Farscape Rewind: Episode 1.22

[Mr. Infamous]

Well at long last we're back with the final episode of season one, "Family Ties". Family Ties is overall a somewhat mediocre episode, not a train wreck like the last one but definitely not as good as some of the others that we've already watched. Truth be told I'd remembered it as being better.

We start out with Moya still hiding in the asteroid field from Bone to be Wild only now Rygel's got it into his head that the best way to remedy the situation is to fly a transport pod over to the Pk command carrier and try to sell out the others for his own safe passage. The episode drops us right into the middle of him already having left the ship while the other characters just generally spaz out and try to contact him on the coms.

We next cut over to Scorpy and Crais, so Scorpy can drop a brief call back to the last episode about how the security officer sent to watch M'lee has vanished without explanation. Don't worry though she's on an outbound marauder so we won't be seeing any more of her in this episode. Scorpy reminds the audience a bit more about how important wormhole tech is to him and how it's in John's head, then Braca brings in Rygel where he lays out his proposal to the Pks to trade his freedom for the others.

Opening credits roll and we're back on Moya again with everyone trying to figure out what their next move will be. Dargo mentions the star map from last episode and suggests using baby Moya to fight the PKs. Aeryn tells him that baby Moya would be like "throwing stones" against the carrier so John suggests a kamikaze mission with a transport pod instead. It won't do anything crashed into the bridge empty apparently but John wants to load it up with explosives and Aeryn seems to think that that might at least buy them enough time to escape. So here's the plan for the episode then, simple enough right. Load up transport pod with explosives, fly it into command carrier's bridge to distract it, escape. Ok we're 5 minutes in, now lets watch it take them another 45 minutes just to do this. Almost all the various complaints I'll voice about this episode can basically be traced back to this right here. Bringing in this bomb plan this early really makes the rest of the episode feel like they're stalling for time, probably because that's exactly what they're doing. The characters have already figured out what they're going to do at this point, and aside from a minor target modification to the plan later on it is what they'll end up doing. I can't help but think that introducing this whole plot thread a little bit later might have been beneficial, especially since the plan as described here would seem to imply that at least one of them is going to have to commit suicide flying this bomb pod into the carrier, something which is oddly never addressed by the story.

We see more of Scorpy and Rygel next, and get to learn a few interesting things. First off there's one thing Crais knows that Scorpy apparently doesn't, that Aurora chairs kill Hynerians instantly so are useless as an interrogation method on them. It's interesting because you would think Scorpy would know this given what a demonstrated fan he is of the chair. It also suggests that the chair is actually a fairly common piece of Pk tech if Crais can know this much about it. We also get to learn via Scorpy's lie detector spidey sense that apparently whatever Rygel was going there to do it wasn't necessarily to sell out the others, or at least not all of them. Scorpy says he's "wasting their time" but once he threatens to imprison Rygel that seems to bring him around to the point where he actually does agree to help the PKs for real.

Back on Moya Dargo and Chiana are fighting about how she's going to avoid becoming a PK bullet sponge when they board Moya, while John and Zhaan cook up some sort of chemical explosive oil and talk about family. We get another reminder here of how close the crew's gotten by now with Zhaan telling John that she considers them her family and him returning the sentiment. The only other thing to note here is that the bomb they're making is nothing but this lutra oil of Zhaan's and some shavings from the floor of the cargo bay. This will become important later when we see just how big of a bang this thing is worth.

Next we get another scene between Aeryn and pilot that's most noteworthy because the writers actually remembered that they have other ships this time. Pilot reminds Aeryn that she could just escape the current situation in her prowler if she wanted to, but she says she's not going anywhere. They don't explain why someone like Chiana wouldn't steal it though, since she can fly it. The scene closes out with Aeryn still trying to think of a name for baby Moya.

We rejoin John next, trying to record some kind of final message to his dad back on Earth in his tape recorder. Aeryn comes in and they talk a bit about their parents, we learn that Aeryn doesn't really know her father but that her mother came to her once when she was very young and told her that her parents had loved one another, which is atypical for Pks apparently.

