Last
week’s Daedalus Demands collected numerous threads from 2˝
seasons of cliffhangers large and small. This week those threads
were seamlessly interwoven into one of the best Farscape
episodes ever.
In
retrospect, the ending was a given from the very first scenes.
The Scorpius clone was dead, John had the wormhole knowledge to
go home, and Aeryn was figuratively packing her bags to head to
Earth with him. They had to do just one more thing before they
could leave, but it was a doozy: save the universe from the
Scarran scourge. Lots of big red arrows here, all pointing
toward the death of John Crichton. Even Furlow contributed a
hint, saying that she wanted to be the one to walk away while
the hero died.
Stark
played the perfect obsequious little slave, acting exactly the
way the Scarran expected him to. He expertly lead Mr. Superior
Race directly into defeating himself with overconfidence.
“Haaaate him!” (talking about Crais) I think this was one of
the few true things he said to Alcar. Later, Stark looked
absolutely flabbergasted when Crais told him he did well.
Furlow:
After watching Season One’s Til
the Blood Runs Clear, I thought Furlow was mostly harmless,
but I was wrong. Through Furlow, the writers took another jab at
commercialism (previous pokes at profiteering can be seen in
Scratch ‘N’ Sniff and Meltdown).
Jack:
It’s easy to forget that there are two heroes in this episode
who died to save their people. Jack stayed behind when the
Ancients went to their new home knowing that he might never join
them. That was heroic. Turning his back on Furlow was just plain
stupid.
Aeryn:
The best example of how much “more“ Aeryn’s become since
Premier? She mutters to the Charrid, “Run away…be
smart…run away…” She shoots him because she has to, not as
the result of a conditioned Peacekeeper response.
John
was a true hero, selflessly doing the right thing not just once,
but twice. He knew how deadly the radiation leaking out of
Jack’s displacement device was, and yet he still got close
enough to it to seal the leak. If he had sought treatment for
the radiation sickness instead of running the wormhole, he could
possibly have saved his own life, but again he made the hero’s
choice. It made me think all the way back to Premier when
Jack Crichton told his son that each man gets the chance to be
his own kind of hero.
It’s
very easy to dwell on the nearly perfect final scene, but Icarus
Abides was so much more than that one scene. Here are just a few
of the many things that stood out this week.
Claudia
Black’s and Ben Browder’s acting abilities continue to
astound me. I cried for an hour after the show ended last night,
woke up this morning feeling miserable, and here I am again,
sniffling away. It takes a great ability to evoke that much
emotion over a couple of people who aren’t even real.
The
Charrids were some of the best aliens so far and I loved their
costumes, especially the hats.
They even had great ears that were nearly hidden by their
hair. A well-earned round of applause for the Costume
Department, the Makeup Department, and the Creature Shop,
please.
Sometimes
music can be grating in a highly emotional situation, but this
time the music gave an extra dimension to an already
multidimensional episode. Thank you Guy Gross.
I
loved the little dune buggy vehicles they used. They were much
more interesting than the fabric-covered golf carts on DamBaDa
in Season One.
We’ve
come to expect nothing less than fantastic CGI from Farscape,
and this week it’s even better than usual. Some of my
favorites: the view from outside the dreadnought as it
approached DamBaDa with the blue wormhole in the distance;
Farscape 1 running the displacement in the wormhole,
the dreadnought exploding.
|
