#anyway the thing john said when he was trying to explain to aeryn. about how scorpius is like

[hetchdrive]

Sorry to post about Farscape only to talk about whatever the hell is going on with Scorpius-that-lives-in-John's-brain but what. Oh my god. You expect me to just be normal about that? John's voice of self-preservation which he himself deliberates on calling his guardian angel is an evil guy who tortured him? And also he's a genetic mistake who is only allowed to continue existing in this militaristic culture because he's developed a specialized skillset and made himself useful? Huh? You expect me to be normal about this weird little freak of a man who shouldn't exist and who put himself inside someone else's head so he could continue to subconsciously interrogate him? But then that version of him protects John (so that the real Scorpius can someday collect the information he's been collecting from John's brain) from certain death and from somebody else torturing him??? Hello??? Can anyone hear me??? Is there anybody out there who can help me--

[c-is-for-circinate]

I wrote so much thoughtspew about the first two seasons of Farscape and serialization vs episodic plot in late-90′s TV and character progression, and then I put a cut there because I’m not an animal.

An interesting thing that happens in Farscape (and I’m a couple of episodes into season 3, and have not been particularly good about any sort of liveblogging, as expected): we don’t actually see the first time John Crichton, intentionally and in his right mind, specifically chooses to and succeeds in killing someone he’d consider a person.

I was keeping an eye out for it--I knew it would happen sooner or later, and early Season 1 Crichton, who thinks he can talk Crais out of his vendetta by explaining it was a car accident; who brokers a deal with the Genesis and then sends a Marauder crew of Peacekeepers off of Moya alive; who spends the entire first episode confused and captured and shot at by various people and then insists, when he’s finally the one with the gun and the handcuff keys, that the Moya crew rescue Aeryn right along with him--that Crichton is so deliberately and fundamentally not a killer.  It’s one of his firmament truths about the world.  You don’t kill people.  That’s not how the world works.

And it was so clearly one of the things that was going to get stripped away in the breaking-down of John Crichton (which I remembered enough about Farscape to know would happen, but could not have described the trajectory of).  So I was keeping an eye out for it, and I realized, we never quite get it.

There’s a moment in Maldus’s trap, with Crais, where he decides to hell with it and tries to kill Crais--but fails.

There’s the virus that takes him over, uses John’s own two hands to beat a Peacekeeper scientist to death--but John doesn’t remember that, wasn’t in control, isn’t really to blame.

And then there’s the Peacekeeper ship that leaves Moya at the end of the episode, that John figures out how to blow up by its trail of cesium fuel--but the only person on board the ship is possessed by the virus, is a zombie, could never be saved, and everyone knows killing a zombie isn’t the same as killing a real person, right?

There’s the firefight as he escapes the Gammak base, and maybe he hits someone lethally and maybe not, but who knows?  There is, of course, the plan several days later that destroys the base completely--ignites an entire moon, and surely dozens, hundreds (thousands?) die with that.  So maybe that’s it.  Maybe that’s the moment.  Or maybe by that point the moment’s already passed.

By the fourth episode of season 2, John stabs T’raltixx straight through the chest with a quolta blade, stone dead, up close, at a range to see his face and his blood, but of course he’s half-crazed from light emissions at that point, so that’s not quite right either.  But by that point it doesn’t feel new or horrifying any more anyway.  By that point John carries a pulse-pistol as a matter of course, and has probably used it off-camera and we haven’t even seen it.  By the time his caveman and superbrain doubles show up he’s ready to shoot first and ask questions later.  By the time he’s kidnapped by the Scarran on the commerce planet, he thinks of himself as a person who’s killed, who’s grown callous to the suffering of others, who his mother would be ashamed of.

John spends a lot more time threatening to shoot people than actually shooting them, but his aversion to pitched battle in the timeslip episode near the beginning of season 3 has a lot more to do with timeline integrity than avoiding death.  He goes into a firefight of pitched battle at the end, and shoots to kill, and succeeds again and again and again, and the only people whose deaths he regrets at the end of it are the ones he tried to save.

