notes on Farscape S2, 2x06 (TWWW) - 2x05 (PIYW), plus notes on spirituality and ep order
Past Farscape posts are indexed here.
PLEASE NOTE: I am watching Farscape for the first time, and I am staying resolutely spoiler free. As of this writing, the last episode I've seen is 2x07 (Home on the Remains). If you've seen more eps than this-and why on earth would you be reading these notes if you haven't?-you're welcome to comment on any eps I've seen, and I won't even mind if you make vague and ominous comments like "Some crazy is not what it seems..." But: If you spoil me, I will beat you to death with a shovel. A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.
Notes on Zhaan and the Delvian Seek
I've been thinking some more about the scene between Aeryn and Zhaan in "Mind the Baby" - the one where Zhaan says she loves Aeryn but that worldly concerns no longer interest her, and Aeryn gets angry and calls Zhaan "selfish." This scene (taken together with the later scene in which Zhaan tells D'Argo that she's slowing down the Seek because Aeryn was right) interests me for two reasons.
The first has to do with the Seek itself, the place of spirituality in the world, the balance between enlightenment and action. I don't think the show wants us to understand the Seek as a bad thing; pursuing it seems to have kept Zhaan alive while she was imprisoned, and practicing it has helped keep her darker impulses in check during S1. But its value is greatest when Zhaan is not responsible to or for anyone else. As a process focused on the transformation of the self, it's noble when the self is all one has but solipsistic under other circumstances.
The second has to do with the question of what love means. Aeryn has no use for love as an emotion or a philosophical concept; love is an action, not a feeling. It's what we do for other people. Aeryn's statement of this position is extreme - her yardsticks for action are violence and death - but ultimately I think the show comes down on the side of love as action rather than abstraction, as we see when Zhaan revises her position.
And thinking about love provides a nice transition to...
2x06 The Way We Weren't
"Mind the Baby" establishes that Aeryn does have a concept of love; this ep makes clear that it's not a concept she's previously applied to the people with whom she's recreated (though she does say she'd apply it to Velorek now). Taken together with her fear of being alone, her fear (in "DNA Mad Scientist") of being "left behind," her notion of love seems to be bound up with military service: commitment to one's fellow warriors. Peacekeepers are trained to fight and die alone, but it seems clear that they don't actually have to do it very often; have we ever seen another PK (besides Crais) who's not part of a group, a team of some kind? No wonder it's difficult for her to interact with John, for whom she is clearly feeling something strong and confusing: if love is action - and specifically perhaps action for rather than action with - then how does she demonstrate it to John? (It occurs to me that, from this point of view, her attempt to teach him to fly Moya's module in "The Flax" demonstrates a certain affection all by itself, completely aside from the ep's later events.)
I mentioned in my comments on "That Old Black Magic" that I was wondering whether Aeryn was a Peacekeeper voluntarily or by conscription, and whether she was ambivalent about that aspect of her life at the time. And here we get part of an answer, at least: she was literally bred to be a Peacekeeper. "The Aeryn on this tape is not the Aeryn we know," John says, and that's true; but it's also true that, as "Crackers Don't Matter" showed, there's what we are and then there's what we have within us, and we've got to reckon with both of them. (It's a theme that goes right back to the early exploration of Zhaan's dark side in "That Old Black Magic.")
Sex, trust, communication. John encourages Aeryn to talk, and Aeryn responds with "No means no" - surely not an accidental choice of phrase on the writer's part. So: talk is more intimate, more invasive, more frightening than sex for Aeryn? As she describes it, recreating is - not meaningless, clearly, but unremarkable, treated as a biological need rather than an expression of individualized emotion or desire; pair-bonding is frowned upon. What model does she have, then, for the kind of emotional intimacy that John keeps asking for? And how strange John must seem to her - how difficult it must be to understand someone who values that intimacy so much. John and Zhaan share that kind of connection, partly because of their past Unity but also simply because they are both creatures who want to understand others, who talk openly about their understanding of the world and how they feel about it, even if they don't often do so in particularly emotional terms.
Aeryn's relationship with Velorek: the show does a nice job of maneuvering John (and us) into expecting Velorek to be a bad guy; the moment in which it looks like he's going to rape Aeryn is chilling, but also so much more simple than the truth turns out to be. It would be easier on John if Velorek *had* raped Aeryn: he could use that to explain her distance, he'd have someone to blame. But no; they were lovers, and she says she loved him, and it's her betrayal of him that's left her damaged.
