"Us Southern boys don't make good eatin'. Not without a fight."
At the risk of appearing callous, I've said all I have to say about Katrina at this point--anything else would just be more despair and infuriated ranting, and who wants to see that? So I'm returning to my regularly scheduled fannish posting. I for one need the distraction from the unrelentingly grim news.
Standard disclaimer: this post and/or the comments may and probably will contain spoilers for the entire series. Previous episode posts here.
"Bone to Be Wild" would be a fairly unremarkable monster (or creature)-of-the-week episode were it not for the interesting motif of things not being what they seem, full of the murky morality that Farscape is now beginning to explore in earnest, and of shifting centers of power, the distorted and inverted relationships between might and right.
To begin with, there's the supreme absurdity of the Moyans--huddled together for warmth, trying to avoid the scans of Crais's command carrier--receiving a distress call from someone who might be in even worse shape. It's an irony that they openly recognize, as Chiana gapes, "A distress call? Directed at us?" and John responds, "How stupid is that?" M'Lee's plea--she's alone, her family dead, being hunted by a monster--is something that early S1 John would have responded to instantly, but our heroes aren't so quick to ride to the rescue anymore; they've got their own problems, their own powerful enemies, and getting involved can only bring more trouble on their heads. It's the hope that M'Lee's settlement might have the charts they need to navigate out of the asteroid field, to escape their impossible situation, that tips them over into helping, and not the fact that it's the "right thing to do."
D'Argo, enormous and fierce warrior, has terrible allergies. John is now carrying a pulse pistol, and using it with deadly competence, and while the leather pants are not yet a regular part of the wardrobe, he's now willingly clothing himself in Peacekeeper gear, not just as a disguise but as a part of his regular wardrobe. M'Lee seems at first like a helpless victim, cowering in terror of the creature who killed her family. But the pieces don't quite add up, and we--and John and D'Argo and Zhaan--slowly learn that she's in fact quite dangerous, that she feeds off bones, that she ate the rest of Br'Nee's expedition, picking them off one by one. Who exactly is the creature in this scenario? The physical juxtaposition is quite striking--M'Lee small, female, high-voiced, but a predator; Br'Nee large but apparently gentle, a botanist, oddly plant-like in appearance, but with a tendency to loom and get aggressively excited. After the initial revelation that M'Lee is not the victim that she appears to be, the viewer's perspective never quite recovers balance, careening from one surprising discovery to the next about the beings on this asteroid, what drives them, how the deceptiveness of appearances has many layers. Because, in the end, M'Lee is a victim in some important respects, brought to the asteroid to cleanse it of fauna and then starve, her own nature used against her, and Br'Nee is a monster, willing to use M'Lee's family, Zhaan, and other sentient life forms as if they are mere things, tools and specimens for his research. Adding to John's confusion is his discovery that Zhaan is a plant, something that the show foreshadowed very cleverly and that knocks him a little off balance before his innate common sense reasserts itself. He undergoes an adjustment in thinking--Br'Nee is able to fool him into thinking M'Lee has gone after Zhaan because he still hasn't quite assimilated the information--but in the end he gets it, and finds his footing in the shifting quicksand of the situation, and when Br'Nee tries to treat her as another plant, John stops him.
Crais is literally losing it--losing his grip on power, losing his tenuous control over his ship, powerless to stop Scorpius from stepping in and taking charge. His obsession has led him directly to this place--his own subordinates have no faith in him, and are willing to accept new leadership, because they've seen him take the command carrier renegade, and they continue to see him making poor decisions. Scorpius is more than able to step in and highlight Crais's shortcomings as a PK captain to those under his command--he knows exactly where to apply the minute pressures that will bring the edifice of Crais's authority tumbling down, and how to goad Crais into assisting in his own demise. Someone who was once a powerful and frightening enemy now appears naked and helpless, a child throwing tantrums, a desperate man whose own weaknesses allow him to be visibly outmaneuvered by a cleverer and more ruthless foe.
And Aeryn, the soldier who holds everyone at arms length, who only warms to the rest of Moya's crew after a long time and many arduous, mutually shared trials, falls instantly into a deep and powerful connection with Moya's child, and reveals an entirely new facet of herself in the process--someone who is capable of great love, of fierce protectiveness. She is, in fact, a mother bear, intensely conscious of and able to understand Talyn as both a Leviathan (through her assimilation of Pilot DNA, her innate consciousness of Pilot and Moya) and as a product of the Peacekeepers, with the indelible markings and patterns that come from such a genesis, just as she herself is. In my last entry, I wondered if Talyn would have stood a chance, had Crais never gotten his hands on him, and watching this episode, I'm very much struck by how much Aeryn could have guided him through the treacherous conflicts between the two sides of his nature, even as she was learning to negotiate her own warring influences.
I'm really fond of the final scene, where the Moya crew comes together to share their adventures, to receive the support and counsel of friends. I like the way Zhaan can bring her doubts to D'Argo and he can counsel her in the ways of patience and acceptance, that they both have these dual sides to their personalities--the intemperate violence and doubt, and the yearning spirituality. And John and Aeryn share their day apart--John listening to Aeryn describing meeting Talyn, absorbing her rapture and the importance of this new relationship, this new being, to her, with this look of utter delight on his face, of happiness at her happiness and pride in her achievement. It's moments like that that really make the John/Aeryn relationship for me--that they fundamentally like each other at this point, that they can go off on separate adventures and come back and share their triumphs with each other, that there is this growing trust and fondness and friendship that is much more complex than simple attraction. But the attraction is there too--it really looks like they're sneaking off to share a moment of a more private nature when Pilot called Aeryn back to ask her to name Moya's child.