Rygel's getting some of that PK love on the command carrier first hand, waking up from bathing to find his tub surrounded by severed Hynerian heads. It's not clear how this whole thing happened but I like to picture Crais sort of sneaking around moving the various heads into position while Rygel dozes in the tub unawares. Right now Crais is more interested in drowning Rygel for a bit though, before bringing him up again to explain that Scorpius has already ordered his execution. Now Crais has some sort of chip here that he claims contains Rygel's death certificate and he tells him that Scorpy's ordered a slow death for him to show the crew what he thinks of traitors but thinking about it in hindsight it's not really clear if this was all the truth or just some clever trick by Crais to scare Rygel into what comes next. Crais actually gets a pretty big upgrade in the brains department this episode, as we can already see from the Aurora chair thing, so it's not totally outside the realm of possibility here that he bullshitted this whole thing to get what he wanted. Crais wants off the command carrier, Rygel now naturally does to and well, that's what happens next.

Crais and Rygel return to Moya on the original transport pod and right now you're probably expecting me to say "why would Scorpy let them leave like that" well just wait and see. Crias gets out of the pod to a warm welcome that includes Dargo beating the crap out of him before he's tossed into one of Moya's prison cells. Before he's carted off though Dargo gets him to tell all the others present that Dargo didn't kill his mate and was falsely imprisoned. Crais kept him locked up this whole time basically because of a legal technicality and well, to be honest, most likely mainly because he didn't give enough of a shit to get him let out. Crais says he needed some sort of official order from a government council to release a condemned murderer but there's no indication he ever even tried to inquire about how to get one for Dargo, and Dargo was his guest for, as I recall, the better part of a decade. Gives you a pretty good indication of the kind of man Crais was. The PK legal system itself actually has a process through which a wrongly convicted murderer can be freed, Crais just never started the process, even though he knew Dargo was innocent for years and had nothing to actually gain by holding him. He basically kept him prisoner solely because he was simply too lazy to do otherwise.

Anyway, Rygel explains to the others how Crais was a walking corpse on his own ship, Aeryn and Dargo have a similar "friendship scene" to the one John and Zhaan had earlier, Scorpy explains to Braca that he let Crais go on purpose and will later have him declared "irreversibly contaminated" like he did Aeryn, and John gets to vent a year's worth of emotion on Crais. This scene is most noteworthy because not only is it pretty well acted, but it also marks a pivotal turning point for Crais where he both admits that he knows his brother's death was an accident and that he knows that his actions as of late have been basically insane. This is the episode where Crais becomes more of an actual character and less of a walking bag of inexplicable anger, so combined with the above average cleverness he also shows, it's definitely a good one for him.

Next we hear even more about the bomb plan, this time with Crais present to basically shoot the whole thing down by pointing out that the command carrier will suspect something fishy about a fully laden pod coming at them unannounced and just shoot them down well out of range. This leads to the crew coming up with plan B, keep the giant bomb but instead of crashing it into the carrier crash it into Scorpy's evil moonbase from Nerve instead. The idea here is that Scorpy will withdraw his carrier to chase the pod if he thinks Crichton's on it, the problem is that Scorpy is in command of a space going aircraft carrier with entire squadrons of lesser craft that could easily chase down and disable a single pod, and probably do so a lot faster and more safely than their big lumbering mothership with it's building sized cannons of megadeath possibly could.

Yep that's a pretty big problem alright. The carrier could easily just saturate the entire area with fighters and those marauder gunship things making it virtually impossible to actually open a hole in the net big enough for Moya to fit through using only a single defenseless pod as bait. How does the crew solve this problem you may wonder, well they don't, because the episode again forgets that the ship the script repeatedly calls a command carrier actually, you know, carries things.

Instead we're fed what's supposed to be this grand strategy about forcing Scorpius to chase the tiny pod with his entire city sized carrier ship because well... yeah, it's cunning you see. He has to chase the pod because if he doesn't it's going to blow up his base and/or John's going to get away. Oh and those air defenses the moon base had that everyone was so worried about in Nerve, yeah they also took their lunch break at the same time all the carrier's attack craft did.

This is pretty much your classic example of a bullshit solution dressed up to seem clever solely through the incompetence of the adversary. There's no way Scorpius, with the resources he has, should need to move the entire carrier just to chase a transport pod, or even if he does, there's no reason that moving the carrier should have any impact on any fighter patrols he's already left spread all over the place to guard the asteroid field. The carrier's position should be of very little actual importance compared to the position of all the various patrols and such it's been launching for probably days by now.

