“Am I being irrational? Well, have a little pain.”
Standard disclaimer: this post and/or the comments may and probably will contain spoilers for the entire series. Previous episode posts here.
The end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2 saw the Moya crew coming together as a unit, a family, working and planning together to overcome obstacles. One of the most striking things about this episode, for me, is how it subverts that trend, reminding us that the conflicts between them that were there from the beginning still exist, albeit in muted forms. T’raltixx is the catalyst, but the ugliness he causes comes from within our heroes, has a basis in reality, and that’s why it’s so profoundly disturbing both for us to watch and for them to deal with in the aftermath. And it’s especially hard to see things fall so drastically apart during scenes of daily Moya life-the expedition to the commerce planet to acquire food, interrupted by wanted beacons; the ongoing attempts to find a way of escaping their pursuers; the rhythms of their communal life.
The crew fractures along cracks that already existed. Although it’s wildly exaggerated, a lot of their paranoia is grounded in real fears about their crewmates. John first becomes paranoid that Chiana isn’t saving any crackers for the restof them-that she’s still just out for herself like she was when he first met her. Rygel is afraid that T’raltixx wants to use his quarters-that his personal space, one of the few things he can call his own, will be taken. Chiana and D’Argo think Rygel will steal food; it’s not really an unreasonable assumption, though the violence it provokes in D’Argo is extreme and painful to watch. Zhaan thinks Aeryn’s going to turn them all in to Scorpius for a pardon, and D’Argo and Chiana and John also develop that fear, that Aeryn can betray them, that she can somehow escape what they can’t, that she’s still somehow on the other side and she’s hiding something from them. Chiana thinks John and Aeryn are conspiring together, that their growing affinity is an expression of sinister conspiracy. The crackers don't matter, they're just the grounds over which familiar fights get enacted.
The episode doesn’t pull any punches. There’s no last minute backing down, no sign that any of them are anything but utterly, deadly sincere in their harsh estimations of their friends-estimations that are all the more surgically precise for how well they know each other by now-and no magical do-over at the end, no trying to pass of the darkness as something external. When John taunts Aeryn for betraying everything her life has led her to believe in, he’s doing it because he knows that has been her greatest pain and struggle. When Aeryn calls John a little man who hasn’t achieved anything compared to his father, she does it because she knows exactly how much John’s life has been shaped by trying to escape from under that shadow. (Although I do have my doubts that John really thinks of Aeryn as a frigid, flat-butted Peacekeeper skank even a little, and he’s got to know that insulting her appearance is not really an effective way to get to her.) They all get uncharacteristically violent-D’Argo attacking Rygel, John shooting D’Argo in the leg, and Aeryn-who of all of them takes weapons the most seriously-pointing her pistol at her own head as well as shooting at John. And probably the ugliest scene in the entire episode, for me, is John threatening Chiana in such an explicitly sexual way, reducing her from a person to an object to be toyed with and discarded, getting off on her fear-taking the relationship based on him being a place of safety for her, someone who valued her for reasons that had nothing to do with sex, and turning it on its head.
“DNA Mad Scientist” showed the characters-who knew each other far less well at the time-turning on each other for something they desperately wanted. This is a different kind of darkness, the secret resentments, the parts of each of them that aren’t nice and good, bubbling to the surface. The friendship and intimacy John has been striving all along to build up among this group of people has a double edge; opening up, showing yourself, makes you vulnerable, and this is a dangerous universe.
In John’s case, some of what bubbles to the surface is Scorpius. He’s been acting unbalanced since the beginning of the season, and it’s telling that at the beginning of the episode-before T’raltixx has had time to effect the crew at all-John’s already cynical, pessimistic, convinced that something will go horribly wrong with their efforts to find a way of hiding themselves, and that he’s dismissive and even downright nasty to T’raltixx. And that’s before T’raltixx has done anything to prove that he’s up to no good; by the end of the episode, John dispatches him mercilessly with the Qualta blade, which is the beginning of a pattern for our crew in general but particularly for John-mercy has come back to haunt them before, and they’ve more or less started killing the enemy when given the opportunity. John is, in other words, a very different man from the John at the beginning of the first season who took every opportunity to learn about the people and places he had the chance to encounter. There’s every reason to believe that John is haunted by Scorpius as well as hunted by him, and it’s only later that his hallucinations take on a more sinister meaning-that the chip in his head is beginning to do its work.
