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I
love the way Farscape does season openers, especially this one.
It doesn’t use half the episode wrapping up the previous
season and the other half explaining every little thing that
happened in between. More questions are raised than are answered
and nobody rides off into the sunset happily strumming a guitar.
(Yeah, I know Season Three started exactly where Two left off
and did wrap up a lot of the cliffhangers, but it had a very
un-sunset-riding, -guitar-strumming ending.)
Somehow
John was rescued by Elack, an elderly Leviathan, and his Pilot
and has spent a beard-growing amount of time drinking his way
through wormhole calculations. He’s lonely but sort of happy,
dreaming of Aeryn and her/his unborn baby, and teaching DRDs the
finer points of Tchaikovsky.
This
is too good to last and, of course, it doesn’t – this is
Farscape, after all. With only a couple of microts warning from
Pilot, Sikozu literally crashes into his life trailing the
Leviathan-harvesting Grudeks in her wake.
John:
This is the most light-hearted John we’ve seen in some time.
Granted, he was drunk at the beginning, but his time alone seems
to have done him good. Aeryn was such a downer for the last
several episodes of Season Three and John finally realizes that
longing for something that’s out of his reach (at least for
now) does nothing but make him sad. About time, too, John.
Aeryn’s been so cold to you so many times that unless she
changes, you’re much better off without her.
I
enjoyed the Klingon references and I found the whole tethered
goat thing hilarious. One of the reasons Ben Browder makes such
a great John Crichton is that he doesn’t mind looking
ridiculous for the sake of the story.
Sikozu:
This new arrival has a lot of qualities that I love. She’s
smart, she’s hostile, she’s gorgeous and she walks on walls
– what’s not to like? The translator microbe thing could
make for a lot of interesting scenes and the instant friendship
between her and Chiana that didn’t happen could make for a lot
more. Apparently she’s not to fond of Crichton either, but if
everyone loved everyone, it wouldn’t be Farscape.
Chiana:
Oh, poor Chiana – what happened to her? She told John a bit of
it, but I’m sure there’s more. This new ability to see the
present in slow-motion is pretty strange but I bet it will come
in handy a few more times before the year’s out.
Farscape
seems to use hair as an indication of a character’s state of
mind and right now, Chiana’s is a mess. She and her hair have
reverted to their roots in Season One’s Durka Returns – wild
and unpredictable – and I for one am glad to see it. She was
turning into an old woman last year.
Rygel::
He looks awful, like he’s spent the time away in puppet
purgatory. His experiences haven’t changed him much, though,
as evidenced by that half-hearted effort he made to break
Crichton’s fall down the shaft. He’s pretty proud of the
fact that he’s worth a couple of million more to the
Peacekeepers than Chiana is. Why doesn’t that surprise me?
Pilot
& 1812: These
two are such terrific characters it’s nearly impossible to
believe that one is a puppet and the other is a
remote-controlled inanimate pile of nuts and bolts.
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