"You were in my shoes. I was in your pants…"
Standard disclaimer: this post and/or the comments may and probably will contain spoilers for the entire series. Previous episode posts here.
I'm not sure any attempt to analyze "Out of Their Minds" can be successful, because it's mostly just hilarious. But because the Farscape actors are so good, and because the show is so deeply rooted in its characters and their reactions and interactions, it's an obligatory genre show body switch episode that mines not just the characters' surface mannerisms but the relationships between their identities and their physicality, relationships that weren't that obvious until they were suddenly severed.
This is in so many ways an episode about teamwork, about how they all work together now, as everybody scrambles to get the defense screen up and keep it up during the crisis; the teamwork is only magnified by the fact that they have to do so while inhabiting each others' bodies. They've all been traveling together for long enough by now that there's a distinct sense that everybody on Moya has settled into a routine of gallows humor and scraping by-when John asks, at the beginning of the episode, whether anybody has sent the "don't shoot, we're pathetic" message yet, he means it, and gets a serious answer. The defense screen is another hint at what their lives are like at this point, a scavenged resource, something that people who sometimes can't even supply themselves with food have to make the most of.
One of the things that makes the episode so funny is that, even though everybody's having to make adjustments to different bodies, the way they interact doesn't change. It's something that goes deeper than seeing one character's body act out another's physical mannerisms. So immediately after the switch, John-in-Aeryn and Aeryn-in-Rygel start brainstorming while Rygel-in-John complains; Chiana-in-D'Argo waits for someone else to figure out what to do while D'Argo-in-Pilot starts issuing orders. As Rygel rightly complains, nobody pays much attention to him unless they're telling him to shut up or he has information they need, no matter what body he's in.
But ultimately, Chiana's the only one of them who's flexible about what body she inhabits, an attitude that speaks not just to Chiana's opportunism but to what drives her sense of self. Everybody else is irrevocably attached to his or her physicality. Pilot literally won't survive in another body, while neither D'Argo nor Chiana can handle the intense mental work that goes with Pilot's. (Incidentally, one of my favorite parts of the episode is when Pilot-in-Chiana walks D'Argo-in-Pilot through the tricks he uses to manage all of the input from Moya, and we get a glimpse, rich with imagery, of how Pilot thinks, of his interior life and relationship with Moya, of all the things that are going on in his head while he's talking to others.) Aeryn is frustrated because Rygel's hands won't allow her to do any of the mechanical work that she once scorned but has come to excel at and depend on as her way of contributing to the crew's survival, of being part of something larger than herself, a new form of duty. D'Argo is reduced to making impotent threats from where he's trapped in Pilot's stationary body. For once, Rygel won't even consider abandoning the others to save himself, because he can only reclaim his throne as a Hynerian, in his own body, and his dream of having revenge on Bishan is the thing that has kept him going through a hundred years of captivity and torture-and we get a glimpse of the steely determination that lives inside his small green exterior, the survivor. John is just easily distracted by his own breasts, and that scene never, ever gets old.
And in true Farscape fashion, they really go there, hurtle headlong into all of the strange and kinky implications of people still being themselves while in other people's bodies-John playing with Aeryn's breasts, Rygel needing help figuring out how to pee in John's body, Chiana-in-D'Argo putting the move on Rygel-in-John, gender and species and personalities snarled up in a giant tangle. Zhaan, the confused outsider in this whole chaotic body-switching mess, becomes the vehicle for mocking the automatic trust in John's leadership that has developed by this point, as Aeryn-in-John has to persuade her to shoot Moya, throwing in the cheesy grin and the thumb gestures and the "Trust me! Everything will be aaaaaallll riiiiiight," and it's suddenly glaringly obvious that she and probably the entire rest of the crew secretly roll their eyes every time he's ever said it, that they probably usually follow him despite the line rather than because of it. Also in true Farscape fashion, vomit-and not just any vomit, but creeping, corrosive vomit-is an actual plot point. I believe this might be the first occasion, but it's certainly not the last.
There's also a very effective reminder that Talyn is still out there, that he's growing and becoming a powerful weapon, and that we have no idea what Crais is teaching him. In the end, it turns out that Talyn didn't attack until provoked, but the Halosians' initial lie is certainly plausible, because we only have our own experience of Crais to go on, and the way Talyn willfully attacked Moya in order to obtain Crais's release. We don't have much of a way to assess the extent of Crais's transformation, and of Talyn's confusion, but here are some clues, the beginnings of a picture.
And finally, although the logical part of my brain thinks canon points to John and Aeryn not getting together again until they were on Talyn-there's the big issue made of the build-up to their physical union there, and the fact that the surviving John never seemed to suspect that Aeryn's child could be his, from before the twinning-the come-hither look on Aeryn's face at the end of this episode, and the way John chased after her looking like someone who just won the lottery, gave me a very different impression when I first saw the show. In fact, I was shocked when I got to the first part of the "Look at the Princess" trilogy and it seemed that they actually weren't totally doing it by this point. But one of the things that's so interesting about their relationship is that physical and emotional connection are such different things for both of them, and mean such different things, and there's a lovely ambiguity to their dynamic in Season 2, of the fact that the show already put the two leads together physically once and that was only the start of a much more complicated journey, that it passed mostly unspoken and informed the way they are with each other now in ways that run so far below the surface.
