel broke the Nebari mind control and allowed him to become evil again.
I can’t explain to you how weird Durka’s affect is. He has a scratchy, breathy voice but the syllabic pattern of Shatner.
Durka and Aeryn engage in some hero-to-villain dueling monologues while Durka tries to activate starburst. When starburst fails, he broadcasts his torture of Aeryn and Rygel over the intercom, terrorizing the Moya crew.
John finds Chiana in a dry ice server room and tries to convince her to team up. She has a lot of trouble committing, because a girlboss does whatever it takes to survive. But John convinces her to join them and act as bait to trap Durka.
Rygel intervenes as Durka turns up the torture on Aeryn, taunting Durka by revealing Moya’s pregnancy. Durka resolves to kill Moya’s baby before the Nebari mothership arrives so he can activate starburst.
Chiana almost lures Durka into the dry ice server room, but he clocks the scheme and Chiana is injured. John hunts Durka through the halls with a weird lacrosse stick. He and Durka battle in the docking bay, but Durka escapes onto the damaged Nebari ship and prepares to blow Moya’s womb out with the Nebari weapons. John deploys Rygel’s leftover bomb supplies to damage Durka’s ship, in the process nearly getting spaced. Durka’s ship falls out of Moya and drifts into the darkness. Durka swears his eternal revenge before he plunges out of comms range.
Aeryn compliments Rygel on his deviousness in helping to defeat Durka. Zhaan and Chiana argue, but Zhaan and John agree to let Chiana stay onboard Moya after they escape the Nebari. John warns Chiana that Moya’s crew has rules and she needs to follow them if she wants to stay. He asks where she was when Salis was killed. She won’t say.
Chiana will be with us from now on. She is a stellar character whose heart is often in the right place but whose impulse control never is.
This is the first episode in a long time where I have no complaints about the soundtrack. Our gestation of infant Farscape is nearly complete.
A Human Reaction
Oh, John Crichton. I said we would get back to the iceberg of loneliness, and here we are. While life on Moya proceeds around him, John reflects on his loneliness, monologuing to his absent father. He misses the sunshine. He’s afraid of growing old alone in space.
Pilot calls him up to the command deck to witness a wormhole which appeared in front of Moya. Earth is visible on the far side of the wormhole (because that’s how wormholes work?).
John prepares to leave immediately. He says a heartfelt goodbye to all his friends, and he asks Aeryn to come with him to Earth. She’s too afraid of not belonging there, and so she stays behind.
John almost can’t do it. He hovers in his module before the wormhole, and it’s only when D’Argo exhorts him to go through, to chase home, that he enters. Everyone cries.
Through the wormhole and ka-pow: John splashes down on the beach in Australia. The sun and the sky are singing the song of home to him. But then the Australian military shows up, tranquilizing and abducting him. The black helicopters, etc. Mad scientists do mad science on him in a prison set which is X-Files by way of David Cronenberg. One government agent interrogates him, while another takes photos. Every time the agent takes the photo, it rips its way onscreen, freezing John at his peak moments of alienated (ALIENated!) terror. Circumstance has rendered this straight white cisgender guy the object of somebody else’s power for the first time in his life.
Obviously, he complains. But his complaints go entirely ignored until his daddy arrives. Crichton the Elder enters John’s cell and interrogates Crichton the Younger about childhood memories. John remembers better than his often-absent father does, so John is released probationally, with government plants watching him everywhere he goes. He just goes to the beach with his dad, though, and gets in a few passive-aggressive shots at the old man. Father Crichton reveals that the wormhole near Earth has been stuck open ever since John originally traveled through it.
A landing pod from Moya comes down to Australia, with Aeryn, D’Argo, and Rygel aboard. Apparently Moya went through the wormhole too. The government freaks lock up the aliens and Crichton, with his translator microbe-enhanced brain, must interlocute. Before long, the government freaks have killed and dissected Rygel, and we do get a full-on puppet gore shot. D’Argo and Aeryn announce their intention to fight their way out or die trying.
John goes to his dad for help. But the truth is his dad doesn’t see the Moya crew as people either, though he’s still willing to help John save them. John is shedding a lot of illusions he previously held about the world and what kind of justice you can find in it. By the time he gets back to the Cronenberg prison, they’ve already taken D’Argo. Together John and Aeryn escape into the monsoon streets of Australia.
Aeryn’s never seen rain before, and when she and John make it to the safe house provided by John’s dad they spend a lot of time watching the clouds roll by. “Earth, minus the sunshine” is what John sees. Aeryn speaks her resolve to never be recaptured alive. They have sex about it.
The next morning John’s father shows up, and though Aeryn is suspicious John vouches for his pops. Crichton the Elder reveals that there is no recourse left on Earth, no government or official who will stand up for them. He exhorts them to flee.
Wandering through the plaza by the beach, John realizes that everyone looks familiar. Every single person in the plaza is someone he knows. All the magazines on the stands have the same news as when he left. Every place he’s visited since landing is a place he’s been before. John goes completely apeshit about this and runs off with a gun.
He enters a bar and starts menacing everyone. He realizes that there’s only one way out of this simulation: enter the one room he’s never been to in real life. That is, of course, the women’s restroom. What do the authors of Farscape mean by this??
Behind the door to the women’s bathroom lurk ORANGE ENERGY WAVES! John, now reasonably convinced that the world is a simulation, storms back into the Cronenberg government facility to confront his father.
His father is an alien in disguise. Rygel, D’Argo, and Aeryn are fine. Alien Dad simply borrowed them for his experiment. He needed a genuine “human reaction”. John gets upset and accidentally rips off a gooey chunk of Alien Dad, but Alien Dad doesn’t take it personal. He explains to John that he’s a representative of a species of powerful aliens seeking a new home. Right now they’re all packed up into what I can only describe as brown edamame pods, but they’d love to get out and stretch their limbs.
John and Alien Dad journey through John’s memories, but John resents the invasion. Alien Dad reveals his true form as a weird beef jerky cockroach. He and John agree that Earth could not peacefully accept a new species of conscious being. They bond about their long journeys home, Alien Dad giving John back the special ring he got from Real Dad in the pilot. Then John leaves by stepping through a doorway into blue waves.
He’s going to be lonely forever! One half of his heart longs to return to Earth, the other is pinned to his alien friends forever, and never the twain shall meet. It’s a doubles episode, it’s an eternal sadness episode, it’s a romance episode, it’s an episode where we see a puppet’s liver.
This is the best episode since “DNA Mad Scientist”. It’s the latest episode to start shading into experimental cinema. It has a terrible tender heart set into an awfully bleak surround. Every other scene is a Paging Dr. Freud emergency. He feels like his father is literally an alien! He needs to enter a sacred feminine space to finally shatter his illusions about the world!
He’s going to be lonely forever.
Crew Roster Check-In: John, Aeryn, D’Argo, Zhaan, Rygel, Pilot, Moya, Chiana, Gestating Leviathan Jr.
Accounting for Farscape’s Crimes
Times I Have Said “What Is Happening” Out Loud to Myself So Far: 9
Times John Crichton Experiences a Sexual or Romantic Violation by a Villain: 1
Doubles Episodes So Far: 2
Weird Sex Things So Far: 15
Tears Shed So Far: 3