The thing is, I’m really into how these gradual character shifts happen.  I’m intrigued by the lack of a clear-cut start/stop point.  Because I think that’s how it happens for the characters, too.

John Crichton never wakes up and thinks, I’m a different person today than I was yesterday.  He doesn’t notice the first tilot me he really kills someone, on purpose--it’s a thing that happens in the middle of ten thousand other things, and by the time he has time to sit down and process the fact that it happened, it has happened, and has been happened, and there’s something else new to worry about now anyway.  

John stops wearing his IASA flight suit and it’s just sort of a thing that happens, and maybe it’s laundry day or maybe it’s the day he dressed up to pretend to be a Peacekeeper and everything went to shit, and in retrospect it matters but at the moment it’s nothing.  You can point to the end of S1 as a major turning point for him, but plenty of things turned around before that point happened.  And of course, you can point to the chip as the explanation for so much of the rage and the violent impulses John’s throwing around in season 2--but it’s not like one of the (many, many) one-off mindfrells that dissipate at the end of an episode and leave whoever-it-is alone to be themselves again.  Season 3 John may be ‘himself again’, but whoever his self is, it’s a pretty far cry from who he was when the chip first went in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this gradual style of character development, where the Big Meaningful Things just sort of happen in the background and you don’t notice until they’re over.  And I wonder how much of it is about the way episodic TV happened in the late 90′s vs today.

In the late 90′s, nobody made TV shows for people to marathon.  I remember 1999.  We had a VCR, which nobody in the house knew how to program, and no cable which meant that any episodes of Farscape I watched were on tape at my best friend’s house and usually out of order.  Any shows I did watch as they aired were often out of order: some weeks it’s a new episode, some weeks it’s a rerun, some weeks you go to your sister’s play and miss it entirely, some weeks it’s preempted by The Sports.  Serialization was a thing, but there was absolutely less continuity from one episode to the next than you might get from, say, Sens8, or Steven Universe, or even something like The Good Place--which is an episodic sitcom, but still builds each episode off of events in the episode before.  I remember watching The Wire for the first time, on DVD, in 2010, and saying to my friends, “this is a different kind of tv show”.  Every single episode acted as a chapter in a story, rather than a stand-alone piece that could be shuffled into a different order within the guidelines of a couple of specific signpost events.  And the kind of character development you do in a show like that, a show made for the internet generation, a show whose creators expect it to be binged, is different.

Farscape has a lot of continuity, but it also uses the status quo as a tool.  Half the episodes start of in media res.  We don’t need to know the specifics of how we got to wherever we are today, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the last episode.  We know the generalities: we’re on Moya, we’re generally in trouble of some kind, and now we’re going to find out what new difficulties today has brought.  Along with that, we know the status quo of characters.  In Season 1, we know John Crichton is desperate to go home to Earth, is confused and out of place, would rather talk than hurt anybody, or let anybody hurt anyone else.  That’s who he is.  Episodes where he doesn’t act that way--trying to kill Crais and then very nearly killing Maldus--they’re anomolies.  One really bad day.  That’s why it’s so easy to shrug off the time he explodes the Peacekeeper shuttle with the virus-infected captain in it.  That can’t really be Crichton committing murder, because that’s not who he is.  That’s not who the status quo says he is.  If that’s who he is, it changes the status quo.

And the thing is, using status quo as a tool like that allows the show to do a lot of very gradual character development without the audience or the characters themselves actually noticing.  Season 2 Crichton is so angry all the time, but--well, it’s just bad days, because we know Crichton, and he’s a good guy who doesn’t like violence.  Or, once it’s been going on long enough--okay, I guess this is the new status quo, he’s just an angry guy.  Was he always like this?  Guess he changed while we weren’t looking.  The show doesn’t start to reveal what’s up with the chip until the back half of the season.  And then suddenly there’s a reason Crichton’s been acting like this, and that makes sense, but also by that point it’s become part of the status quo.  Crichton knows how to do violence and is so frustrated all the time.  That’s part of who he is now.