That's the whole point of a carrier, the threat primarily comes from what it carries. It's a shame to because the PK command carrier, with it's squadrons of FTL capable fighters is actually a pretty clever piece of hardware for a sci-fi show when taken purely on what we know it should be able to do. It's a lot better thought out than something like a star destroyer for example, which basically just spits out a series of smaller laughably impotent targets for whatever it's fighting to shoot down. The PK carrier's fighters however have a much much longer reach thanks to their own FTL type drive, as well as access to weapons that can really ruin the day of a ship much larger than themselves. They're actually comparable to a real life carrier launched fighters/bombers in that sense, being that they can theoretically reach far from their mothership and drop some serious hurting on an adversary via those torpedoes or whatever it was they used in PK wars. Such a shame then that the whole potential of the carrier will go on to be so chronically misused in the series. It would have taken a brief read through one book on the "Battle for the Pacific" to correct this, or even a google search. Instead though they'll take this thing they've come up with that's big enough to carry easily thousands of these nasty little fighters and repeatedly put it into Star Trek TNG or Star Wars style spitting distance battles where it makes no sense for it to be at all given its ascribed capabilities. In this episode they've got the ridiculous notion that the carrier itself must chase a transport pod because giant swarms of small nimble FTL capable fighters are clearly less ideal for doing so. Other later episodes will include similar stupidity all stemming from the same general source, "everybody that does visual space battles in sci-fi just rips off what they saw on Star Wars and Star Trek TNG decades ago". I'll tell you the one person that has the balls to finally discard this tired "visual range combat" cliche that's persisted since the seventies will get a lot of respect from me just for that reason alone. I'm just sad that it couldn't have been Farscape to do it, as a show that was so innovative in so many other areas really shouldn't be limiting itself to just regurgitating this same old shlock without even pausing to think about why they're doing it and if it even makes sense given what they've told/shown us already. Yeah sure some people might consider it "nerdy" to even dare mention something like this but you know what, fuck 'em. That's a pretty bullshit way to try and cover for the recycling of a tired genre cliche that's literally over 30 years old by now. I'm sick of seeing this all the time anyway and it only chaps my ass more when it doesn't even begin to make the slightest bit of sense for it to be there. It's like having a character in a story who's got a loaded gun in each hand, but only ever fights by running around and kicking people, because that's what the guy with two loaded guns in the movie 30 years ago did, and we don't want to alarm the assumed moron audience with too much change at once.

Well with this week's rant out of the way lets get back to the episode. So after Crais is done shitting all over the original kamikaze plan, they shift to the plan B of crashing the bomb pod into Scorpy's moon base instead. I'll just take a moment here to also note that the idea of building a secret base on a moon that's somehow entirely covered with highly flammable oil is so idiotic in so many different ways as to invite the possibility of me dying of old age before finishing any rant I might dare embark upon about it.

Since no one's going stick around and keep reading this while I gradually decline into senility lets move on to the next scene of interest which is one that takes place between Aeryn and Zhaan. It's not much of a scene but it's interesting for one line that Zhaan drops where she states that she doesn't believe she deserves to exist any more because she murdered her douchebag dictator of a former boyfriend. Now I've come down on both sides of Zhaan in the past, sometimes I like her, sometimes I think she's a self deluding walking irritation, with a self serving bogus claim to religion, and an equally self serving and hypocritical code of morality more flexible than Gumby during a master yoga class. This is a case of the former though. Zhaan is a character with a lot a deep faults and questionable morals that I think a lot of people tend to miss on their way to fitting her into the "wise sagely alien" niche. To hear her say that she doesn't think she deserves to live because she knocked off the guy that sold out her entire planet to the space Nazi's for his own petty personal gain though, that sucks. One of her major flaws is this deep self hatred she has over her past which, taken by objective standards, is really not particularly awful at all. It's especially sad if you begin to think about how it might have contributed to her eventual fate and how none of the other characters ever seemed to try to call attention to how disproportionately hard on herself she's being over one obviously corrupt dictator who's card she punched prematurely something like a decade ago. To put it bluntly someone needed to tell her to stop beating herself up over it because ultimately what she did she did only out of the desire to prevent innocent suffering, and not only was she already made to suffer years of torturous imprisonment for it, but through this sacrifice of hers she may have actually improved or even saved the lives of countless others. If circumstances had been different she could easily have been hailed as a hero of her people, and may yet be at some point in the future when all traces of PK backed corruption are driven from her homeworld.