One of the things that strikes me about John in this episode is that it’s his very adaptability-what keeps him going through getting lost on the other end of the universe, the Aurora chair, the chip, and Harvey, his sheer determination to muddle through no matter what the voices in his head are telling him, is what helps him keep it together and focus enough in this episode to figure out the problem and enlist the others’ help to solve it. He’s basically already getting used to feeling crazy. It’s something that’s becoming a part of him.
And the oddest thing about the episode is that with so much darkness and ugliness going on, it’s actually outrageously funny in places. Pilot explaining in great detail to John why his species is the most inferior he’s ever seen, the eyesight contest in the central chamber, dressing John up to fight T’raltixx (“We’re going to die”), there’s a fine balance of outrageous behavior, a careful shading of the ridiculous and the dark, that I think would be very difficult to carry off in a show that wasn’t already full of larger-than-life personalities and a distinct willingness to push boundaries.
And in the end there’s no way to take back those words, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again; they have to pick up the pieces and move on, and that's the unspoken agreement they make with their fumbling attempts at apology. Chiana's the only one who actively addresses their behavior, finding something to admire about John's sexual aggression--maybe as a welcome sign that he is in fact sexually interested in her, orbecause it's a familiar thing she knows how to handle, because she knows very little else in her relationships, so much conveyed about what her life has been up until Moya in that one reaction. The fact that Farscape brought all of the characters to this place of terrible brutality and left them without the words to magically make it right again by the end of the episode is a remarkable thing in television. It feels like a step back for our heroes after their triumphal coming together at the beginning of the season, a reminder of how perilous their situation is and the fact that they’re still a group of fractious individuals who sometimes want very different things, still learning to work together, and that when they overcome obstacles, it’s usually not without cost.
The end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2 saw the Moya crew coming together as a unit, a family, working and planning together to overcome obstacles. One of the most striking things about this episode, for me, is how it subverts that trend, reminding us that the conflicts between them that were there from the beginning still exist, albeit in muted forms. T’raltixx is the catalyst, but the ugliness he causes comes from within our heroes, has a basis in reality, and that’s why it’s so profoundly disturbing both for us to watch and for them to deal with in the aftermath. And it’s especially hard to see things fall so drastically apart during scenes of daily Moya life-the expedition to the commerce planet to acquire food, interrupted by wanted beacons; the ongoing attempts to find a way of escaping their pursuers; the rhythms of their communal life.
The crew fractures along cracks that already existed. Although it’s wildly exaggerated, a lot of their paranoia is grounded in real fears about their crewmates. John first becomes paranoid that Chiana isn’t saving any crackers for the restof them-that she’s still just out for herself like she was when he first met her. Rygel is afraid that T’raltixx wants to use his quarters-that his personal space, one of the few things he can call his own, will be taken. Chiana and D’Argo think Rygel will steal food; it’s not really an unreasonable assumption, though the violence it provokes in D’Argo is extreme and painful to watch. Zhaan thinks Aeryn’s going to turn them all in to Scorpius for a pardon, and D’Argo and Chiana and John also develop that fear, that Aeryn can betray them, that she can somehow escape what they can’t, that she’s still somehow on the other side and she’s hiding something from them. Chiana thinks John and Aeryn are conspiring together, that their growing affinity is an expression of sinister conspiracy. The crackers don't matter, they're just the grounds over which familiar fights get enacted.