Most importantly, for my money, this ep takes apart the heretofore unchallenged assumption that there's only one way to be a Peacekeeper. We see three: 1) the simple unthinking following of orders (as when Aeryn shoots Pilot), which admittedly appears to be the most common; but also 2) the subversion and sabotage in which Velorek engages, and 3) Aeryn's aggressive use and enforcement of the system, her betrayal of her lover to resume her familiar place in that system.
I loved that aspect of the ep, actually - the way in which I, as much as the rest of the crew, was caught out in the implicit belief (hope?) that, to paraphrase Chiana, Aeryn was out picking daisies while the other PKs did the really awful stuff. It's a naive hope, of course, but having plucked that hope away from us the ep sticks in a knife and twists: Aeryn went above and beyond the call of PK duty, perpetuating and enforcing the system rather than merely failing to resist it. I found it quite moving that Velorek seems genuinely to regard her betrayal as a sign that, as he and John have both said, "you can be more." So, piling on to the theme from "Crackers Don't Matter": perhaps a capacity for the truly dreadful signals a capacity for great goodness, and vice versa? To think outside the box most minds are in (as Velorek says) makes one powerful, able to resist that box; but it can also lead to contempt for those still in that box, to disconnection.
Crais has some of that quality himself, as registered in his assessing glance at Aeryn after Velorek calls her "special" even as he's arrested. Which takes us back to John and Aeryn's conversation at the end of "Mind the Baby": just what is Crais capable of? For that matter, what is Scorpius capable of? The Aurora chair, after all, is one of the most spectacular instances of "thinking outside the box" that we've yet seen.
Speaking of that damn chair, I'm still annoyed that Stark's gone. It's not that I'm actively missing him, exactly; I'd just really like to see his take on things. I rather think he and Zhaan would have a lot to talk about.
Notes on structure: Does this show know how to do a teaser or what? This episode had me on a string for the first couple of minutes. Storm troopers on Moya! Shit! No, wait - that's not our Pilot. Oh my god! They're killing the Pilot! Crais is giving the order - and Aeryn executed it - so this is Moya? And Aeryn's been aboard before?!
Notes on other characters:
- Chiana, bless her heart, tries to get Aeryn to talk, even if she can't stick with it like John does. Have I mentioned that I love Chiana? I really do.
- Pilot's been in permanent pain? Man, that is *really* upsetting. And now he gets to re-bond with Moya! Yay!
- John and D'Argo are *still* using rock-paper-scissors to decide stuff? I mean, sure, it beats drawing straws, but I'm starting to wonder how long it's gonna be until D'Argo loses and decides to just knock the snot out of John instead of grumbling quietly.
2x05 Picture If You Will
Spacemall! Or, well, space flea market. Whatever.
Aaaaaaaand the D'Argo/Chiana flirtation progresses. Heh.
I like that Aeryn's so upfront about her willingness to ditch Rygel and possibly even Chiana. I love Chiana, of course, but I'm waiting for the show to come up with something for Rygel to do again. He did come in handy a couple of times last season; he's smart, and sneaky, and much more capable of political machinations and intrigue than anybody else on board, but on a day-to-day basis that's clearly not as useful as... pretty much anything else.
Of course, when Aeryn does lose Chiana, she immediately feels guilty about her inability to save her - and she takes it out on Pilot, a fact that's not lost on John. She also loses John and D'Argo, whom she rather pointedly did *not* say she wanted off the ship, and Zhaan, about whom Aeryn is more ambiguous but who is certainly very useful (as John said in a past ep, "the closest thing we've got to a doctor").
One of the side-effects of Zhaan's habitual calm: when she gets upset, *I* get upset.
S1's world- and character-exposition continue to pay off: Maldis is back (of course), and John and Zhaan fool him by communicating through the bond of Unity, thus neatly folding allusions to two S1 eps into one convenient package.
A note on ep structure: this episode changes focal character several times, in a way that felt unfamiliar to me. I'll have to test this assertion against other eps, but it does seem to me that most eps thus far have had either a single focus (usually John, natch) or a more-or-less balanced double focus (John and Crais, John and D'Argo, the crew on the planet-of-the-week and the crew remaining on Moya). In this ep, the focus appears to be Chiana and her experience with the painting; when Chiana "dies" we shift to Zhaan, her fear, the ominous voices she hears; when D'Argo becomes the subject of the picture the focus shifts to him, and he's the one we follow into the picture. Back on the ship, we pick up again with Zhaan and, to a lesser degree, John.