I'm not sure any attempt to analyze "Out of Their Minds" can be successful, because it's mostly just hilarious. But because the Farscape actors are so good, and because the show is so deeply rooted in its characters and their reactions and interactions, it's an obligatory genre show body switch episode that mines not just the characters' surface mannerisms but the relationships between their identities and their physicality, relationships that weren't that obvious until they were suddenly severed.
This is in so many ways an episode about teamwork, about how they all work together now, as everybody scrambles to get the defense screen up and keep it up during the crisis; the teamwork is only magnified by the fact that they have to do so while inhabiting each others' bodies. They've all been traveling together for long enough by now that there's a distinct sense that everybody on Moya has settled into a routine of gallows humor and scraping by-when John asks, at the beginning of the episode, whether anybody has sent the "don't shoot, we're pathetic" message yet, he means it, and gets a serious answer. The defense screen is another hint at what their lives are like at this point, a scavenged resource, something that people who sometimes can't even supply themselves with food have to make the most of.
One of the things that makes the episode so funny is that, even though everybody's having to make adjustments to different bodies, the way they interact doesn't change. It's something that goes deeper than seeing one character's body act out another's physical mannerisms. So immediately after the switch, John-in-Aeryn and Aeryn-in-Rygel start brainstorming while Rygel-in-John complains; Chiana-in-D'Argo waits for someone else to figure out what to do while D'Argo-in-Pilot starts issuing orders. As Rygel rightly complains, nobody pays much attention to him unless they're telling him to shut up or he has information they need, no matter what body he's in.
But ultimately, Chiana's the only one of them who's flexible about what body she inhabits, an attitude that speaks not just to Chiana's opportunism but to what drives her sense of self. Everybody else is irrevocably attached to his or her physicality. Pilot literally won't survive in another body, while neither D'Argo nor Chiana can handle the intense mental work that goes with Pilot's. (Incidentally, one of my favorite parts of the episode is when Pilot-in-Chiana walks D'Argo-in-Pilot through the tricks he uses to manage all of the input from Moya, and we get a glimpse, rich with imagery, of how Pilot thinks, of his interior life and relationship with Moya, of all the things that are going on in his head while he's talking to others.) Aeryn is frustrated because Rygel's hands won't allow her to do any of the mechanical work that she once scorned but has come to excel at and depend on as her way of contributing to the crew's survival, of being part of something larger than herself, a new form of duty. D'Argo is reduced to making impotent threats from where he's trapped in Pilot's stationary body. For once, Rygel won't even consider abandoning the others to save himself, because he can only reclaim his throne as a Hynerian, in his own body, and his dream of having revenge on Bishan is the thing that has kept him going through a hundred years of captivity and torture-and we get a glimpse of the steely determination that lives inside his small green exterior, the survivor. John is just easily distracted by his own breasts, and that scene never, ever gets old.
And in true Farscape fashion, they really go there, hurtle headlong into all of the strange and kinky implications of people still being themselves while in other people's bodies-John playing with Aeryn's breasts, Rygel needing help figuring out how to pee in John's body, Chiana-in-D'Argo putting the move on Rygel-in-John, gender and species and personalities snarled up in a giant tangle. Zhaan, the confused outsider in this whole chaotic body-switching mess, becomes the vehicle for mocking the automatic trust in John's leadership that has developed by this point, as Aeryn-in-John has to persuade her to shoot Moya, throwing in the cheesy grin and the thumb gestures and the "Trust me! Everything will be aaaaaallll riiiiiight," and it's suddenly glaringly obvious that she and probably the entire rest of the crew secretly roll their eyes every time he's ever said it, that they probably usually follow him despite the line rather than because of it. Also in true Farscape fashion, vomit-and not just any vomit, but creeping, corrosive vomit-is an actual plot point. I believe this might be the first occasion, but it's certainly not the last.
There's also a very effective reminder that Talyn is still out there, that he's growing and becoming a powerful weapon, and that we have no idea what Crais is teaching him. In the end, it turns out that Talyn didn't attack until provoked, but the Halosians' initial lie is certainly plausible, because we only have our own experience of Crais to go on, and the way Talyn willfully attacked Moya in order to obtain Crais's release. We don't have much of a way to assess the extent of Crais's transformation, and of Talyn's confusion, but here are some clues, the beginnings of a picture.
And finally, although the logical part of my brain thinks canon points to John and Aeryn not getting together again until they were on Talyn-there's the big issue made of the build-up to their physical union there, and the fact that the surviving John never seemed to suspect that Aeryn's child could be his, from before the twinning-the come-hither look on Aeryn's face at the end of this episode, and the way John chased after her looking like someone who just won the lottery, gave me a very different impression when I first saw the show. In fact, I was shocked when I got to the first part of the "Look at the Princess" trilogy and it seemed that they actually weren't totally doing it by this point. But one of the things that's so interesting about their relationship is that physical and emotional connection are such different things for both of them, and mean such different things, and there's a lovely ambiguity to their dynamic in Season 2, of the fact that the show already put the two leads together physically once and that was only the start of a much more complicated journey, that it passed mostly unspoken and informed the way they are with each other now in ways that run so far below the surface.