"How Batman was that?"
Standard disclaimer: this post and/or the comments may and probably will contain spoilers for the entire series. Previous episode posts here.
And since it's been so long, direct links to Part 1 and Part 2.
In retrospect, one of the hardest things to watch in this episode is the way John makes bargains with what is left of his hope. I talked in my writeup of Part 1 about how this trilogy is the place where what he ends up hoping for starts changing, but before that can happen, he has agreed to take on an entirely new life, to give up his search for Earth in exchange for security, a family, a future both alien in its setting and recognizable in its domestic parameters. For the first time in the series, he makes a kind of peace with the idea of never returning to Earth, with making an entirely new home for himself. That's Plan B, and in this episode, Plan B fails too. He's not as safe as he thought he would be, when he traded away the hope that had been sustaining him all along up to this point--now everyone's out to get John Crichton, and for the first time, when Scorpius plucks his head out of that vat of foundry acid like a twisted black wraith of a guardian angel, the clear-cut lines of antagonism blur ever so slightly, because it's not a binary universe anymore. Scorpius may want to dissect John's brain, but he'll do anything to protect him until he can; Crais, out there somewhere with Talyn, isn't an ally but also isn't quite an enemy anymore; and John's immediate rescuer in this trilogy is a Peacekeeper, one whose mandate does not intersect with Scorpius's. John loses the second part of the bargain too, because as with any good fairytale, the princess marries her true love, the good guys win for once--except for him, because he loses the children that would have been his consolation, the one child that's already on the way, the things he thought his hope was worth trading for. And so much of that hope is tied up with family--with wanting to see his own family on Earth again, with a daughter with Katralla, with the makeshift family he's become a part of on Moya, with having to trade those pieces of himself for the best resolution he can scrape together under the circumstances.
Although Aeryn's adventure with Dregon is mostly played lightly--Dregon is so utterly out of his league with Aeryn, in every possible way--there's something incredibly telling about the way she deals with the loss of John here, by running away, by immersing herself in physical activity and the things she's been trained to do, trying to distract herself from the grief. It's a distant warning of how she'll handle John's death in the future, because as Dregon points out, she's not trained to deal with emotions, and as she confesses, she's not sure anything can be worth the pain of that loss. And there's another distant echo of the future in John's coping mechanism, his way of dealing with too many near death experiences and being hunted and Aeryn's disappearance, with his need for physical connection and familiar touch, when he hooks up with Jenavia. I don't fault him for being disloyal to Aeryn or to Katralla under the circumstances; he didn't have any kind of understanding with the former or any deep feelings for the latter, and it was obvious by the way he flatly told Jenavia they weren't compatible afterwards that he was in it for the sex, for the escape. It wasn't a particularly smart thing to do, though--she was a Peacekeeper disruptor, after all--and it seems like the same kind of impulse that led to him getting rolled on LoMo, settling for the shadow of something he thought had passed out of his reach, grasping at the here and now. (Either that, or the hookup was just a semi-gratuitous Captain Kirking of John by the writers, which is also a theory I entertain. There's something about the sequence that's out-of-place, possibly because they were stretching scenes that didn't quite justify their length, narratively speaking, to pad out to three episodes.)
One of the ideas I think Farscape plays around with a lot is biology and its relationship to destiny. It is an intensely physical show; the characters are grounded in their often messy bodies and the characteristics of their species, and their relationships with others are fraught with not only interpersonal issues but the baggage of species and history. The Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, each with their own rigid sense of biological superiority, are at war (and Scarran development is constrained by the consumption of a plant); John's human biology is unique in this part of the universe, something Scorpius can easily identify as different in the halls of a gammak base, something that makes his kiss with the princess sweet when no one else's was; D'Argo's real crime was marrying and having a child with a Sebacean; the hybrids, Scorpius and Jothee and Talyn, all struggle with their dual inheritances. Here we learn for the first time that Scorpius's biology is both literally and symbolically at war with itself--he's half Scarran and half Sebacean, taking the Peacekeeper side in the conflict between the two; and his Scarran side loves the heat while his Sebacean side will die from it, and he uses technology, the cooling rods and thermal suit, to mediate between his two halves in the battleground of his own body. John would kill Scorpius if it weren't for the chip doing its unseen work, burrowing into his brain, attaching itself to his biology as well as his mind.
Two other things I like about this episode, randomly, are the way Rygel has become part of the team, looking out for his own comfort but taking on the role of negotiator and emissary for all of them with ruthless pragmatism and doing it well, and the way John's friendship with both D'Argo and Chiana moves to a new and deeper level, from companions in crisis to people who stand by each other through everything: they came to his wedding, they stood with him while he was turned into a statue, they tried to put his pieces back together, and in the end, D'Argo feels John's loss of a child as part of his own.
And then there's the kiss, the compatibility test between John and Aeryn at the end of the episode, the whole sequence conveyed without dialogue, her shaking hand holding the test out, John's eyes wide with the weight of what she's offering to him, and in the end, her relief and his hope, their awe at the possibilities. It's an intensely Aeryn gesture, both in her fear of the emotional intimacy she's committing to and the way she reaches out to John with action rather than words. But it's also her way of telling him that she understands what he wants, family and children, home, and that she's willing to try. And it comes at the point where John is trying to pick up the pieces of his hope and reassemble them, and this gives him something new to work with. It is one of the defining characteristics of John Crichton that he never gains anything without paying a price, from wormhole knowledge to this new possibility with Aeryn, but this is the thing that will ultimately sustain him, the place where the shift of home begins.
