While
making an earth-orbit test of his own theory, John Crichton,
astronaut and scientist, is sucked into a wormhole and deposited
on the other side of the universe. Immediately
after arriving, another ship runs into him before it crashes
into an asteroid and explodes. He's then pulled into an enormous
living ship populated by four alien beings: D'Argo, a huge Luxan
warrior; Zhaan, a blue Delvian priest; Rygel, a slug-like
Hynerian royal; and Pilot, who is bonded to the ship - a
Leviathan named Moya.
John soon
learns that these people were prisoners who are running from a
militaristic group called Peacekeepers. When the escaping
prisoners use a maneuver called StarBurst to put distance
between them and the Peacekeepers, they drag one of the soldiers
along in their wake, a female
prowler pilot named Aeryn Sun. John and Aeryn are kept in a cell
on board the ship but they manage to escape and hotfoot it down
to a nearby commerce planet. Aeryn contacts the Peacekeepers to
inform them of the whereabouts of the prisoners and the ship.
When
the PK commander, Captain Bialar
Crais, arrives he accuses John of deliberately crashing into his
brother, the pilot who actually ran into Crichton the moment he
popped out of the wormhole. Crais takes him prisoner along with
D'Argo. When Aeryn stands up for John, claiming he's too
cowardly and stupid to have intentionally attacked the captain's
brother, Crais threatens her with irreversible contamination for
spending so much time with an unclassified life form. Even
though John stands up for her in return, they all end up in the
local jail. John manages to get one of the guard's weapons and
he and D'Argo talk Aeryn into escaping with them. Moya is unable
to StarBurst again because she needs to recuperate from the last
time, so John successfully field-tests his theory while Aeryn
manually pilots the Leviathan, enabling them to escape into the
Uncharted Territories.
There was so
much information packed into this first episode that it's
amazing there was time to tell a story at all, but they
certainly did, a story of endings and beginnings. Far from being
the always-competent astronaut hero we've come to expect in sci
fi, John is having many of the same problems most of us would
have in his situation. He's just coping with it a little better. |