I mention all this partly to note that it's a rather tricky type of structure to pull off, but also to register how much I enjoy the ensemble nature of this show, which the structure emphasizes. John is the main character, broadly speaking; he's our entry into the show and the world. But the show, despite being named for his module, is not just his show with extras; it's all of them. I like that.
Of course, this ep also featured the blessedly-atypical post-exposition scene between Rygel and Chiana, which gets ironized with Rygel's observation that we'd "best not ponder questions like these; they only make your head hurt," but not before I've rolled my eyes and observed to the cats that the relative lack of exposition has become one of my favorite things about the show, and why must the ep go and spoil it at the last minute? The cats, for the record, blinked sagely and did not respond.
While we're on the subject: the cats have taken to watching the show with me, usually draped across my legs, always pointing at the TV. They especially like the opening credits; I can see their eyes tracking the module as it goes "zoom" right at the end.
Notes on episode order
I've written up my notes on these two eps in the order I watched them, which is the order on the DVD. I discovered only afterwards that (according to the Snurcher's Guide) this is another instance in which production order and US airdate order diverge. On reflection, I think the production order makes a good deal more sense. "Picture If You Will" doesn't mention Pilot's having less control over Moya's functions, which is sufficiently relevant to matters at hand that I'd have expected it to come up. I really don't think John would have made his crack to Aeryn about "Let's get rid of Pilot - then you can have the whole ship to yourself" in the wake of the events of "The Way We Weren't." And thematically, I found a lot in "The Way We Weren't" that harked back to "That Old Black Magic"; those strands of continuity would probably have been even more clear if I'd been thinking about that ep already, as I would have been if I'd seen "Picture If You Will" first.
A question about recommended viewing order: I note in the Snurcher's Episode Index that there's another production date / airdate disparity in upcoming eps. I don't want to go check the recommended viewing order in the individual pages, for fear of inadvertent self-spoilage (I cannot resist reading text, and it's idiotic to ask myself to try). Based on prior experience, I suspect I should follow production order ("My Three Crichtons" *after* the "Look at the Princess" trilogy); anyone have advice to offer on this matter?
PLEASE NOTE: I am watching Farscape for the first time, and I am staying resolutely spoiler free. As of this writing, the last episode I've seen is 2x07 (Home on the Remains). If you've seen more eps than this-and why on earth would you be reading these notes if you haven't?-you're welcome to comment on any eps I've seen, and I won't even mind if you make vague and ominous comments like "Some crazy is not what it seems..." But: If you spoil me, I will beat you to death with a shovel. A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.
Notes on Zhaan and the Delvian Seek
I've been thinking some more about the scene between Aeryn and Zhaan in "Mind the Baby" - the one where Zhaan says she loves Aeryn but that worldly concerns no longer interest her, and Aeryn gets angry and calls Zhaan "selfish." This scene (taken together with the later scene in which Zhaan tells D'Argo that she's slowing down the Seek because Aeryn was right) interests me for two reasons.
The first has to do with the Seek itself, the place of spirituality in the world, the balance between enlightenment and action. I don't think the show wants us to understand the Seek as a bad thing; pursuing it seems to have kept Zhaan alive while she was imprisoned, and practicing it has helped keep her darker impulses in check during S1. But its value is greatest when Zhaan is not responsible to or for anyone else. As a process focused on the transformation of the self, it's noble when the self is all one has but solipsistic under other circumstances.
The second has to do with the question of what love means. Aeryn has no use for love as an emotion or a philosophical concept; love is an action, not a feeling. It's what we do for other people. Aeryn's statement of this position is extreme - her yardsticks for action are violence and death - but ultimately I think the show comes down on the side of love as action rather than abstraction, as we see when Zhaan revises her position.
And thinking about love provides a nice transition to...
2x06 The Way We Weren't
"Mind the Baby" establishes that Aeryn does have a concept of love; this ep makes clear that it's not a concept she's previously applied to the people with whom she's recreated (though she does say she'd apply it to Velorek now). Taken together with her fear of being alone, her fear (in "DNA Mad Scientist") of being "left behind," her notion of love seems to be bound up with military service: commitment to one's fellow warriors. Peacekeepers are trained to fight and die alone, but it seems clear that they don't actually have to do it very often; have we ever seen another PK (besides Crais) who's not part of a group, a team of some kind? No wonder it's difficult for her to interact with John, for whom she is clearly feeling something strong and confusing: if love is action - and specifically perhaps action for rather than action with - then how does she demonstrate it to John? (It occurs to me that, from this point of view, her attempt to teach him to fly Moya's module in "The Flax" demonstrates a certain affection all by itself, completely aside from the ep's later events.)