Our next scene is another interesting one between Chiana and John where she tries to offer him sex as a thank you for flying the pod that's going to save them all by abusing Scorpy's plot mandated stupidity. It highlights how in her own way Chiana is actually fairly naive when it comes to other people, just in a more unconventional way. In this case because she doesn't really understand why Crichton wouldn't want sex from her in these circumstances or given his obvious closeness with Aeryn, nor does she seem to be able to think of a more appropriate thing to do to send him off. It's obvious that she's largely gotten by on her sex appeal thus far and when placed in a situation where that option isn't on the table she's completely out of her depth emotionally.

John tells her to "pass on" the kindness he's showing her instead and she does so later on by making quite an impressive amount of food for all the other characters. I don't think her cooking ever comes up again but given this performance it probably should have. Where she found time as a fugitive teenager to learn how to cook like Gordon Ramsey on speed is anyone's guess though.

Next we get a bit more nefarious planning from Scorpy and Braca and Crais takes a tour of baby Moya with Aeryn, briefly speaking some sort of alien language that doesn't sound anything like the Sebacean we heard in previous episodes. Not sure what the point of that little number was.

We're back on Moya next for another 2 character heart to heart next, the likes of which are becoming pretty tiresome by now in this episode. It's Rygel and John this time and the moral of the day is that "the right thing starts at the beginning of the day not once you've been caught". It's something of a shame they jammed so many of these little 2 character scenes into this one episode, an obvious effort to stretch out the running time, because some of them are actually pretty good. This one with Rygel here is probably my favorite but by this time in the episode I'm feeling a lot more "get to the fucking point already" than I am "I wonder how Rygel's feeling right now".

Anyway we're finally into the final act. John records another better message to his dad, Baby Moya gets a name; Talyn, Crais steals him, the bomb plan finally goes ahead and Dargo gets his best line of the series so far. "Fear accompanies the possibility of death, calm shepherds it's certainty".

The rest of the episode is basically just a continuous action sequence. The pod takes off heading for the planet, Scorpy chases them in his entire carrier, Scorpy fails to catch them in time and the bomb explodes in a mushroom cloud about half the size of Australia. Considering this bomb was made from some floor tiles in Moya's cargo hold and a bit of magic oil you get a bit of insight into why a civilization based entirely around fighting other people's bad guys for them can actually exist and get customers. If I thought somebody that didn't like my country very much could just fill up a uHaul with cargo ship floor tiles and magic oil and blow the whole thing up I might be inclined to hire on some space Nazis to handle things for a while to.

The last part of the plan here is that Aeryn's going to pick up John and Dargo after they bail out of the pod, John with a space suit on and Dargo and Aeryn for some reason without one. I suppose it's possible that they still only have 1 suit total from way back when that second one was broken but that seems pretty unlikely. Nah what we're looking at here is false drama to put a sense of a time limit on the rescue (before Dargo dies of exposure) combined with a little lack of forethought about what would happen if Aeryn tried to open her cockpit to pick them up when she herself had no spacesuit.

The episode ends on the cliffhanger they were fairly obviously padding it out to attain this whole time. The secret moon base is on fire, Scorpy's been tricked, Moya's escaped, but John and Dargo are still awaiting pickup from Aeryn and Dargo's just passed out, dun dun dun. Tune in for the thrilling conclusion next season.

Final verdict: Family Ties is a fairly mediocre episode that suffers mainly from the fact that it becomes increasingly obvious as it goes on that the script is just filling time because they want a cliffhanger at the end. There's some decent character moments but also a bit of plot induced stupidity to complain about and some stuff that grinds the gears of the setting itself, like continent sized fireballs growing out of homemade bombs and ships full of 50,000 people all too stupid to use them properly, but hey, there was that scene where they actually acknowledge that Aeryn could just escape the whole situation in her prowler if she wanted to.

[Rustydogz]

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Well at long last we're back with the final episode of season one, "Family Ties". Family Ties is overall a somewhat mediocre episode, not a train wreck like the last one but definitely not as good as some of the others that we've already watched. Truth be told I'd remembered it as being better.

See? Told you so.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

I can't help but think that introducing this whole plot thread a little bit later might have been beneficial,

Yes, a bit of problem with story construction here. There is a type of story that begins with the plan and the drama comes from the details in carrying it out, but it is a tricky story type to do successfully.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

especially since the plan as described here would seem to imply that at least one of them is going to have to commit suicide flying this bomb pod into the carrier, something which is oddly never addressed by the story.

