:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 ::

Current politics

I could rant, I could rave. Or I could just send you here. Much funnier, and I can go back to sticking my head in the sands of Farscape.

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:: fialka 6:41 PM [+] ::

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I take it back, I think.

But I won't take it down. Consider it part of the historical landscape, even if I wind up (happily) recanting every word.

In other news (cough) the full version of Reflections in a Stolen 'I' has finally made it onto Leviathan. Kept telling me I needed a warning, even though I kept clicking on 'none'. Hmm. Maybe there's a sentient on the archive?

Thanks to Cofax for many reasons, not the least of which is getting it to upload. This version very slightly revised (based on my not being quite happy with the way the text flowed near the end, not any new info received since it was first posted).

Going to rewatch 420 now and smile, smile, smile.

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:: fialka 11:24 PM [+] ::

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For those who can't wait...

Comments on 419 here.

Off to watch the next.

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:: fialka 6:41 PM [+] ::

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No atheists in Scarran foxholes

(in four parts, not because I can, but because I have to)

Prayer is not quite the Aeryn version of WGFA I'd hoped for, but that aside, it pretty much delivers exactly what's expected. Like The Choice, Prayer is most remarkable for the chance it gives Claudia Black to flex some acting muscle -- an opportunity that she's not had much of this season -- and I'm constitutionally predisposed to like any episode which does that.

As the only member of Moya's crew never to have been tortured, I guess Aeryn's luck was bound to run out, and we knew from last week that John was going to go into the UR. In terms of the larger story, it seems pretty clear what's going to happen from here till the end. I'm just holding on tight to my chair, because even if there are no surprises, it means there's some pretty big drops ahead, and the sharp turns are always in the unforseen details. Whatever they're going to have to do to get Aeryn back alive, I suspect neither she nor John are going to end this proud of themselves.

Prayer is a hard episode to take, easily as hard as watching John in the Aurora chair, and in a way I'm glad. If you're going to torture your leads it *should* be horrific to watch. It's also a hard episode to pull meaning from -- are the Greek Tragedy bookends just there because they're kind of trippy, or is there a subtler point to the story Aeryn tells? Is there any truth in the lies she tells the Scarran? Have we actually learned anything from this ep? (Except that if the stasis remains unbroken it will eventually result in gestation, not menstruation, which, I'm sorry, would make far more sense. But then, so would prophylactic birth control. Wave hands, next.)

Monjo always does write a good Aeryn-in-extremis -- pushed until her emotions fracture, yet still the harshly-trained warrior falling back on Peacekeeper tactics to survive in any way she can. Keep the body alive -- that imperative was strong enough to keep her from stepping off that ledge on Valldon, made her attempt to disarm Xhalax though Aeryn clearly didn't care if Xhalax killed her or not. Suicide seems to be an ingrained taboo in PK culture, more deeply even than cross-species mating. An interesting conflict considering PK soldiers also trained to die upon order -- orders, I guess, being the distinction between dishonourable suicide and honourable death.

I've been trying to put my finger on why Aeryn felt so off in some of the mid-season eps, and I think it's this: Even in Reverse!Aeryn mode in Twice Shy, she was still strong enough to pull Crichton out of his inertia and insist they first deal with the immediate threat. That's the Aeryn I believe, not the namby-pamby one whispering girl-talk to Chiana (twice, three times?) in the bowels of the ship while there's a crisis at hand.

It's not that Aeryn doesn't have strong feelings, it's that she never *volunteers* them, never speaks in an emotional context unless pushed hard to do so, and if there's a physical act to concentrate on instead, she'll jump into it full-force. The Aeryn of IP was the most "human", most vulnerable Aeryn in the whole series and she still kept the military objective in mind, even when everything had turned to dren and she knew John was dying. Like a teenager, Aeryn generally acts out her inner drama -- she doesn't have the vocabulary, the distance or the self-awareness to do anything else and she's never been able to ask for help.

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:: fialka 4:40 AM [+] ::

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So what are we to think of the cold open here?

Monjo's Aeryn is always an indomitable force, all the way back to The Flax and AHR, when she was still something of a cypher. (I'll ignore Kansas, which I think is Monjo's weakest script; both plot and character sacrificed to a tired series of jokes.) What he excels at is the distinction between Aeryn's public and private personae; between the part of herself she trusts and is comfortable with, and the unfamiliar, uncomfortable landscape of love and fear. If plot is not Monjo's strong point as a writer, perhaps it is the stripping away of all pretense to lay the character bare.