And I think the show really benefits from being watched with that mindset, because it feels like the characters are just as used to thinking of themselves and their friends in terms of status quo as we are.  I’m thinking about the episode where Zahn and D’Argo and Rygel rip off Pilot’s arm and then turn on each other.  By that point they’ve stood by each other through all sorts of problems, risked their lives for each other, and for Pilot and Moya, no question.  But the opportunity to go home comes up, and they each think about who they are, who they think they are, and they think, ‘I am a person for whom going home is the Number One Priority’.  Never mind how little time they’ve spent seeking out a way home compared to how much time they’ve spent taking care of each other.  By season 3, John loves Aeryn, loves Moya and her crew, would die for them and has actively tried to do so on multiple occasions, but he puts them all in danger for a chance at a wormhole and a way home.  Not because going home is actually more important to him than their safety--if you set out the choices in front of him, if you said ‘You go home but Moya and everyone on her will suffer or die’, he’d give up the chance to go home without question.  But the option comes up, and the little self-identification flag in his head goes, ‘Astronaut John Crichton, US of A, wants to go back to Earth more than anything in the world’, like a one-note character description blurb.

Farscape works really well when viewed as a show about a bunch of people who spend very little time actually thinking about where they’re going and why.  They drive around in circles getting into and out of trouble, trying to keep safe and keep fed, reacting to one problem after another, and not one of them has any kind of plan for getting the things they say they want.  Ask anybody on Moya if they intend to spend the rest of their lives there, they’d say no (or, ‘probably, and it looks like that’ll be about half an arn, now shut up and let us figure out how not to die’).  But not one of them have an actual plan for leaving her.

[jesterlady]

Absolutely feel free to skip this one because it’s very long and very spoiler-y.