Standard disclaimer: this post and/or the comments may and probably will contain spoilers for the entire series. Previous episode posts here.
"Bone to Be Wild" would be a fairly unremarkable monster (or creature)-of-the-week episode were it not for the interesting motif of things not being what they seem, full of the murky morality that Farscape is now beginning to explore in earnest, and of shifting centers of power, the distorted and inverted relationships between might and right.
To begin with, there's the supreme absurdity of the Moyans--huddled together for warmth, trying to avoid the scans of Crais's command carrier--receiving a distress call from someone who might be in even worse shape. It's an irony that they openly recognize, as Chiana gapes, "A distress call? Directed at us?" and John responds, "How stupid is that?" M'Lee's plea--she's alone, her family dead, being hunted by a monster--is something that early S1 John would have responded to instantly, but our heroes aren't so quick to ride to the rescue anymore; they've got their own problems, their own powerful enemies, and getting involved can only bring more trouble on their heads. It's the hope that M'Lee's settlement might have the charts they need to navigate out of the asteroid field, to escape their impossible situation, that tips them over into helping, and not the fact that it's the "right thing to do."
D'Argo, enormous and fierce warrior, has terrible allergies. John is now carrying a pulse pistol, and using it with deadly competence, and while the leather pants are not yet a regular part of the wardrobe, he's now willingly clothing himself in Peacekeeper gear, not just as a disguise but as a part of his regular wardrobe. M'Lee seems at first like a helpless victim, cowering in terror of the creature who killed her family. But the pieces don't quite add up, and we--and John and D'Argo and Zhaan--slowly learn that she's in fact quite dangerous, that she feeds off bones, that she ate the rest of Br'Nee's expedition, picking them off one by one. Who exactly is the creature in this scenario? The physical juxtaposition is quite striking--M'Lee small, female, high-voiced, but a predator; Br'Nee large but apparently gentle, a botanist, oddly plant-like in appearance, but with a tendency to loom and get aggressively excited. After the initial revelation that M'Lee is not the victim that she appears to be, the viewer's perspective never quite recovers balance, careening from one surprising discovery to the next about the beings on this asteroid, what drives them, how the deceptiveness of appearances has many layers. Because, in the end, M'Lee is a victim in some important respects, brought to the asteroid to cleanse it of fauna and then starve, her own nature used against her, and Br'Nee is a monster, willing to use M'Lee's family, Zhaan, and other sentient life forms as if they are mere things, tools and specimens for his research. Adding to John's confusion is his discovery that Zhaan is a plant, something that the show foreshadowed very cleverly and that knocks him a little off balance before his innate common sense reasserts itself. He undergoes an adjustment in thinking--Br'Nee is able to fool him into thinking M'Lee has gone after Zhaan because he still hasn't quite assimilated the information--but in the end he gets it, and finds his footing in the shifting quicksand of the situation, and when Br'Nee tries to treat her as another plant, John stops him.
Crais is literally losing it--losing his grip on power, losing his tenuous control over his ship, powerless to stop Scorpius from stepping in and taking charge. His obsession has led him directly to this place--his own subordinates have no faith in him, and are willing to accept new leadership, because they've seen him take the command carrier renegade, and they continue to see him making poor decisions. Scorpius is more than able to step in and highlight Crais's shortcomings as a PK captain to those under his command--he knows exactly where to apply the minute pressures that will bring the edifice of Crais's authority tumbling down, and how to goad Crais into assisting in his own demise. Someone who was once a powerful and frightening enemy now appears naked and helpless, a child throwing tantrums, a desperate man whose own weaknesses allow him to be visibly outmaneuvered by a cleverer and more ruthless foe.
And Aeryn, the soldier who holds everyone at arms length, who only warms to the rest of Moya's crew after a long time and many arduous, mutually shared trials, falls instantly into a deep and powerful connection with Moya's child, and reveals an entirely new facet of herself in the process--someone who is capable of great love, of fierce protectiveness. She is, in fact, a mother bear, intensely conscious of and able to understand Talyn as both a Leviathan (through her assimilation of Pilot DNA, her innate consciousness of Pilot and Moya) and as a product of the Peacekeepers, with the indelible markings and patterns that come from such a genesis, just as she herself is. In my last entry, I wondered if Talyn would have stood a chance, had Crais never gotten his hands on him, and watching this episode, I'm very much struck by how much Aeryn could have guided him through the treacherous conflicts between the two sides of his nature, even as she was learning to negotiate her own warring influences.
I'm really fond of the final scene, where the Moya crew comes together to share their adventures, to receive the support and counsel of friends. I like the way Zhaan can bring her doubts to D'Argo and he can counsel her in the ways of patience and acceptance, that they both have these dual sides to their personalities--the intemperate violence and doubt, and the yearning spirituality. And John and Aeryn share their day apart--John listening to Aeryn describing meeting Talyn, absorbing her rapture and the importance of this new relationship, this new being, to her, with this look of utter delight on his face, of happiness at her happiness and pride in her achievement. It's moments like that that really make the John/Aeryn relationship for me--that they fundamentally like each other at this point, that they can go off on separate adventures and come back and share their triumphs with each other, that there is this growing trust and fondness and friendship that is much more complex than simple attraction. But the attraction is there too--it really looks like they're sneaking off to share a moment of a more private nature when Pilot called Aeryn back to ask her to name Moya's child.