So. Does it matter that it makes no sense for Aeryn to pray to a capricious goddess of vengeance she doesn't even believe in? Is it not the prayer itself, as a symbol of Aeryn's desperation, that we're meant to observe? And are we not meant to wonder why Aeryn asks, not for deliverance, but simply a sign that Crichton is coming for her?

How odd of her to even doubt it.

This makes me wish again that there had never been a reconciliation at all, for how much more frightening would this be if Aeryn were still in the uncertain state of Terra Firma, if she really didn't *know* if John still loved her? How much more desperate for Crichton if he had lost her again when he'd been thrusting her away while she was still there? How much more *powerful* would it all have been if they'd unwittingly wasted their second chance, if all the pertinent questions had not been shoved aside for an easy fix, but were going to be tacitly answered by their actions now.

The tone of much of this suggests that Aeryn isn't completely sure John will come after her, a concept I find intriguing, to say the least. Again, it makes me wonder if the tag and the MAA opener were shovelled in late. Or if, on the other hand, we were meant to feel there's something wrong about the reconciliation because there is, and Prayer is meant to give us a hint of that. Of course there's always the third hand which says that Aeryn is simply worried John won't be able to find her, a logical fear under the circumstances.

Alone with her grief in The Choice, Aeryn kept dragging Crichton back into existence, only to plunge further into despair each time the illusion shattered. Here, she reaches for something else, a search for meaning, a lifeline to grab. Perhaps she learned something from that walk along the edge of her sanity, perhaps it's as simple as this: Crichton lives, and as long as he's alive, there's hope of rescue. If The Choice is a study of what happened to Aeryn when all hope was gone, Prayer is a study of how much strength one slim hope gives, if only we can hold onto it. The question remains whether or not Aeryn still has hope at the end.

Back to the cold open, we're left to wonder who Aeryn is telling this story to, and which guard told it to her, when. The disjointed affect says the brackets are either there purely to be stylish, or we could assume that Aeryn has been imprisoned long enough to be raving from the heat. I prefer the second interpretation. The first strikes me as too metatextual for comfort, as the answer to us, the fans, and our season-long clamouring: "Why did you ?" "Because we can."

I'm going to say that Aeryn is praying for a reason to hold on to her life rather than push the Scarran to end it, or find a way to end it herself and it's upon this that the episode turns. Telling the Scarran to frell off is either a stupid and pointless act of defiance or a wish for faster death, and it makes me wonder whether Aeryn would know she's more vulnerable to the heat ray because she's pregnant. On the other hand, that assumption says Aeryn found the answer, literally, in herself at the end, and I'm just not pleased about that. It robs the character of autonomy, and it's one of the reasons I *hate* making leading female characters pregnant. Perhaps that, and not wild spec is the reason Aeryn hasn't felt like Aeryn for so much of the season. She's no longer Moya's first line of defense, a person in her own right. She's been relegated to 'Crichton's female', a mere vessel for his child.

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:: fialka 3:42 AM [+] ::

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Salient points (or not)--

-- That first chair looks as if it's usually used for forced breeding and I have to say, I really hope they're not leaving that as a card to pull out of the hat later. I'm not sure I could quite deal with that knowing we won't have another season, since I'm sure its ramifications would have carried well over into next year.

-- Likewise, I don't think I was meant to find the second chair amusing, but it really looked like they needed to be drugged senseless because there was nothing else to keep them from just getting out of it.

-- John and Scorpy are fighting like an old married couple already. Aren't they cute?

-- No Star Trek air injectors here. Man, could those shots have looked more painful?

-- Scarrans have no haemoglobin. Also, Scorpius has Scarran blood, since we know Sebacean blood is red.

-- The Nurse does seem subversive, trying to save a life here and there. Helping Aeryn in her own peculiar way, first by proving she's pregnant, then overdosing her with truth serum just as she's about to break. I wonder if she's heard of John Crichton and is hoping she can engineer her own escape, or if it's just her tiny way of making up for being a complete traitor to her species.

-- Whale, kind of like...gee...a leviathan???