How can I explain Farscape?  No, I'm not going to do the Mean Girls thing, it wouldn't do it justice. I think what makes Farscape so special was that it wholly embraced its scifi-ness and yet somehow managed to invert most of the tropes therein, in such a way that still managed to make it seem ground breaking and yet completely scifi.  One of the ways it does this is the fact there's only one human on this show.  John Crichton is our guide to the universe and the eyes through which everything is filtered (totally making him like the companion on DW, lol) but the show is a big melting pot of alien.  Even the aliens that are humanoid or look human have very specific cultures, physiology, mannerisms, and values that make them completely alien.  It's a bit shocking to get used to. Before I watched Farscape the only thing I knew about it was that it was extremely popular and made with Muppets in Australia.  In fact during the first episode I got all confused because all along I'm been assuming John Sheppard from Stargate Atlantis was Crichton, whoops. The first episode itself didn't immediately make me fall in love but it didn't take much more than the first half of a season to make me completely involved, in a good way or a bad way.  Like I said, this show doesn't play by humanity's rules.  Crichton may be the lead of the show and he may influence them all in huge ways, but these are incredibly different creatures with extremely different morals.  One of the very first episodes deals with three of the characters cutting off the arm of the Pilot in order to secure maps to their home worlds.  I was so pissed off and I kept on being pissed off through the whole episode and you know what...they don't apologize or realize it was wrong and they weren't influenced by the alien bad guy like I thought at first, in fact, in the end scene D'Argo even says he'd do it again.  He was attempting in his own way to make it up to Pilot, but he wasn't backing down.  I fretted and fumed about it for a while and then started writing fic in my head to fix it, but the episode brings home an important fact.  This isn't Star Trek, these aren't people, this show does things differently, and the main characters might not always be likeable.  John and Aeryn both bring up the incident later when they're being accused of something to remind everyone that that they were the ones who were a. psychotic about reaching home and b. not exactly careful about treating Pilot well, but that's all you get on that front. So, yeah, it's an interesting show to get used to.  The cute little Muppet is a dirty, greedy, rotten old man who betrays them countless times and constantly deserves to get spaced.  When Chiana joins the crew later she's like a little alien street rat who uses her body and whatever else she can to get by, but even though the only thing alien looking about her is makeup, her physicality is so incredible.  The actress just makes her move and stand and be alien, it's amazing, she's like a living puppet on strings. It's not the greatest budget on the planet and the special effects weren't amazing, but using the prosthetics and the puppets, actually made it really cool.  I love shows set in Australia, they just don't care if they reuse actors a bunch or if everyone speaks with an Aussie accent, they just focus on making their show and trust it to deliver what the budget can't.  It's very inspiring. And like I said, it turns things on their head.  Our lead John Crichton is so very Southern and he's all action hero and all, but he's also a scientist, an astronaut, incredibly smart, peculiarly fitted to understand space and learn to live with aliens.  His plans are insane and they always work even though they require a lot of improvisation along the way.  He's a pop culture machine, always spitting out references, which we get, but the aliens don't.  It's always a joy to wonder what he'll say next and what new nickname he'll give someone.  Now, he's got a reason to act crazy.   Literally just being shot to the other end of the universe and living among aliens would do that, but then he is hunted by Crais, Mr. Head Peacekeeper, and then gets the most wanted tech in the universe, wormhole knowledge, encoded in his brain.  So literally everyone wants to capture him and when he does get captured, he's tortured and then turned into Mr. Nosferatu Scorpius's pet science project, up to the point of having a chip in his head and then neural clones.  Imagine living with your worst enemy in your head.  I mean, it's no wonder Crichton is insane.  To be honest, I love Insane!Crichton, he's hilarious.  But...it's torture to watch at the same time.  At the end of S2, when they're desperately trying to get the chip out and each time it doesn't work out, I was audibly begging the invisible showmakers to please let him get the chip out. Of course the torture didn't end with the chip, why would it?  What is most torturous and most wondrous about the show is John and Aeryn's relationship.  I mean, talk about a romance for the ages.  They're never fully together it seems, they're never actually apart, but it doesn't feel like a 'will they, won't they' type of deal.  They are bound by astonishingly amazing chemistry and it just builds and builds until their UST is enough to make you explode.   But even that's all backwards because they have sex like first thing in the first season, and then it's never a thing really.  But they talk and talk and talk and work well together and protect each other and look at each other and sometimes even cuddle in Pilot's den.   Now Aeryn is stiff and bred for war and was taught love was a weakness.  She is an outcast from her people and adrift amongst the very people she was born to kill and hate.  It's difficult, oh yeah.  All through S2 she's just fighting it like crazy.  