Farscape 1.06-1.07
Jun. 24th, 2010 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperx1.06 - Thank God It's Friday...Again.
Aeryn: She gives me a woody... [surprised look from Crichton] 'Woody', it's a human saying. I've heard you say it often. When you don't trust someone or they make you nervous, they give you --
John: Willies!
Just goes to show that my opinion is strictly my own. I checked out Farscape World and "Back and Back and Back To The Future" has an equally high or higher rating to "Thank God It's Friday... Again," and yet I hated B-B-Back to the Future, and I like TGIF. Go figure. Ah well, my opinions are my own. :)
Anyway, part of the reason that I like TGIF is that it feels bigger somehow, and not just because of location shoots. To this point in the series, the Peacekeepers have mostly been Crais's vendetta against John. This ep shows that they are an institutional evil...and it's not even the point of the episode. It's just there, part of the show's landscape
The jumping off point for the episode is that D'Argo is in a rage (and Crichton has been hiding from him for three days. Heh!) Poor, D'Argo, after all those years in prison, he does deserve to get laid, so he headed out to a planet to...erm... get him some. After coming out of hiding (heh!), John et al go to retrieve D'Argo only to find that he's gone native. The funny thing is, this stoner D'Argo in many ways more closely resembles who D'Argo becomes than the gruff/ragey parts of him that's been most of what's been showcased thus far. It was interesting listening to the commentary where the writer spoke about how they'd introduced the characters as big sci-fi archetypes that they then wanted to expand. D'Argo the gruff warrior was very much of the Worf/Klingon mold. Only, it's really difficult to imagine Worf ever being as straight-up goofy or as vulnerable as D'Argo can be. And this is the first glimpse of big, goofy D'Argo... and I love that. I also love D'Argo's lament at the end that he'd been happy and it had only been an illusion, admitting that he'd been a prisoner and a fugitive longer than he'd ever been a warrior, and confessing to Zhaan that, in many ways, what he dreamed of was a simple life - a home and a family. ::pets D'Argo::
Meanwhile, we get a hint of Aeryn's "she can be more" when she's forced out of soldier mode and into having to take a turn as scientist... and finding that she kind of likes it. :)
And back to why this episode felt 'bigger' to me In this episode, while the mystery is solved (namely that the planets inhabitants have been pharmaceutically enslaved into farming a psychotropic drug for the Peacekeepers, a drug that the Peacekeepers turn into a weapons) we can see exactly what kind of institutional evil the Peacekeepers are. It's not just John escaping Crais. This is a militaristic society that enslaves planets as if they were Afghanastan and the Peacekeepers are Al Queda. It helps to put into perspective the world that the Farscape characters live in.
Oh, and wow! In this rewatch I caught something that I don't think I ever caught before! Pilot confesses to Aeryn that he doesn't understand all of Moya's systems, that he studies to try to understand them. This totally fits with the backstory of The Way We Weren't and how ironic that he confesses this to Aeryn of all people. The amazing thing is that The Way We Weren't was an episode that came almost an entire year after this one. Damn. You have to love Farscape for continuity.
Finally, for the fun of it a D'Argo/Crichton friendshippy vid
1.07 - PK Tech Girl
John: They spit fire? How come nobody tells me this stuff? How come nobody tells me they spit fire? Aeryn!!!
Okay, to give a little perspective, I began watching Farscape when it was airing Season 4 on Syfy (then SciFi). Intrigued, I began downloading back episodes that I found online, filling in the episodes that I couldn't find by reading posted summaries. PK Tech Girl was one of the episodes that I couldn't find, so I read the summary first and the summary left me with a preconception that John and Gilina had a full blown romance here, when mostly it's just flirtation. And I can understand why John is attracted to Gilina. He's been in a rather harsh environment for a while, surrounded by a pair of warriors, a priest, Rygel, etc. Then he meets Gilina who he understands. She isn't a warrior. Like himself, she's an engineer. And she seems human and emotionally available. I can totally see why he finds that attractive and comforting. Of course, he flirts. But, though I went into the episode the first time thinking that it would be about John/Gilina, many watchings later it sticks in my head as an Aeryn and Rygel episode.
And the episode image that remains most clear in my memory for PK Tech Girl is this:
Action hero Aeryn Sun! I love her swinging in, rescuing Crichton as though he's a damsel in distress, shooting up the bad guys, and brushing off the carnage with "Sorry, about the mess."
Woohoo! Aeryn rocks.
Aeryn: When you told me endless tales of your home, you spoke of forests, and rivers, and valleys, and I was thinking of walls not unlike these.
John: I'm sure it looks better with carpeting.
When they find the foundered Peacekeeper dreadnought, a ship equated to the Titanic (if the Titanic had been a war ship), we're immediately informed that Aeryn sees it differently. To her it represents home. Then they run across a murdered member of Gilina's salvage team, someone that Aeryn recognizes, leaving Gilina to inform Aeryn that after Aeryn was branded a traitor, her entire fighter division was demoted and would remain so... until Aeryn's death.
Aeryn is very much alone, or at least feels as though she is. It hurts being branded a traitor to everything she new. It hurts worse knowing that the people she had once associated with were being punished because of her. So yes, Aeryn kicks ass, but she's also in pain. And it's summed up nicely in the episode's coda
Aeryn: I hate being ambushed.
John: Well, you got him in the end. That's all that counts.
Aeryn: I wasn't talking about the Sheyangs.
John: In my world, they say that loss is the hardest emotion to deal with.
Aeryn: In my world, showing pain is a sign of weakness.
John: How can you not feel pain after what you've been through?
Aeryn: Don't presume to understand me.
John: That's not fair. It's not fair, Aeryn. You bash me all the time for being soft. Well, the fact of the matter is that sometimes it's an advantage. I think I understand you.
Aeryn: There's no way that you can know how I feel.
John: If I somehow got a chance to return to my world, to walk around my old neighborhood, see my old house, Dads' truck, best friends' bike on the lawn... And then I got a chance to go inside, walk through the living room and upstairs to my room [...] and then I think... what if everyone were dead? What if all my friends and family were there -- dead. What would it be like to go home then?
Aeryn: [Stiff, proud, and choked with unspoken emotion] I stand corrected.
And the B-storyline is Rygel's post traumatic stress as this ghost ship was his first prison (130 years ago!), where he was once brutally tortured. Rygel is no ordinary muppet. He's haunted by those old fears and smoldering, impotent rage. He wants revenge on Durka, who was his torturer, but there's more on that later...
So two good episodes tonight!
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Date: 2010-06-25 04:27 am (UTC)PK Tech Girl, though? I love it to pieces. Every bit of it. For much the same reasons as you...
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Date: 2010-06-25 07:46 am (UTC)Durka? Is that really you, Durka? You killed yourself, Durka? You coward. You once told me I would never leave your ship alive. You robbed me of so many cycles. But no matter what you did to me, I'll always remember one thing. ...You LOSE.
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Date: 2010-06-25 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 01:54 pm (UTC)I'm really enjoying reading these reviews. :)
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Date: 2010-06-25 11:14 pm (UTC)