-- Obviously the crew doesn't imagine that Grayza's been captured. I'm still hoping she is, and she and Aeryn wind up having to work together to get out. *That* would be an interesting mirror of John and Scorpius.

-- So....Stark/Sik once loved a Scarran? If s/he can only cross over someone s/he loves and s/he once crossed over a Scarran it would seem so.

-- Raise your hand if you thought Aeryn had died when she went so still after her last big confession? Excellent work from CB, who made it seem that it's the first time Aeryn has ever fully accepted that there never has been, nor ever will be, anyone else.

-- Last, can the baby really carry wormholes? Well, obviously Crichton's memories aren't contained in his gametes. What might be contained in his DNA, however, is a talent native to the human species. One which some of us have, such as perfect pitch -- which can, with proper training and in the right circumstance, result in a career in the opera. Consider Crichton a native, untrained talent, calling the wormhole to him merely by his presence out in space. That can be inherited. All the ancients gave him was the training to use his talent well (if not wisely).


I didn't talk about Scorpius last week, as I was trying to keep it relatively short, and I figured I'd have more to say after this. Well, since I've given up on short, and I certainly do have things to say, I'll go for it.

On the question of whether Scorpius originally meant the Peacekeepers to capture Aeryn -- as with the question of Future!Aeryn -- the jury is still out. Nothing we see in Prayer either proves or disproves it. However, for everyone (myself included) who thought John had lost the final vestiges of Momma Crichton's baby boy last week, it looks like we were wrong on several counts. So far, there are certain essential elements of John left -- "You don't just shoot people" for one. For two, the fact that he can't commit the premeditated murder of Chi/Aeryn, even knowing it isn't her and that she's going to die in an arn anyway. It's all in the eyes (a beautifully edited sequence), and John just can't kill something with Aeryn's eyes. Not again. (A nice counterpoint to end of BHTB, since it was by the bot's eyes that John realised something was wrong.)

Speaking of which, based on the difficulty John had looking Scorpius in the eyes during the blood-vow scene, I don't think he means to let Scorpius have the wormhole tech, no matter what Scorpius does. Oops, Scorpy's not going to like that. Which is good, uberstorywise, in my books. I prefer Scorpius as the enemy -- I won't say villain, because we know him too well now to simply strip him down to that -- rather than dubious bedfellow. Seems they'll have mined that one as far as possible by the time this ends, and Grayza as enemy just isn't doing her job well enough to make me scared. It's not the alien dominatrix aspect of the character I object to, it's that she's still barely two-dimensional and nearly the whole season has passed. Crais and Scorpius filled out far, far faster.

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:: fialka 3:38 AM [+] ::

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But back to Scorpius and John. (Such an adorable couple, are they not?)

This year has been all about the deconstruction of John Crichton, to the point where I suspect the cliffhanger may have nothing to do with his relationship with Aeryn (and frankly, I'd be grateful for that. Even I'm beginning to feel they've banged the relationship gong too often and too loudly this season). We've seen John and Scorpy moving closer and closer; John getting colder and more ruthless, while Scorpius finds -- perhaps for the first time? -- the joys and foibles of personal attachment. Would Scorpy be so quick to kill Sikozu/Stark, one wonders, as he was to kill Chi/Aeryn? Quite possibly yes, as "it's not her," but if Scorpius has a John-like Achilles heel, it looks like Sikozu has been set up to be it. Which leads me to wonder if the end of the season is not going to see them having exchanged places, with Scorpius acting for love and John acting purely for revenge.

So far, Scorpius seems to be acting in perfect faith. I do believe he means to help John get Aeryn back (I suspect that it will actually be Scorpius that saves her where John fails, thus pushing John further to the wall) and I'm inclined to believe that *he* believes it when he says he wants the wormholes only as a deterrent. Still, it's too easy to imagine that a circumstance could arise where he'd use it as a first strike, and let us not forget Einstein's warning about what could happen if the division between the two realms was breached.

However, having mentioned Einstein, I'm sad to report that the rest of 411 has definitely been tossed out in the hiatus. Theoretically, this UR did not exist until John arrrived in it, and should have irrevocably collapsed once he left, as it was he himself who created it. And only as a possibility, not fact. We seem to be back to multi-verse theory: if John can arrive in this UR one hour early, it has its own independent existence -- and theoretically so does he, within it. Many Johns, many realities, not one, as 411 insisted.