There's this whole 3 parter where John actually gets married to and has a baby with some Princess but he'll never live long enough to see his child and Aeryn is off freaking out while he's being held hostage in this situation.  At the end...do we get a beautiful reunion?  Nope, we get them both knowing that they're compatible and smiling.  Finally, finally when she does admit she loves him, he's being taken over by the evil clone in his head and he ends up killing her. Oh, and then when she's brought back to life by Zhaan (so sad Zhaan died like that.  I mean, it was beautiful, but I hated that she was gone) Aeryn admits to John she loves him but she won't be with him because Zhaan gave her life for Aeryn and Aeryn won't risk feelings because it would get people hurt.  Trope annoyance alert! I hate the whole 'I love you but I won't be with you because I would lose focus and it would hurt more if one of us died' bits.  You're gonna be worried about him anyway, honey, you might as well enjoy the fun part of love. Anyway...S3 was all sorts of fun and angst.   Because they twin John so now there's a copy and an original.  As soon as they didn't resolve that by the end of that episode I knew there was going to be angst about it, I spent like 10 episodes analyzing everything they each did and trying to figure out who was the copy and who I should root for to live and be with Aeryn.  By the way, they never reveal who the copy is.  So I will never know if John Crichton actually died in the Uncharted Territories.  This show, this show. But what they did was actually really clever and interesting.  They split the crew up for most of the season on two ships.  One Crichton on each. So they got to develop some interesting storylines that way.  Of course, as soon as Aeryn ended up with one of the Crichtons on Talyn, you kind of felt he was doomed.  Red shirt alert!  Another trope not inverted but held for maximum angst.  Because of course she and that John got together and it was beautiful and perfect and wonderful.  Then in a dramatic two parter, that John finally unlocks the wormhole tech in his brain and gets rid of the Scorpius clone living in his head while with Aeryn in beautiful, tangible love so...naturally he dies of radiation poisoning. It wrecks Aeryn, she finally opened up and then she had to grieve so she clams right the hell back up.  I mean, I knew it would happen, but I was so sad for the other Crichton because he's been on Moya missing her like hell and the saddest moment in all of Farscape (apart from Zhaan and D'Argo's deaths) is when he runs up to the transport pod with the cutest love struck look on his face, so anxious to see her again, and she just cuts him.  Oh, it breaks my heart to think about it. Of course, then they have to work together and it's obvious they both still care.  I get it with her, but I'm just like 'girl, you have the best opportunity in the world, to watch the one you die and still be able to have exactly him.'  They've both had to watch each other die at this point.  At the end of the season she leaves and he tries to stop her but she can't deal and he lets her go because they freaking toss a coin to see who wins that argument.  Wow.  Of course, magically (this whole bit is kind of silly) he finds out she's pregnant after she goes!  (Neranti is just weird but again, a delightfully non human element of the show that they just stick in.) So next season when they get reunited and she's finally figured things out a bit, but she still can't tell him the whole truth or if the baby is even his (weird alien gestation alert) and so he decides he can't trust his heart to her.  Ack!  Then she's working on building his trust back up and he's taking drugs to dull his feelings for her.  I am usually with Crichton on their relationship stuff cause she's so bad at (unused to) it but this time I was about ready to smack that boy.  I was clutching a pillow and yelling at the screen for him to say no to drugs for so much of that season.  Turns out it was all a ploy to protect her and the baby from Scorpius (which is also silly) but then as soon as she called him on it they started a secret relationship and it's going to be fine but she gets kidnapped and tortured and he breaks all hell and makes a deal with the devil to save her and they accidentally start an interstellar war and the Scarrans are going to attack Earth and Crichton collapses the wormhole that would let him go home again and then the baby is his and he proposes and they kiss and are happy and happy and happy and then they get shot and turned into crystals and the series ends... Yeah, this show ends every season on a cliffhanger and they got canceled.  I actually only found that out at the start of S4 when I started to question if it would be okay.  I freaked out and googled it and found out they had a miniseries to wrap things up.  Heart quieted at that point, maybe it was knowing that the story would continue on, but actually the ending wasn't so bad if it had ended there.  I could have happily pretended the last two bits didn't exist and that it ended with them getting engaged and having a baby and defeating the Scarrans.  I don't know. What I do know is that there was a miniseries that wrapped things up really well, completing the arcs and wrapping up the wormholes and the Peacekeeper/Scarran war and resolving John and Aeryn perfectly, giving them the happy ending they deserved with marriage and baby. Not to say that everything ended happily because D'Argo died and I don't like that at all.  He kind of asked for it, resolving things with Chiana and Jothee like that. Now, bits of the show that were weird and involve all of that.  D'Argo and Chiana get together in S2.  It was a bit weird and out of the blue if you ask me.  Not that they couldn't be together, but I feel like it was fairly obvious that D'Argo and Zhaan were really heading somewhere and then it just...stopped.  