And no mention of a remote control, how tricky could that be. True, they have no tech person, but it should be mentioned. And since Moya is a living ship, and it is one of her pods, shouldn't the pod have some semblance of life also? Or failing that, Moya should be able to control her own pods, since they are in a way part of her, an extension of her being. Even though Moya is an organic, living ship, the writers acted as though her pods were just metal hardware like the Prowler, which does not follow with the conceptualization of Moya herself.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

The only other thing to note here is that the bomb they're making is nothing but this lutra oil of Zhaan's and some shavings from the floor of the cargo bay. This will become important later when we see just how big of a bang this thing is worth.

Yes that is a lame concept for a home-made bomb. Esp when the idea is to attack a warship with it.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Dargo was his guest for, as I recall, the better part of a decade. Gives you a pretty good indication of the kind of man Crais was.

In some eps they imply it was three years, in others, decades.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

John gets to vent a year's worth of emotion on Crais. This scene is most noteworthy because not only is it pretty well acted, but it also marks a pivotal turning point for Crais where he both admits that he knows his brother's death was an accident and that he knows that his actions as of late have been basically insane. This is the episode where Crais becomes more of an actual character and less of a walking bag of inexplicable anger, so combined with the above average cleverness he also shows, it's definitely a good one for him.

It was the high point of the Crais character. Now, if they had kept that going for two or three episodes, or even four, then killed him off or had him go away never to return, that would have been great. But they kept him hanging around for years for no good reason.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Next we hear even more about the bomb plan, this time with Crais present to basically shoot the whole thing down by pointing out that the command carrier will suspect something fishy about a fully laden pod coming at them unannounced and just shoot them down well out of range. This leads to the crew coming up with plan B, keep the giant bomb but instead of crashing it into the carrier crash it into Scorpy's evil moonbase from Nerve instead.

And of course the same reasoning Crais supplied regarding the carrier also applies to the moonbase.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Yep that's a pretty big problem alright. The carrier could easily just saturate the entire area with fighters and those marauder gunship things making it virtually impossible to actually open a hole in the net big enough for Moya to fit through using only a single defenseless pod as bait. How does the crew solve this problem you may wonder, well they don't, because the episode again forgets that the ship the script repeatedly calls a command carrier actually, you know, carries things.

I think they ignored the presence of the fighters since episode two.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Oh and those air defenses the moon base had that everyone was so worried about in Nerve, yeah they also took their lunch break at the same time all the carrier's attack craft did.

Exactly. This is science fiction written with the logic of a comic book for ten year olds.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

In this episode they've got the ridiculous notion that the carrier itself must chase a transport pod because giant swarms of small nimble FTL capable fighters are clearly less ideal for doing so. I'll tell you the one person that has the balls to finally discard this tired "visual range combat" cliche that's persisted since the seventies will get a lot of respect from me just for that reason alone. I'm just sad that it couldn't have been Farscape to do it, as a show that was so innovative in so many other areas really shouldn't be limiting itself to just regurgitating this same old shlock without even pausing to think about why they're doing it and if it even makes sense given what they've told/shown us already.

I expected better from Farscape. They continue to do some incredibly imaginative things, then inexplicably fall back into schlock cliches.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

I'll just take a moment here to also note that the idea of building a secret base on a moon that's somehow entirely covered with highly flammable oil is so idiotic in so many different ways as to invite the possibility of me dying of old age before finishing any rant I might dare embark upon about it.

The first thing is, if the Peacekeepers found such a place they would have giant refineries built on the moon to gather the resource, not a military base, unless it was there to guard the refineries.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Since no one's going stick around and keep reading this while I gradually decline into senility lets move on to the next scene of interest which is one that takes place between Aeryn and Zhaan. It's not much of a scene but it's interesting for one line that Zhaan drops where she states that she doesn't believe she deserves to exist any more because she murdered her douchebag dictator of a former boyfriend. Now I've come down on both sides of Zhaan in the past, sometimes I like her, sometimes I think she's a self deluding walking irritation, with a self serving bogus claim to religion, and an equally self serving and hypocritical code of morality more flexible than Gumby during a master yoga class. This is a case of the former though.

So you like her this episode, even with the exaggerated self-pity?