ARGH. Did Kemper not attend the same story conferences as Monjo and Manning? If he hadn't spent so much time in 411 telling us how this was going to work, we would have simply gone with the way wormhole travel has been presented since Kansas, rather than complained about the inconsistency of it. Or worse, been left with no criteria by which to judge anything that we're seeing, for if I have to throw out an entire ep for the rest to make sense, what else should I be ignoring?

Which brings me back to the visions Aeryn conjures of herself as undercover tralk killing with her bare hands. Are these meant to give us any accurate information? All they tell me is that Occam's Razor slashes all our pretty theories and the explanation is simply this: Natural Election was even more badly written than I previously thought because there is no way that *this* Aeryn came back to Moya and went all simpery on us. In fact, going back to look at all the writers of this season, I see that the other two eps where Aeryn simply felt 'off' for no real reason I could put my finger on (I Shrink and CbyC) were also written by first-timers. In double fact, I didn't much like any of the new writers' eps apart from APM (Mark Saracini, and I suspect that's only because it's Aeryn-centric), and Twice Shy (David Peckinpah, which I did enjoy, apart from the hamfisted tag).

Hmm. And that was a pattern I wasn't even looking for.

One further theory I'll offer: four years on, the characterisation -- especially in terms of John, Aeryn and Scorpius -- has become so finely nuanced and complex that an ep by a newbie writer simply isn't going to seem either as deep or as effortless. I often didn't like these eps because there was little character growth and the plot either annoyed (Lava, CbyC) or bored (I Shrink, MAA) me. Natural Election neither irked nor bored me (though not a stellar ep) but I suspect the general perception that there is something up with Aeryn this season really does stem from there, and there's nothing purposeful about it.

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:: fialka 3:37 AM [+] ::

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Damn.

It does say something about the organic quality of FS that I didn't immediately recognise these as newbie eps. However, the long-term writers are able to carry a throughline that resonates subtly across the seasons -- I wondered at Aeryn's sudden willingness to talk romance in Terra Firma, but there was still a core to her that I recognised from as far back as TFaL, even though the character was minty new and the tone of the show entirely different back then. And certainly the John and Aeryn of Prayer are the logical outgrowth of the Aeryn and John in Nerve (Manning) and The Hidden Memory (Monjo).

So if Occam's Razor holds, and the simplest explanation is true, then what has Prayer told us? Weirdness abounds in Aeryn's memory flashes, and with Monjo's track record for plotholes, it's hard to know what to make of it.

Most likely, since the Velorek flashback is true, so too is the other, but then what are we to make of the man Aeryn is with? Aeryn says "on Vendrill, I met a man" and flashes to a stranger who then turns into Crichton. Immediately, I find myself looking under the bed for clues, wondering again if this is some other reality's Aeryn and she's flashing on the Crichton from "her world, on her time"? Has...deah gott...the pregnancy actually come with her from the future, is she here without Crichton's knowledge, and is this why she has to protect the proto-fetus and bring both of them back? Or...when she says, "because I *have* to" does that meant she knows something important about this child, something beyond just wanting or loving it? Has Aeryn dropped into her body as it exists in this timeline, so that -- in some Terminatoresque way -- the child already has a part to play in a future Aeryn knows about, and if it's killed or taken out of her now that future along with that child, will cease to exist? When Aeryn refers to the child as 'she' is that just for ease, or because she really knows it's a girl? And if she already knows it's a girl, then she must also have always known who the father was, so why lie -- especially to Crichton -- about that?

And the wobbles on Bizarro!Moya -- neato camerawork, or clue that John's "real" present is reinventing itself with every choice he makes? Does killing Chi/Aeryn somehow save the "real" Aeryn from what appears to be her death?

Ooh, look at all the pretty dust-bunnies under that bed.

At this point, though I'm loathe to accept it, it really does seem like a lot of the puzzle of the season is just...well, not because they can, but because they did. And that makes me sad. It makes Aeryn nothing but a plot device to bring the 'baby' storyline front and center, as if we couldn't see it coming to capture/retrieval since the tag of 322. The split-up last year left a lot of room for all the characters to arrive severely damaged (as they did), and undergo their own deconstructive transformations over the season (an opportunity that's largely been missed). I do love BB dearly, but I wish we'd had a third less John this season, and a third more everyone else, especially D'Argo and Chiana. And yes, I could have done not with so much more, but with more *meaningful* Aeryn. Eighteen eps on, although the character is definitely an Aeryn I recognise, her journey still makes no sense.