And since it's been so long, direct links to Part 1 and Part 2.
In retrospect, one of the hardest things to watch in this episode is the way John makes bargains with what is left of his hope. I talked in my writeup of Part 1 about how this trilogy is the place where what he ends up hoping for starts changing, but before that can happen, he has agreed to take on an entirely new life, to give up his search for Earth in exchange for security, a family, a future both alien in its setting and recognizable in its domestic parameters. For the first time in the series, he makes a kind of peace with the idea of never returning to Earth, with making an entirely new home for himself. That's Plan B, and in this episode, Plan B fails too. He's not as safe as he thought he would be, when he traded away the hope that had been sustaining him all along up to this point--now everyone's out to get John Crichton, and for the first time, when Scorpius plucks his head out of that vat of foundry acid like a twisted black wraith of a guardian angel, the clear-cut lines of antagonism blur ever so slightly, because it's not a binary universe anymore. Scorpius may want to dissect John's brain, but he'll do anything to protect him until he can; Crais, out there somewhere with Talyn, isn't an ally but also isn't quite an enemy anymore; and John's immediate rescuer in this trilogy is a Peacekeeper, one whose mandate does not intersect with Scorpius's. John loses the second part of the bargain too, because as with any good fairytale, the princess marries her true love, the good guys win for once--except for him, because he loses the children that would have been his consolation, the one child that's already on the way, the things he thought his hope was worth trading for. And so much of that hope is tied up with family--with wanting to see his own family on Earth again, with a daughter with Katralla, with the makeshift family he's become a part of on Moya, with having to trade those pieces of himself for the best resolution he can scrape together under the circumstances.
Although Aeryn's adventure with Dregon is mostly played lightly--Dregon is so utterly out of his league with Aeryn, in every possible way--there's something incredibly telling about the way she deals with the loss of John here, by running away, by immersing herself in physical activity and the things she's been trained to do, trying to distract herself from the grief. It's a distant warning of how she'll handle John's death in the future, because as Dregon points out, she's not trained to deal with emotions, and as she confesses, she's not sure anything can be worth the pain of that loss. And there's another distant echo of the future in John's coping mechanism, his way of dealing with too many near death experiences and being hunted and Aeryn's disappearance, with his need for physical connection and familiar touch, when he hooks up with Jenavia. I don't fault him for being disloyal to Aeryn or to Katralla under the circumstances; he didn't have any kind of understanding with the former or any deep feelings for the latter, and it was obvious by the way he flatly told Jenavia they weren't compatible afterwards that he was in it for the sex, for the escape. It wasn't a particularly smart thing to do, though--she was a Peacekeeper disruptor, after all--and it seems like the same kind of impulse that led to him getting rolled on LoMo, settling for the shadow of something he thought had passed out of his reach, grasping at the here and now. (Either that, or the hookup was just a semi-gratuitous Captain Kirking of John by the writers, which is also a theory I entertain. There's something about the sequence that's out-of-place, possibly because they were stretching scenes that didn't quite justify their length, narratively speaking, to pad out to three episodes.)
One of the ideas I think Farscape plays around with a lot is biology and its relationship to destiny. It is an intensely physical show; the characters are grounded in their often messy bodies and the characteristics of their species, and their relationships with others are fraught with not only interpersonal issues but the baggage of species and history. The Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, each with their own rigid sense of biological superiority, are at war (and Scarran development is constrained by the consumption of a plant); John's human biology is unique in this part of the universe, something Scorpius can easily identify as different in the halls of a gammak base, something that makes his kiss with the princess sweet when no one else's was; D'Argo's real crime was marrying and having a child with a Sebacean; the hybrids, Scorpius and Jothee and Talyn, all struggle with their dual inheritances. Here we learn for the first time that Scorpius's biology is both literally and symbolically at war with itself--he's half Scarran and half Sebacean, taking the Peacekeeper side in the conflict between the two; and his Scarran side loves the heat while his Sebacean side will die from it, and he uses technology, the cooling rods and thermal suit, to mediate between his two halves in the battleground of his own body. John would kill Scorpius if it weren't for the chip doing its unseen work, burrowing into his brain, attaching itself to his biology as well as his mind.
Two other things I like about this episode, randomly, are the way Rygel has become part of the team, looking out for his own comfort but taking on the role of negotiator and emissary for all of them with ruthless pragmatism and doing it well, and the way John's friendship with both D'Argo and Chiana moves to a new and deeper level, from companions in crisis to people who stand by each other through everything: they came to his wedding, they stood with him while he was turned into a statue, they tried to put his pieces back together, and in the end, D'Argo feels John's loss of a child as part of his own.
And then there's the kiss, the compatibility test between John and Aeryn at the end of the episode, the whole sequence conveyed without dialogue, her shaking hand holding the test out, John's eyes wide with the weight of what she's offering to him, and in the end, her relief and his hope, their awe at the possibilities. It's an intensely Aeryn gesture, both in her fear of the emotional intimacy she's committing to and the way she reaches out to John with action rather than words. But it's also her way of telling him that she understands what he wants, family and children, home, and that she's willing to try. And it comes at the point where John is trying to pick up the pieces of his hope and reassemble them, and this gives him something new to work with. It is one of the defining characteristics of John Crichton that he never gains anything without paying a price, from wormhole knowledge to this new possibility with Aeryn, but this is the thing that will ultimately sustain him, the place where the shift of home begins.