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Our next scene is another interesting one between Chiana and John where she tries to offer him sex as a thank you for flying the pod that's going to save them all by abusing Scorpy's plot mandated stupidity. It highlights how in her own way Chiana is actually fairly naive when it comes to other people, just in a more unconventional way. In this case because she doesn't really understand why Crichton wouldn't want sex from her in these circumstances

I don't understand it either. He has certain standards to uphold as the stud hero of the show. He has no girlfriend, however lusty his thoughts may be for Aeryn, and he isn't getting any from her either, so he should have gone for some space-hangar-deck action while he had the chance, as any self-respecting action hero would.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

or given his obvious closeness with Aeryn, nor does she seem to be able to think of a more appropriate thing to do to send him off.

Completely appropriate. Good girl Chiana.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

It's obvious that she's largely gotten by on her sex appeal thus far and when placed in a situation where that option isn't on the table she's completely out of her depth emotionally.

That is true, she does not know how to interact with others on a 'normal' level, she relates to people based on a system of cons, bargains, favors, hustles.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Crais takes a tour of baby Moya with Aeryn, briefly speaking some sort of alien language that doesn't sound anything like the Sebacean we heard in previous episodes. Not sure what the point of that little number was.

Probably just to hint at some possible bond between those two, completely impossible given their past history.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

It's something of a shame they jammed so many of these little 2 character scenes into this one episode, an obvious effort to stretch out the running time, because some of them are actually pretty good.

Yes, good scenes but there were an awful lot of them.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Nah what we're looking at here is false drama to put a sense of a time limit on the rescue (before Dargo dies of exposure) combined with a little lack of forethought about what would happen if Aeryn tried to open her cockpit to pick them up when she herself had no spacesuit.

I wondered how she expected to get them on board. Maybe her Prowler has a front that opens into a big maw like Blofeld's ship in 'You Only Live Twice'. Basically the writers found another way for Aeryn to screw up.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Final verdict: Family Ties is a fairly mediocre episode

I agree. I hope next season is better.

[Mr. Infamous]

Originally Posted by Rustydogz

See? Told you so.

Yeah I've got to concede that one. It wasn't until I watched this with a more critical eye toward reviewing it that I actually started to notice the flaws. It's still not a Jeremiah Crichton or Bone to be Wild but it's definitely not a Nerve or Hidden Memory either.

Yes, a bit of problem with story construction here. There is a type of story that begins with the plan and the drama comes from the details in carrying it out, but it is a tricky story type to do successfully.

The plan in this case was too simple to really support that kind of story. It's basically just, oil + shavings = boom. The plot just gives them the oil and shavings to as they're already available on Moya, something which is certainly destined to go the way of Zhaan's superpowers the next time a continent sized nuclear explosion might prove useful.

And no mention of a remote control, how tricky could that be. True, they have no tech person, but it should be mentioned. And since Moya is a living ship, and it is one of her pods, shouldn't the pod have some semblance of life also? Or failing that, Moya should be able to control her own pods, since they are in a way part of her, an extension of her being. Even though Moya is an organic, living ship, the writers acted as though her pods were just metal hardware like the Prowler, which does not follow with the conceptualization of Moya herself.

It's weird because they come up with this plan to suicide an exploding pod into Scorpius' carrier, something which is at best just going to stun it for a while so they can escape, and they're acting like they've cracked the problem as opposed to come up with a desperate last ditch effort that's going to require one of them die just to spoil the paint job on Scorpy's carrier. It's most interesting probably because taken with the end of the episode it does show you just how nasty a PK carrier actually is. It's something they could have made a point to remind the audience of later when they started to flirt with the idea of the PK's getting to Earth. I don't think the nuclear arsenal of the entire planet added together could equal that bomb they made, and that bomb wasn't even going to be able to destroy one PK carrier.

Nice departure from stargate anyway. Where the badguys show up and are wiped out by the 14th floor of norad in a matter of minutes and nobody sees it.

Yes that is a lame concept for a home-made bomb. Esp when the idea is to attack a warship with it.

It's funny because it makes you think that if you can make a bomb like that out of floor tiles and some of Zhaan's oil, what kind of bombs do actual military organizations like the PKs and Scarrans have? There is a season 4 episode where Grayza tells Braca to ready her Carrier to destroy the entire Earth so I guess it does make sense in context with that one but still, damn.

In some eps they imply it was three years, in others, decades.

I think he said in a previous episode that it was either eight or twelve years. I couldn't remember exactly and I wasn't going to recheck them all to find it but either way it really reflects badly on Crais. "Oh I know he's innocent but getting him out is going to be a headache so I won't even delegate it to a subordinate, let him stay in there".