However, having said that, Prayer delivers the unflinching will to follow the story into all its horrifying nooks and crevices that I expect from Farscape, and on first viewing, it had me competely taken in. I believed most of Aeryn's lies, and though I didn't swallow that she'd been on Moya as a spy all along (I wouldn't expect them to trash the previous 83 eps) I did for a moment believe she'd never loved Crichton. Kudos to CB, and kudos to Monjo and director Peter Andrikidis who delivered another chillingly atmospheric ep. I just wish they'd managed to give us some concrete information along with it.

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:: fialka 3:35 AM [+] ::

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Something I might regret...

Since I'm having so much trouble uploading, and since I've only got a couple of hours to do comments on 417, I'm going to try something dangerous...writing them directly into Blogger.

Yeah, I know. Desperate circumstances, desperate measures. {G}

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A Constellation of Doubt

Oh my god. This is just so much of a badness, a very bad badness.

::yippee::

I'm reminded of a line I wrote in a story for XF, paraphrased slightly: "Just when he thought he had fallen as far as possible, he rolled off the ledge and found there was further to fall."

A Constellation of Doubt picks up all the threads I hoped, while turning Terra Firma around and showing us the dark looking-glass reflection of the crew's time on Earth. It contains much of what I wished that earlier episode had been stretched in two to cover, and presents it in a much more original fashion than pure linear story-telling. We've been told this episode took seven months to shoot, and it was well worth the effort.

I'm delighted to report that the seeds planted earlier in the season are beginning to sprout at last and there's every reason to hope they'll have blossomed before this ends. As with the Talyn!John arc (literally the kiss of death {g}), the larger plot is not the surprise -- we've been predicting "John must trade wormholes for Aeryn/baby, who have fallen into enemy hands" since last season's tag. The surprise is all in presentation and details.

A couple of asides before we get into the meat of it:

-- D'Argo is back to being a general? Vitas Mortis told us his markings were a lie; I'm surprised he'd want to continue the charade, or that the crew would let him. Wouldn't Captain D'Argo have been title enough? At least he's earned it.

-- Cousin Bobby/Nephew Bobby, have we got that one out of our systems yet? At least John has his second sister back.

-- Hello, I'm Fialka and I'm an Overthinker. But...in several scenes Aeryn's hair is back to normal length. Clue or oversight?

-- I'm not sure why John thought the clue to a Scarran base was embedded in a documentary put together by humans on Earth, but as he turned out to be right, I'll wave my hands.

-- A space-going civilisation of thousands of systems and no one's figured out toilet paper? That's got to be John being cheeky. Then again, they don't seem to have chocolate, newspapers, or recorded entertainment.

-- They left 1985 on October 31st, and if Moya had been there 42 days, that should mean they arrived in 2003 on December 12th or so. ACoD makes it seem more like they'd been there a couple of months, but Bobby confirms it as roughly two weeks. Yeehaw. Now I'd just like to know whether landing in December *2003* was another "Cousin Bobby", or if we really have (based on the tenet that FS runs pretty much parallel to Earth time, which the Sept 11th ref did nothing to dissuade) jumped ahead a year, and there'll be a reason for that.

-- Last, but not least, a show of hands from those who would like to see all of Nephew Bobby's footage appear on the DVDs? I thought so, yeah.

Sigh. See what happens when you present an entire season as a puzzle? You get the fans looking for clues in hair length and bog rolls.

--continued below--

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:: fialka 6:38 PM [+] ::

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And now, back to our previously scheduled analysis:

D'Argo's word doesn't seem to last that long, though it's hard to tell how much time has passed between the end of BTHB and this. From what I know of this crew's tenacity and their level of despair, I would imagine several days at least, and their chance of catching up with Aeryn while she's still in transit is fading fast.

Since we have been doing homage and reversal all season, I consider this to be John's "The Choice," and it's indicative both of John's intrinsic personality and the crew's feeling for him that unlike Aeryn, he does not grieve alone. Indeed, there are so many layers of grief and guilt on Moya right now that as far as the rest of the crew is concerned, it's hard to find the one layer that might truly be for Aeryn herself. I get the feeling that it is not really Aeryn who is missed nor Aeryn who is loved, but the John Crichton that was and will never be again if they can't at least try to rescue her.

