The Watercooler for Netflix

Or: The One Where Crichton Blows Up His Phallic Substitute, But D’Argo’s Shoots Lasers

In the first Farscape piece I wrote on here, I described John Chricton as a Star Trek hero forced to exist in a world with very little patience for that breed of non-violent idealism. There’s a narrative arc implied by that idea, a Gene Roddenberry story about one good man uplifting a fallen universe through sheer decency and rationality.

This isn’t that story.

This is a story about growing up. About realizing that there’s a point where idealism has to stop, because now you’re the liability who keeps blowing up your gun and everyone rolls their eyes when you say you have a plan. Because you’re so obsessed with impressing people that it gets you kidnapped and killed. Because you want to save people (and save them YOUR WAY) so badly you’re willing to kill them to do it. Because you keep pushing your brother or your sister away with words like “barbarian” or “coward” so you don’t have to look at how similar you are.

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Or: The One Where We Learn the Farscape Euphemism for Testicles

This is basically Groundhog Day, except that Groundhog Day is fun, and this is boring. The whole POINT of a Groundhog Day scenario is to show a) the fun of consequence-free actions, and b) how a simple situation can turn out differently based on a few simple choices.

Instead, what we get is Shouty D’Argo (have I mentioned my distaste for Shouty D’Argo?), super-simple characterizations, and (ugh)… Matala.

Look, I have no problem with the idea of the femme fatale. And it’s actually pretty clever to have a character who combines D’Argo’s desire for a home with the fact that he hasn’t had sex in 8 years. But the whole subplot where Crichton wants to or does not want to have crazy alien finger sex or whatever with her feels like padding with no point except to get D’Argo jealous, and a red herring to make us think she might have sexy mind control powers or something.

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“Moya is invaded by spawning space bugs, which produce clones of the crew. To complicate matters, a Peacekeeper retrieval squad arrives and Aeryn begins to suffer heat delirium.”

I’m glad to see that Netflix is using the airdate order for Farscape instead of the production order, both because the second produced episode, “I, E.T.” works much better slightly later in the season, and because this one is such a good re-entry to the world of Moya and her crew. It introduces several important plot points, relationships, bits of mythology and themes that we’ll be making extensive use of as time goes on.

For instance, and most prominently, we have Sebacean Heat Death, one of the least believable but most plot-important bits of the show’s often plausibility-challenged approach to biology. While I find it hard to swallow that a race with such a huge, glaring weakness (it seems to reach fatal levels at, what, 100 Fahrenheit?) could be as dominant and widespread as Sebaceans and Peacekeepers are, it does have a certain lyricism to it - the ultra-repressed Peacekeepers being portrayed as literally cold-blooded. More importantly, it puts Aeryn in a position of weakness and vulnerability, something the character probably needs at this point in the series.

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