Farscape Rewind: Episode 1.13

Mr. Infamous · #1

Look it's Wednesday again. Yeah hopefully I'll be back to doing these on Wednesday's, who knows.

This week's episode is "The Flax", a pretty important episode that marks some key turning points for John, Aeryn and Dargo, gives us some more insight into what a clever little bugger Rygel can be, and introduces us to some more guest characters who'll appear again later in the series.

This week opens up with John taking another driving lesson (since the last one went so well) this time in a transport pod. Aeryn's showing him how to pilot the thing and John seems to be doing a fairly reasonable job of it, sharing with her some of his "southern euphamisms" as they go. Back on the ship Rygel's getting on Zhaans nerves by bitching about how bored he is and how many servants he used to have, trying to get her to play some sort of game with him that we'll see again later in the episode.

I'll also take this opportunity to make an observation here, mainly that Rygel more than any other crew member seems exceptionally talented at pissing Zhaan off. For whatever reason Zhaan, in this and other scenes, seems to have far less patience for Rygel's bullshit than she does for bullshit produced by say Dargo, who produces more than his share in this early part of the season as we've seen. It's never really made quite clear why this is the case but it's not hard to see that for whatever reason she seems to resent him specifically far more than any of the others. It's nice how they drop in little character quirks like this and without even feeling the need for some sort of deep expository backstory to justify them. Zhaan just doesn't like Rygel, it's not because he did anything to her or the others necessarily she just doesn't like him, presumably for the kind of person he is, but this isn't something that's spoonfed or even pointed out to the audience directly. It's up to you to notice it and make sense of it yourself, and it does make perfect sense that she wouldn't like him at all given her personal history and values.

Speaking of stupid bullshit though Dargo comes storming in here all up in a tizzy again and if you're anything like me you'll be rolling your eyes again here as you strap yourself in for more of his childish whining. This time he's whining about Aeryn taking Crichton out to teach him to fly but don't worry, this episode actually sees Dargo grow up a lot later, but we'll get to that at the end.

Back in the transport pod John's trying to get Aeryn to lighten up but she tells him she "has no need for speed". I'll admit I got a laugh out of that, good delivery. Oh also Pk flight simulators will kill you on the last day of practice if you screw up. I guess it's their way of weeding out the shitty cadets without letting them crash real expensive space fighters into things. What if cadet dipshit clips your wingtip in a botched maneuver though, does your simulator kill you to just because he's a retard? That would certainly suck. Speeking of cadets from the short bus though, as soon as Aeryn leaves her seat John manages to find something in the vast interstellar void big enough to crash his transport pod into. It's the titular flax of course, some sort of giant energy net that apparently covers an absolutely huge area of space and is completely invisible until you run into it.

While Aeryn stops to wonder why the peacekeepers never militarized such an awesome and evidently easy to use technology to do things like say, trap escaping prisoner ships, the opening credits roll.

When we come back we see that the mental contradiction was just too much for poor officer Sun to process and she's out cold on the floor while her synapses reboot.

Back on the ship Zhaan's now moved on to trying to stab Rygel with his game pieces until pilot intterupts her with a horriffic sound over the coms. There's a strange little ship approaching them and inside it a strange little man called Stanz. After somehow docking with a seemingly featureless part of Moya's hull, Stanz comes on board to warn our crew that they're about to fly right into the Flax and they don't even know it. Zhaan heads off to warn Crichton and Aeryn and Dargo takes Stanz to go play games with Rygel. "Tardek" the game is called. Clearly both planning to try and hustle the other Stanz and Rygel sit down to have a game.

Back on the pod John and Aeryn are trying to figure out their predicament only to uncover more problems. The pod's "caloric batteries" are dying and with them all of the onboard systems. Interesting that they use a type of battery here, presumably charged directly from Moya, as Aeryn says she charged them up before they left. Could this potentially be some insight into all of those "take a transport pod you idiots" situations when the ship is falling apart and/or trying to kill them. Maybe the batteries need to be charged up before a trip out and aren't normally kept topped off for whatever reason. Stupid practice yes, but it's possible, and might be some sort of tech limitation. Maybe these caloric batteries just can't hold a useful charge for very long, or doing so degrades them somehow, making long term storage with charged batteries difficult.