It was the high point of the Crais character. Now, if they had kept that going for two or three episodes, or even four, then killed him off or had him go away never to return, that would have been great. But they kept him hanging around for years for no good reason.

He becomes just a little too nice and friendly later on considering his origins to.

And of course the same reasoning Crais supplied regarding the carrier also applies to the moonbase.

If you wanted to be really generous you could say he aimed for the other side of the moon so the base never had a clear shot, but that's kind of bunk to. First off no one mentions they're doing anything like that, which does go to indicate that the script simply forgot about the air defenses of two eps ago, and second if you were building a base on a flammable oil covered moon wouldn't you put air defenses on the other sides to?

I think they ignored the presence of the fighters since episode two.

They'll go on to ignore it in basically every confrontation that features command carriers to. Oh they'll have a token squad of fighters around all the time but they always seem to forget that they can fly a lot further than right next to the carrier and there's only ever like 10 of them, even though the ship is absolutely gigantic in episodes like ItLD.

I expected better from Farscape. They continue to do some incredibly imaginative things, then inexplicably fall back into schlock cliches.

It's just so tired and SO pervasive a cliche in the whole "space ship sci-fi" genre that even really good shows like Battlestar Galactica still managed to fall into it. It's literally like nobody even spares a moment of thought to think about how it could possibly be done differently. It's so pervasive that it's not even visible as a cliche anymore to someone trying to avoid cliches, probably because it hides itself so cleverly aside from the actual writing and plot of the show. Still an overused FX cliche is still and overused cliche. Another similar one is the "slow moving glowing blobs of something" cliche that usually walks hand in hand with this one.

The first thing is, if the Peacekeepers found such a place they would have giant refineries built on the moon to gather the resource, not a military base, unless it was there to guard the refineries.

I just like to imagine the Scorpy of some years ago flying around in the uncharted territories looking for a place to build his secret moonbase and then busting out with "that one's perfect, no not the planet the moon orbiting it, yes the moon that's somehow entirely covered in flammable oil. Set us down at once, oh but be careful on the throttle in case you blow us all to hell. Why it's a miracle this thing isn't already on fire isn't it! Good thing we found it when we did or we wouldn't have been able to build a secret base here."

So you like her this episode, even with the exaggerated self-pity?

I draws my sympathy sometimes when she occasionally busts out with these horribly over the top self defacing comments and all the other characters either nod along, ignore it, or as is often the case with John, agree with it. It's because, like I pointed out, to me at least she's really got very little to actually feel that bad about. Of course if you want to take the other angle you could say that she doesn't truly feel legitimately bad at all, but just tries to act like she does and makes these kinds of comments about herself in front of the others in the hope of drawing out some of that "there there" kind of sympathy from them.

I don't understand it either. He has certain standards to uphold as the stud hero of the show. He has no girlfriend, however lusty his thoughts may be for Aeryn, and he isn't getting any from her either, so he should have gone for some space-hangar-deck action while he had the chance, as any self-respecting action hero would.

Completely appropriate. Good girl Chiana.

I get the feeling I might have liked your version of the episode better. It wouldn't exactly kill him to show Aeryn that she's not the only woman in the universe either. She'll just get all sulky and irritating like she usually does and he could just keep banging Chiana and ignore her bullshit, instead of repeatedly playing right into it like he usually did.

That is true, she does not know how to interact with others on a 'normal' level, she relates to people based on a system of cons, bargains, favors, hustles.

That's a better description of her than I could muster for sure. She's not really one of the characters I've devoted a lot of thought to.

Probably just to hint at some possible bond between those two, completely impossible given their past history.

Yeah I like how Crais, especially in later episodes, thinks he's going to be best buds or even lovers with Aeryn after personally ruining her life and making her a fugitive. "But we're both former PKs, we should be friends right!"

I wondered how she expected to get them on board. Maybe her Prowler has a front that opens into a big maw like Blofeld's ship in 'You Only Live Twice'. Basically the writers found another way for Aeryn to screw up.

Duh, they each hold on to a wing and hang on for dear life while she jumps to FTL speeds to find a planet with a nice thick breathable atmosphere to perform reentry on.

I agree. I hope next season is better.

As I recall in general the quality does go up, but there's a few stinkers in there to.

[Rustydogz]

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

It's funny because it makes you think that if you can make a bomb like that out of floor tiles and some of Zhaan's oil, what kind of bombs do actual military organizations like the PKs and Scarrans have? There is a season 4 episode where Grayza tells Braca to ready her Carrier to destroy the entire Earth so I guess it does make sense in context with that one but still, damn.