I mentioned in my comments on "That Old Black Magic" that I was wondering whether Aeryn was a Peacekeeper voluntarily or by conscription, and whether she was ambivalent about that aspect of her life at the time. And here we get part of an answer, at least: she was literally bred to be a Peacekeeper. "The Aeryn on this tape is not the Aeryn we know," John says, and that's true; but it's also true that, as "Crackers Don't Matter" showed, there's what we are and then there's what we have within us, and we've got to reckon with both of them. (It's a theme that goes right back to the early exploration of Zhaan's dark side in "That Old Black Magic.")
Sex, trust, communication. John encourages Aeryn to talk, and Aeryn responds with "No means no" - surely not an accidental choice of phrase on the writer's part. So: talk is more intimate, more invasive, more frightening than sex for Aeryn? As she describes it, recreating is - not meaningless, clearly, but unremarkable, treated as a biological need rather than an expression of individualized emotion or desire; pair-bonding is frowned upon. What model does she have, then, for the kind of emotional intimacy that John keeps asking for? And how strange John must seem to her - how difficult it must be to understand someone who values that intimacy so much. John and Zhaan share that kind of connection, partly because of their past Unity but also simply because they are both creatures who want to understand others, who talk openly about their understanding of the world and how they feel about it, even if they don't often do so in particularly emotional terms.
Aeryn's relationship with Velorek: the show does a nice job of maneuvering John (and us) into expecting Velorek to be a bad guy; the moment in which it looks like he's going to rape Aeryn is chilling, but also so much more simple than the truth turns out to be. It would be easier on John if Velorek *had* raped Aeryn: he could use that to explain her distance, he'd have someone to blame. But no; they were lovers, and she says she loved him, and it's her betrayal of him that's left her damaged.
Most importantly, for my money, this ep takes apart the heretofore unchallenged assumption that there's only one way to be a Peacekeeper. We see three: 1) the simple unthinking following of orders (as when Aeryn shoots Pilot), which admittedly appears to be the most common; but also 2) the subversion and sabotage in which Velorek engages, and 3) Aeryn's aggressive use and enforcement of the system, her betrayal of her lover to resume her familiar place in that system.
I loved that aspect of the ep, actually - the way in which I, as much as the rest of the crew, was caught out in the implicit belief (hope?) that, to paraphrase Chiana, Aeryn was out picking daisies while the other PKs did the really awful stuff. It's a naive hope, of course, but having plucked that hope away from us the ep sticks in a knife and twists: Aeryn went above and beyond the call of PK duty, perpetuating and enforcing the system rather than merely failing to resist it. I found it quite moving that Velorek seems genuinely to regard her betrayal as a sign that, as he and John have both said, "you can be more." So, piling on to the theme from "Crackers Don't Matter": perhaps a capacity for the truly dreadful signals a capacity for great goodness, and vice versa? To think outside the box most minds are in (as Velorek says) makes one powerful, able to resist that box; but it can also lead to contempt for those still in that box, to disconnection.
Crais has some of that quality himself, as registered in his assessing glance at Aeryn after Velorek calls her "special" even as he's arrested. Which takes us back to John and Aeryn's conversation at the end of "Mind the Baby": just what is Crais capable of? For that matter, what is Scorpius capable of? The Aurora chair, after all, is one of the most spectacular instances of "thinking outside the box" that we've yet seen.
Speaking of that damn chair, I'm still annoyed that Stark's gone. It's not that I'm actively missing him, exactly; I'd just really like to see his take on things. I rather think he and Zhaan would have a lot to talk about.
Notes on structure: Does this show know how to do a teaser or what? This episode had me on a string for the first couple of minutes. Storm troopers on Moya! Shit! No, wait - that's not our Pilot. Oh my god! They're killing the Pilot! Crais is giving the order - and Aeryn executed it - so this is Moya? And Aeryn's been aboard before?!
Notes on other characters:
- Chiana, bless her heart, tries to get Aeryn to talk, even if she can't stick with it like John does. Have I mentioned that I love Chiana? I really do.