Back on the ship Dargo and Zhaan are arguing about if they're going to believe Stanz or not after finding out he has a PK record. Dargo shows some more top shelf reasoning here by at one point forwaring the idea that because Stanz has an extensive PK record this could mean he's potentially one of the bounty hunters the PKs hired to pursue them...

Yeah.

He's also just generally worried that Stanz is a slimeball though, but Zhaan's trying to remind him that the PK "crimes" he's accused of might easily be bullshit, just as his crimes were. Dargo makes up for his earlier dumb idea here by turning it around and reminding her that not everyone imprisoned by the PKs was innocent either, presumably referring to her. She picks up on this immediately of course but he doesn't follow through on it, keeping the focus on Stanz instead, now that he's satisfied he's shut down her argument. I've got to give the big guy credit here though, that was a pretty nice comeback on his part. Maybe he's not as dumb as he puts on.

Having won the argument with Zhaan Dargo goes to interrupt Stanz's game with Rygel, and following a really unfortunate bit of wire work, we learn that Stanz used to be a Zenitan pirate himself, which is how he knows so much about the Flax, the Zenitans being the group that set it up. He says he left the Zenitans because they let him rot in prison after he was caught, and now makes it his business to generally make trouble for them any way he can.

Back on the pod John and Aeryn lauch a message bouy that somehow escapes from the flax completely unimpeeded. I can't explain this one so I'm not even going to try.

Instead lets go back to Moya where Dargo's noticed that Stanz is wearing a set of Luxon boots. This of course likely means that at some point Stanz was on a Luxon ship or met a Luxon, so Dargo interrogates him about it; turns out there is an old Luxon ship trapped in the Flax and it might contain some kind of maps back to Dargo's homeworld. This again taps into the whole idea of them not knowing where they are or which direction their homeworlds lie in. Dargo can't be too far from home though since apparently Luxon ships are flying around out here, even if they are "deep space voyagers". Stanz and Dargo cut a deal. Stanz gets him to the ship, he gets the maps and Stanz gets the rest of it.

While John and Aeryn manage to break their pod even more trying to escape Dargo is busy lying to the other crew members about heading off with Stanz to respond to the message in their bouy. Luxon Voyager here we come.

Few more scenes with John and Aeryn then the rest of the Zenitans show up to make trouble for Moya. These guys as it turns out also want to play games with Rygel so while John and Aeryn continue to try and repair their ship Crecitch, the leader of the Zenitans, sits down with Rygel. Things are getting bad for John and Aeryn now though because their last little escape attempt messed up the pod bad enough that it's now decided it'd rather suffocate them than let them keep crashing it into the flax repeatedly. Some sort of atmospheric mix line is breached and needs repairing and brace yourselves, 'cause here comes the pain folks...

The episode tells us that this line can't be welded normally because the atmosphere currently in the pod is too rich in oxygen to do so without it potentially causing an explosion. In response to this Aeryn suggests they blow all the atmosphere out and fix it in EVA suits but wait, what was the problem preventing them from welding it again?

There's too much oxygen

And what is the main overreaching problem they're trying to solve by welding it again?

Eventually they'll run out of oxygen.

And what lies between those two opposite points...?

Yeah well there's really not much more to say about that is there. If the atmosphere is too rich in oxygen right now to fire up a torch safely but in a few more hours you'll be dead because it'll be too poor in oxygen to sustain human life then why not, oh I don't know, wait an hour or so then just start welding normally when the oxygen oversaturation has been eliminated by you simply sitting on your ass and breathing up the extra.

Awful, awful, awfully thought out problem here. What they end up resorting to to circumvent this total non issue is a real teeth-clenching cringer. What do they resort to exactly. Well after finding out that one of the space suit helmets it broken, John's, they decide to kill John temporarily, dump the atmosphere, weld the line, then resuscitate him. Ok sometimes I'm in a hurry to get things done to and don't want to just sit around wasting all this time just breathing but fuck. Hell even if you're in a rush or to stupid to think of something as complicated as breathing the air why not just dump 1/4 or so of the atmosphere instead, thin it out a bit so the torch doesn't explode and just let John breathe what's left for a while. It's not perfect and could still be dangerous but it's better than literally killing his ass then trying to revive him later right.

I guess having Dargo win that argument with Zhaan used up this episode's intelligence budget.