Like it or not, Aeryn is John's hope, and without John's hope there is no center to Moya. But pointless hope will only drive John mad, as it seemed to do early in the season, before Aeryn came back and at least gave him something solid to push against. I find it most interesting that Sikozu, who knows them both the least, nevertheless seems to understand better than anyone how close John is to going over the edge.

Understanding that isn't going to stop him, however, and in the name of good drama, thank god not.

Action!John has never taken well to helplessness, and the image of him sitting in the dark, torturing himself by replaying the same footage over and over again is worth suffering through the Christmas kiss in MAA. Indeed a lot of ACoD makes many of the minor nits I've picked throughout this second half of the season worth living with. As with the pumpkin, the 'Cher' reference and the running popcorn jokes, I'm delighted to see so many of the seemingly-extraneous details from Kansas reappear, even if the sheriff himself is still a walking cliche. I'm delighted to see more of the aliens on Earth, even if I still never got to see Aeryn in a gun shop, and don't believe for a moment that Chiana -- who's been all over the Uncharteds -- is naive enough to drink from the toilet, eat lipstick, or wipe makeup in her hair.

Nephew Bobby was not my favorite character, but at least he's not a Star Trek robo-child. The kid's a brat, but then young John was no paragon himself and I'll always prefer a brat to a Marty-Sue model of well-behaved sweetness. And there is something to be learned from the child's acceptance of who the aliens are, without trying to either minimise or demonise the difference. If the 'Alien Visitation' documentary shows us how innocence can be manipulated, it also shows that even when manipulated, innocence can still reveal the essence of the characters. Chiana's indomitable exuberance for life, and D'Argo's contemplative appreciation of it still shine through. Indeed, D'Argo emerges as something of a warrior-poet, a quality that we've seen glimpses of since "They've Got a Secret," if not before; and Noranti seems to have finally coalesced as a character, as someone who is not arbitrarily scattered, but sees, perhaps, more than one mind can hold.

--see below--

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:: fialka 5:42 PM [+] ::

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I've put forth Scorpius as the architect of a plan that went awry, but I'm quite willing to be wrong about that. Willing to go completely out in the wild and ask: could this somehow be an elaborate scheme by Stark to punish John for letting Aeryn go, after Zhaan had died to save her? Did Aeryn herself perhaps die in a timeline only Stark has seen?

Based on the end of The Choice, I would have said no, but who know's what's happened to Stark in the interval? He went off searching for Zhaan's message and reappears in inverted form, harboring an irrational hatred of John (who he clearly blames for the death of Zhaan) and apparently in possession of both a highly-detailed blueprint of Talyn!John's mind, and the ability to access or manipulate information inside this John's head as well.

Stark (an energy being) would neither understand nor need the wormhole knowledge to navigate through time, but if he has seen T!John's entire consciousness via helping him to die, it's important to remember that the knowledge had been unlocked for that John.

In the UR which John will inevitably have to try to revisit, it was Stark/Sikozu in love with Aeryn, John with Zhaan. Since we did not see Zhaan on board Fused!Character Moya, it's entirely possible that the other two survivors of that reality are Aeryn/Zhaan, and Zhaan/Stark, which makes absolute sense, since Stark had already begun to conflate them by The Choice. However, JQ also told us that Avatar!Stark can't use what he's never seen, hence the absence of Sikozu and Noranti in the game, while the situation with Scorpius (and even Aeryn's shirt!) remains as John remembers.

There's a part of this UR which reminds me of FS!Einstein's admonitions: John cannot go to a destination he's never seen. Perhaps the Fused!Character Moya is the intersection of those two realities -- Aeryn and Zhaan both gone, Stark always coming back, and Crais embracing Crichton rather than killing him.

I may be twisting this to fit my own parameters of where I wanted this to go, but I'm still holding on to the hope that the reconciliation isn't *quite* what it seemed on the surface. Perhaps John really was playing Aeryn, stringing her along in the hope of finding the answers to those questions, and some of his actions here are fueled by guilt? It's been a theme all season, most pointedly driven home at the end of John Quixote, and the question needs no rephrasing to encompass this wider meaning. How many will die for the love of John Crichton? I can safely predict that Crichton's love would not remotely approve.