- Pilot's been in permanent pain? Man, that is *really* upsetting. And now he gets to re-bond with Moya! Yay!
- John and D'Argo are *still* using rock-paper-scissors to decide stuff? I mean, sure, it beats drawing straws, but I'm starting to wonder how long it's gonna be until D'Argo loses and decides to just knock the snot out of John instead of grumbling quietly.
2x05 Picture If You Will
Spacemall! Or, well, space flea market. Whatever.
Aaaaaaaand the D'Argo/Chiana flirtation progresses. Heh.
I like that Aeryn's so upfront about her willingness to ditch Rygel and possibly even Chiana. I love Chiana, of course, but I'm waiting for the show to come up with something for Rygel to do again. He did come in handy a couple of times last season; he's smart, and sneaky, and much more capable of political machinations and intrigue than anybody else on board, but on a day-to-day basis that's clearly not as useful as... pretty much anything else.
Of course, when Aeryn does lose Chiana, she immediately feels guilty about her inability to save her - and she takes it out on Pilot, a fact that's not lost on John. She also loses John and D'Argo, whom she rather pointedly did *not* say she wanted off the ship, and Zhaan, about whom Aeryn is more ambiguous but who is certainly very useful (as John said in a past ep, "the closest thing we've got to a doctor").
One of the side-effects of Zhaan's habitual calm: when she gets upset, *I* get upset.
S1's world- and character-exposition continue to pay off: Maldis is back (of course), and John and Zhaan fool him by communicating through the bond of Unity, thus neatly folding allusions to two S1 eps into one convenient package.
A note on ep structure: this episode changes focal character several times, in a way that felt unfamiliar to me. I'll have to test this assertion against other eps, but it does seem to me that most eps thus far have had either a single focus (usually John, natch) or a more-or-less balanced double focus (John and Crais, John and D'Argo, the crew on the planet-of-the-week and the crew remaining on Moya). In this ep, the focus appears to be Chiana and her experience with the painting; when Chiana "dies" we shift to Zhaan, her fear, the ominous voices she hears; when D'Argo becomes the subject of the picture the focus shifts to him, and he's the one we follow into the picture. Back on the ship, we pick up again with Zhaan and, to a lesser degree, John.
I mention all this partly to note that it's a rather tricky type of structure to pull off, but also to register how much I enjoy the ensemble nature of this show, which the structure emphasizes. John is the main character, broadly speaking; he's our entry into the show and the world. But the show, despite being named for his module, is not just his show with extras; it's all of them. I like that.
Of course, this ep also featured the blessedly-atypical post-exposition scene between Rygel and Chiana, which gets ironized with Rygel's observation that we'd "best not ponder questions like these; they only make your head hurt," but not before I've rolled my eyes and observed to the cats that the relative lack of exposition has become one of my favorite things about the show, and why must the ep go and spoil it at the last minute? The cats, for the record, blinked sagely and did not respond.
While we're on the subject: the cats have taken to watching the show with me, usually draped across my legs, always pointing at the TV. They especially like the opening credits; I can see their eyes tracking the module as it goes "zoom" right at the end.
Notes on episode order
I've written up my notes on these two eps in the order I watched them, which is the order on the DVD. I discovered only afterwards that (according to the Snurcher's Guide) this is another instance in which production order and US airdate order diverge. On reflection, I think the production order makes a good deal more sense. "Picture If You Will" doesn't mention Pilot's having less control over Moya's functions, which is sufficiently relevant to matters at hand that I'd have expected it to come up. I really don't think John would have made his crack to Aeryn about "Let's get rid of Pilot - then you can have the whole ship to yourself" in the wake of the events of "The Way We Weren't." And thematically, I found a lot in "The Way We Weren't" that harked back to "That Old Black Magic"; those strands of continuity would probably have been even more clear if I'd been thinking about that ep already, as I would have been if I'd seen "Picture If You Will" first.
A question about recommended viewing order: I note in the Snurcher's Episode Index that there's another production date / airdate disparity in upcoming eps. I don't want to go check the recommended viewing order in the individual pages, for fear of inadvertent self-spoilage (I cannot resist reading text, and it's idiotic to ask myself to try). Based on prior experience, I suspect I should follow production order ("My Three Crichtons" *after* the "Look at the Princess" trilogy); anyone have advice to offer on this matter?