So while John and Aeryn are discussing exactly how they're going to kill him needlessly (Pk suicide poison kit Aeryn just happend to have brought along on the driving lesson) Rygel is playing his board game with Crecitch and Dargo and Stanz are still headed toward the Luxon ship. They've run into a bit of trouble and got caught in the Flax themselves though, but eventually Stanz's junker manages to break itself loose and they're home free to the Luxon ship Dargo's after.

Back on the pod Aeryn kills John and gets to work, managing to fail at both as she not only doesn't finish welding in time but also brings him back to life again. If there's one good thing that comes out of this whole horrible clusterfuck of incompetence though it's that Dargo and Stanz detect the atmosphee being vented from the pod which is what will eventually lead Dargo to have his big character changing moment in this episode. Had it not been for John and Aeryn's incredible stupidity with this whole plan here we might have had to endure douchey Dargo for even longer so there's an upside to it I guess.

Rygel looses his game against Crecitch after offering up Stanz's location as a wager but here's the punchline. The crafty little green bastard planned the whole thing. He threw the game to Crecitch, knowing that it was necessary to distract him as long as possible, he offered up Moya as a wager, knowing he would decline, then offered up Stanz. What he surrendered to Crecitch upon loosing though was not Stanz's location, but a bunch of preprepared lies and bogus coordinates about his wereabouts. So Crecitch wasted his time playing Rygel in this game only to "win" the opportunity to be sent off into some featureless empty void of space in the opposite direction to where Stanz really was.

This is why he's Dominar Rygel folks. Even Zhaan completely fell for it, making it all the more convincing for the pirates in the end.

Rygel puts the cherry on top by saying how abominable of a player Crecitch was and how hard this made it to lose to him convincingly. He knew the pirates weren't going to leave without taking something, so by giving them something they thought was valuable and something they thought they won from him with a type of force, he was able to get rid of them by manipulating their own unseemly natures against them.

Dargo meanwhile gets to the Luxon ship just as it's about to be melted down. This is his big moment. He can't stop thinking about John and Aeryn and the atmosphere leak they detected so rather than board the Luxon ship and grab the maps that will take him home to his son he tells Stanz to turn the ship around and goes back for them, the same two people he desperately wanted to abandon in the episode two prior to this. This is the first real genuine show of self sacrificing camaraderie we've seen from Dargo and it'll go on to become one of the traits that defines his character.

He tells stanz that that maps would get him home to see his son, but when he does get home he wants to be able to look his son in the eye.

Back on the pod John and Aeryn have decided that they're both pretty much dead so rather than try to weld the line again, since now they've probably got a lot less oxygen than they did before, they decide to screw instead. No I'm not joking, again sadly. Before they can get down to business though Dargo interrupts them with his rescue attempt so for the time being Zhaan will get to remain as the best that John's ever had.

It's funny because at the end of the episode when they're trying to rationalize their behaviour to each other Aeryn even remarks that if it had been him and Zhaan trapped in the pod together the same thing would probably have happened. It's funny because it suggests she doesn't know all the details about last week and likely never did, just like I doubt she knew about Jenavian in season 2. John gets his relationships started off right in other words, with a suitable helping of lies of ommission about his real sexual history. Afterall 800 year old psychic plant woman with the power to unleash ten years of really great sex at once could seem a little intimidating right. It's fun to bring this up to J/A shippers in any case.

Rounding out this episode's romance Stanz reveals that he's actually a she and has it bad for Dargo. Again, I'm not joking.

All in all The Flax is a decent episode with some good character changing moments, mainly for Dargo, but we also get to see the real start of the John and Aeryn romance hinted at earlier in PK tech girl, when it was really only Aeryn who was interested in John. Despite that though there's some painfully bad plot surrounding the whole pod situation. If you don't notice that, or write it off to too much oxygen affecting their judgement, the episode is a pretty good one, if you do though then it knocks it down a few pegs.

On the balance then I'll put this one somewhere in the middle. The overall quality of the episodes is clearly improving at this point as the characters become more and more well defined in their personalities. Much like last week's girlfriend plot though there's still a few sloppy or unecessary things here and there pulling otherwise good episodes down. At this stage however you really are begining to see the sort of potential this series really has starting to break through... at least until next week's surprise sucker punch to the unmentionables.

Rustydogz · #2