D'Argo and Chiana were not an obvious couple and she's all innocence and sensuality and little girl (D'Argo always felt a bit like her dad to me).  D'Argo is all honor and loyalty and commitment.  Now...D'Argo has been searching for his son Jothee for the last two seasons and they finally reunite at the end of S2 and it's so beautiful and gorgeous, but all hell breaks loose and they have to fight a war and all that and in the chaos Chiana and Jothee sleep together.   WHAT?  Chiana's been freaking out about D'Argo preparing to ask her to marry him, but geez.  It's another example of how the show is not afraid to make its characters do things that aren't likeable and aren't human, but still, that one threw me.  I feel like there were so many other ways they could have gone with that.  I would have really liked to have had Jothee join the show and have him and D'Argo really struggle with getting to know each other again and, if they weren't meant to be, Chiana and D'Argo could have plenty of relationship issues without that huge betrayal.  Maybe Jothee and Chiana could even end up together but only after proper development.  But instead, they did that.  Jothee leaves and we don't see him again until the miniseries.  D'Argo forgives Chiana but they don't get back together until the end of S4 and then things get all good between them in the miniseries and then, naturally, D'Argo dies. John and Aeryn name their baby after him!  Sob! But like I said, the show wrapped everything up pretty well and they were extremely good about pacing, really, about telling a deliberate story with plenty of room for natural development along the way and making sure every character and relationship and story arc got fulfilled.  The only thing I felt like got dangled and forgotten was from S3.  Stark, I have a special place in my heart for Stark, not sure why.  Boy is legit crazy and sane at the same time.  Him and Zhaan could have been nice.   But they do this whole thing with him being on Talyn while the crew is split up where he finds out what Crais and Talyn are up to and there's this whole menacing threat to Crais and then when he leaves, he encodes a message for Crichton on his mask and when John starts to listen to it, it gets interrupted and we never hear what Stark wanted to say.  Even when Stark comes back, it's never referred to ever again.  It might have become a moot point because Crais and Talyn sacrifice themselves for everyone at the end of that season, but I still feel like it was a pretty big thing to just leave hanging like that. So...I can't describe Farscape and what it means to me.  The show completely wrapped itself in my insides and won't let go.  I just want to watch it over and over again and I wish there was more and yet I'm so glad it ended the way it did.  This show lived and breathed naturally and it wasn't afraid to make bold choices, assuming its audience's intelligence, and yet it entertained.  The episodes Crackers Don't Matter and John Quixote are so hilarious.  Every bit where John interacts with Harvey in his brain is so amazing and funny.  The acting is flawless, the writing brilliant, the creativity boundless.  This show is submersive, you can't help but be drawn in and caught up in the plight of the living ship Moya and her crew.  Found family is one of my favorite things and this absolutely encapsulates that.  I remember reflecting in S1 that I didn't think they could ever all be a cohesive whole because everyone was so different.   That never changed but even the unlikable characters (Jool started out so so annoying but I actually really grew to like her) and the people who did things that made you angry, somehow they're still a vital and amazing part of a family and they fight for each other, they're trying to survive.  They're caught up in a galaxy's machinations and politics and wars, and mostly what they want to do is go home and protect each other.  They have to do horrible things along the way.  They don't always win.  There's a truly awful episode where they go back in time and end up causing the slaughter of a bunch of nuns!  I mean, wow.  But in the end, you root for them and you will die rooting for them.  All the different interactions are important.  Obviously John and Aeryn are the heart and soul, but Aeryn's relationship with Pilot is so touching and tender.  Crichton and Chiana have this slightly sexual but yet not, brother and sister relationship that could be weird yet never is.  John and D'Argo's epic, bickering bromance is a thing for the ages.  It's just beautiful.  It's like Crichton, a plague that has ruined my life.

I watched 4 seasons and 1 mini series in 14 days.  It was perfect because I was on vacation for the first 10 days and I actually really took my time, feeling like I had the time. I started it casually, but it quickly consumed everything.  I lived and breathed Farscape for those days even when I was doing other things and I made sure I did other things.  My hands were shaking, my heart was racing, I clutched pillows and yelled at the screen, and I did happy squee flailing and monkey dancing around my living room on more than one occasion.  This show is not casual, it is a lifestyle.  I am so glad I was not watching it while it was on air because having to wait even a microt for between seasons would have been horrible and too much.  It is such a blessing though, the perfect sci fi show.  It's not a perfect show like Leverage is literally perfect and I would never change a thing about it and it's not fluff and happiness and comedy like Parks and Rec is perfect, but it is everything a scifi show should be and it has all the ingredients necessary to make it absolutely one of the best shows I have ever seen. 10 out of 10 recommend.  Make sure you have some time because binge watching is so necessary with this one but do it, do it, do it.