I suppose the material the moon was made of contributed to that, but the potency of that bomb was exaggerated for the sake of a big Special FX boom. I wouldn't expect the warship bombs to do as much damage as that home made torpedo. The writers are not using any relative logic here, they are just going for the immediate audience-freindly thrill.
It is another bad sf cliche to have a planet-destroying bomb or 'beam'. I can picture a massive interstellar warship oribiting a planet and bombarding major cities with missiles, or even energy beams, but some sf films even have the planet itself exploding as though it was filled with explosives.
The attack vrs the base may have been more interesting if Gelina was still alive, because it gives them a moral choice: do they save themselves by killing the person who saved their lives earlier.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

They'll go on to ignore it in basically every confrontation that features command carriers to. Oh they'll have a token squad of fighters around all the time but they always seem to forget that they can fly a lot further than right next to the carrier and there's only ever like 10 of them, even though the ship is absolutely gigantic in episodes like ItLD.

I think the next time they use the fighters is in that first battle against the Scarrans.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

It's just so tired and SO pervasive a cliche in the whole "space ship sci-fi" genre that even really good shows like Battlestar Galactica still managed to fall into it. It's literally like nobody even spares a moment of thought to think about how it could possibly be done differently. It's so pervasive that it's not even visible as a cliche anymore to someone trying to avoid cliches, probably because it hides itself so cleverly aside from the actual writing and plot of the show. Still an overused FX cliche is still and overused cliche.

BSG did a good job visually with that type of battle, but they were still thinking in terms of 17thC -18th C wooden ship battles, and not WWII battles in which the aircraft carriers were the most dangerous ships and decided the naval war.

Originally Posted by Mr. Infamous

Another similar one is the "slow moving glowing blobs of something" cliche that usually walks hand in hand with this one.

That one reminds me of the constant battles vrs giant seaweed in the old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea tv show from the sixties.

[Rustydogz]

"Farscape Rewind" ?? We must be using an 8-track.

[Mr. Infamous]

Originally Posted by Rustydogz

I suppose the material the moon was made of contributed to that, but the potency of that bomb was exaggerated for the sake of a big Special FX boom. I wouldn't expect the warship bombs to do as much damage as that home made torpedo. The writers are not using any relative logic here, they are just going for the immediate audience-freindly thrill.
It is another bad sf cliche to have a planet-destroying bomb or 'beam'. I can picture a massive interstellar warship oribiting a planet and bombarding major cities with missiles, or even energy beams, but some sf films even have the planet itself exploding as though it was filled with explosives.
The attack vrs the base may have been more interesting if Gelina was still alive, because it gives them a moral choice: do they save themselves by killing the person who saved their lives earlier.

The massive bomb wouldn't be as much a problem for me if it was some kind of military weapon. The problem comes from the notion that you can make something like this just by mixing oil and floor tiles in their universe. It makes you wonder how there are any inhabited planets left. Once somebody starts lighting those off in a war it's going to make the cold war going nuclear look like a capgun. The reason our planet isn't a nuclear wasteland already is mainly because nukes are very difficult and require a lot of specialized skills to make. This absolutely isn't either of those.

I think the next time they use the fighters is in that first battle against the Scarrans.

Another thing that always annoyed me is how none of the Command Carriers was ever given a name other than the Zelbinion. We know the PKs name their ships because of that so it's a pretty conspicuous oversight once you notice it.

BSG did a good job visually with that type of battle, but they were still thinking in terms of 17thC -18th C wooden ship battles, and not WWII battles in which the aircraft carriers were the most dangerous ships and decided the naval war.

The main flaw in all of them is the same. The whole idea of this giant battleships engaging at ranges that are sometimes even shorter than they are long. There's really no defense for it and the only reason it's done is because they either think the audience is too stupid or easily bored to enjoy watching it represented more realistically, or they're just the latest link in an infinite chain of prior knockoffs and imitations of older material that did it that way owing to tech limitations.

That one reminds me of the constant battles vrs giant seaweed in the old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea tv show from the sixties.

I really loved how even in BSG, where they're just supposed to be shooting what are basically giant naval shells at each other, they felt the need to make these giant naval shells glow.

"Farscape Rewind" ?? We must be using an 8-track.

Well the prevailing theme is nostalgia after all. 1979, 1999 what's the difference.