The episode doesn’t pull any punches. There’s no last minute backing down, no sign that any of them are anything but utterly, deadly sincere in their harsh estimations of their friends-estimations that are all the more surgically precise for how well they know each other by now-and no magical do-over at the end, no trying to pass of the darkness as something external. When John taunts Aeryn for betraying everything her life has led her to believe in, he’s doing it because he knows that has been her greatest pain and struggle. When Aeryn calls John a little man who hasn’t achieved anything compared to his father, she does it because she knows exactly how much John’s life has been shaped by trying to escape from under that shadow. (Although I do have my doubts that John really thinks of Aeryn as a frigid, flat-butted Peacekeeper skank even a little, and he’s got to know that insulting her appearance is not really an effective way to get to her.) They all get uncharacteristically violent-D’Argo attacking Rygel, John shooting D’Argo in the leg, and Aeryn-who of all of them takes weapons the most seriously-pointing her pistol at her own head as well as shooting at John. And probably the ugliest scene in the entire episode, for me, is John threatening Chiana in such an explicitly sexual way, reducing her from a person to an object to be toyed with and discarded, getting off on her fear-taking the relationship based on him being a place of safety for her, someone who valued her for reasons that had nothing to do with sex, and turning it on its head.
“DNA Mad Scientist” showed the characters-who knew each other far less well at the time-turning on each other for something they desperately wanted. This is a different kind of darkness, the secret resentments, the parts of each of them that aren’t nice and good, bubbling to the surface. The friendship and intimacy John has been striving all along to build up among this group of people has a double edge; opening up, showing yourself, makes you vulnerable, and this is a dangerous universe.
In John’s case, some of what bubbles to the surface is Scorpius. He’s been acting unbalanced since the beginning of the season, and it’s telling that at the beginning of the episode-before T’raltixx has had time to effect the crew at all-John’s already cynical, pessimistic, convinced that something will go horribly wrong with their efforts to find a way of hiding themselves, and that he’s dismissive and even downright nasty to T’raltixx. And that’s before T’raltixx has done anything to prove that he’s up to no good; by the end of the episode, John dispatches him mercilessly with the Qualta blade, which is the beginning of a pattern for our crew in general but particularly for John-mercy has come back to haunt them before, and they’ve more or less started killing the enemy when given the opportunity. John is, in other words, a very different man from the John at the beginning of the first season who took every opportunity to learn about the people and places he had the chance to encounter. There’s every reason to believe that John is haunted by Scorpius as well as hunted by him, and it’s only later that his hallucinations take on a more sinister meaning-that the chip in his head is beginning to do its work.
One of the things that strikes me about John in this episode is that it’s his very adaptability-what keeps him going through getting lost on the other end of the universe, the Aurora chair, the chip, and Harvey, his sheer determination to muddle through no matter what the voices in his head are telling him, is what helps him keep it together and focus enough in this episode to figure out the problem and enlist the others’ help to solve it. He’s basically already getting used to feeling crazy. It’s something that’s becoming a part of him.
And the oddest thing about the episode is that with so much darkness and ugliness going on, it’s actually outrageously funny in places. Pilot explaining in great detail to John why his species is the most inferior he’s ever seen, the eyesight contest in the central chamber, dressing John up to fight T’raltixx (“We’re going to die”), there’s a fine balance of outrageous behavior, a careful shading of the ridiculous and the dark, that I think would be very difficult to carry off in a show that wasn’t already full of larger-than-life personalities and a distinct willingness to push boundaries.
And in the end there’s no way to take back those words, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again; they have to pick up the pieces and move on, and that's the unspoken agreement they make with their fumbling attempts at apology. Chiana's the only one who actively addresses their behavior, finding something to admire about John's sexual aggression--maybe as a welcome sign that he is in fact sexually interested in her, orbecause it's a familiar thing she knows how to handle, because she knows very little else in her relationships, so much conveyed about what her life has been up until Moya in that one reaction. The fact that Farscape brought all of the characters to this place of terrible brutality and left them without the words to magically make it right again by the end of the episode is a remarkable thing in television. It feels like a step back for our heroes after their triumphal coming together at the beginning of the season, a reminder of how perilous their situation is and the fact that they’re still a group of fractious individuals who sometimes want very different things, still learning to work together, and that when they overcome obstacles, it’s usually not without cost.