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Looking back over her time on
Farscape, Riggs has no difficulty summing up some of her favourite moments.
"Most of my work with David Franklin I think," she immediately
offers. "I loved the scene where I promoted Braca that nobody will ever
see except perhaps on the DVD. I think it was going to be in episode 401, but
it got edited out, so in 402, it said, 'Last week on Farscape...'
You just saw a tiny snippet of it,
because they thought, 'Hang on, this is a relatively important story line that
we're not going to see!' but there was some stuff in there that I very much
enjoyed doing. I enjoyed working with David, but we used to make a joke that
our work was always in the first day of filming for every single script.
And maybe the bath scene is probably one
of them. It was just such a quirky scene. I don't see myself in that way all
and here I was, sitting in a bath that was gradually getting colder and
colder, and the edge of the bath
kept falling off, so there were all
these surreal, crazy things occurring. Within that, there was always this
absolute connection between David and myself and a lovely sense of going on
this weird ride together."
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One of
the biggest questions left hanging with the end of Farscape was the fate of commandant Grayza,
the seductive Sebacean last seen trying to acquire wormhole technology from John Crichton. By
the end of Season Four, Grayza's actions had inexplicably moved offstage, prompting some viewers
to wonder about the commandant's disappearance.
"I wouldn't want to say this in a court of law, but I
was getting married about the time of the end of the season," notes actress Rebecca Riggs
aka Commandant Grayza. "Although I could have done that last episode, I was flying away to
get married in another state and maybe they thought they were making it slightly easier for me
by not having me there for that episode, but I don't know for sure. That was something I heard;
it wasn't that I demanded not to be there. They also had so many things up in the air at that
stage, that maybe I wasn't the first priority in terms of resolving the end of the story. But I
think you'd have to ask somebody else for the real reason."
Like many of her fellow cast members, Riggs admits being
disappointed that there wasn't some measure of closure for her character but found a somewhat
unusual way to deal with it. "When I used to read books as a kid," she explains, "if I didn’t like the
ending because it was too sad or whatever, I'd make up my own journey afterwards. That certainly
wasn't an intentional thing, but I've got lots of Ideas about what might happen to Grayza after
that story. I suppose that solved the problem with my own imagination.”
Just what sort of ideas did Riggs have regarding Grayza's
future? "They're total speculation, nothing at all to do with anything that the writers may
have come up with but they're sort of connected to things that were in my head toward the end of
the series too. I found that Grayza had started acting in more and more irrational ways. That's
not something that I thought fitted her in some ways so I decided that she had a reason for
that, and the reason that I felt really comfortable with that was that she had another plan
going.
"I believe that Grayza was carrying
Crichton's child. It was my own personal secret; I think I mentioned it once to
[writer/producer] Ricky Manning, but that was probably on my last day. I can't even remember
what I said, but towards the end of the season things were pretty hectic and I was getting
scripts in which Grayza was behaving in a certain way and I'd think, 'Oh God, how can that make
sense for me?’ So I made up this plan and that sat pretty comfortably with me. They have had
sex, and added to that I knew that Sebaceans were able to control their fertility and play
around with the time frame of that. I know that Grayza wanted something more than what she was
getting out of what she'd been doing. But I don't mean that she suddenly got really maternal
either. I think she believed that Crichton was the key to that without really knowing why, and
she wanted to find out."
And if Farscape had gone on to a fifth
and final season, the jury is still very much out about Grayza's ultimate fate. "Like most
of the time on Farscape," claims Rebecca Riggs, "you heard extremely different stories
from different people so that left many possibilities and no certainties whatsoever.
"I heard all sorts of things but I don't think they would have been solidified
until Season Five began. I know they had set up this magnificent Scarran story so I know that
they were going to focus on that, and to be honest I don't know where that would have left
Grayza. There was a lot of talk about a mini-series or a feature film to finish the story but I
don't know if that's going to happen now because things are dissipating. That's the problem if
those things were going to happen. Anything is possible, but I just don't know."
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