No, Crichton's love has turned to something entirely different, so much that I'm not sure he still sees the real Aeryn at all. Not love, perhaps, but *damn* fine storytelling, and yes, the only way this season could have gone.

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:: fialka 2:38 PM [+] ::

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It is done.

Reflections in a Stolen 'I', Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3.

I'll replace those with a single version as soon as I can get one to upload correctly. Right now, I'm just grateful to Kansas.

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:: fialka 1:39 PM [+] ::

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The internet hates me

No matter what I do, my comments keep getting frelled. Now I can't even get the simplest HTML to upload onto Geocities correctly. I suspect it's IE, but suddenly neither Netscape nor Opera are working.

Five days later, I've managed to break it into two parts and get it to load correctly. Maybe I should stick to one paragraph comments from now on.

Bringing home the Beacon, in two parts, below.

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:: fialka 3:59 AM [+] ::

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A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Commerce Planet--


Ah, boys and their toys, boys and their toys. Bringing Home the Beacon is the girl ep, and in the best Farscape fashion, tosses gender conventions right out the window. The boys stay home discussing recipes while the girls go off and have the adventure.

I'm still a bit confused about how long the boys were off playing with Katoya, and though I suspect it's not really relevant, it's the kind of thing that sticks in my craw. Aeryn and John left at the same time. Beacon is meant to take place over the span of roughly four arns. The cold open makes it seem as if the boys have been back on Moya for awhile, so either the planetoid is a couple of solar days journey, or we've jumped back in time.

"Eh, they'll figure it out," I hear the production team saying, and so I wave my hands. As I said, a small detail. Moving right along.

One of the things I've loved this season is the evolving dynamic between Aeryn and the female characters. We never saw much of that in the last three seasons -- Aeryn was generally wary with Zhaan and combative with Chiana, and didn't have a lot of screen time with either of them. I like the opening out of the character to that extent, love the tentative friendship that's grown between Aeryn and Chiana, but I wish I understood how her stint as an assassin could have turned Aeryn into someone who needs to share secrets about her love life, and talks about "relationships" with strangers. I would have logically expected the opposite, that she'd have come back as tightly controlled as she was in Fractures, but better at it. Not an open wound, but a twisted mass of scar tissue.

And at first, she was that. The Aeryn of 'Promises' is one I could imagine, right up to the end -- ruthless, suicidal, and still blind to the pain she's caused. It was Natural Election that made me wonder if the heat delirium had fried her brain, or if something else was up.

Since then she's been softened to the extent that I would have said this is some Future!Aeryn and she's been on Earth raising babies with John all this time, but her reaction to Earth in Kansas and Terra Firma negates any idea she'd already been there. I don't know, maybe the poor girl was so lonely wherever she was, that it was a relief to see even Chiana again.

Beacon, however, does a splendid job of restructuring Aeryn in a way that makes sense, allowing her to interact with the other women as friends without losing the soldier's hard edge. I would expect no less from Carleton Eastlake, who meshed those two conflicting sides of Aeryn -- emotional innocent and ruthless killer -- so beautifully in Infinite Possibilities, bringing her to maturity at last. Eastlake makes the change in Aeryn seem more the result of a season-long reaching out, the organic growth of a lonely woman consciously trying to reconnect. All the more interesting that she finds a compatriot in Sikozu, something neither had expected, but which makes perfect sense. Both Aeryn and Sikozu admire strength and discipline above almost anything else, and despite her revealing outfit, Sikozu seems nearly as dismissive of those who use 'feminine wiles.' It's a mindset more comfortable to both than Chiana's, and certainly more comprehensible than Noranti's.

The four women work astonishingly well together, however -- between them they wield brains, sex, cunning, and serious firepower -- and make up the best combination of female characters the show has ever had.

I loved the scene in the bar -- some forms of asshole are simply intergalactic. Most women have had that conversation, I'm sure, and I completely sympathised with Sikozu, trying to talk sense to some schmuck that turns every statement into a sexual threat. Each of the women gets to try their way, and it's the combination that finally gets them what they want. (Well, okay, maybe Aeryn's pistol on the table helps a lot .)

Sikozu's gone a long way trying to prove to Aeryn that she's an ally -- first it's offering a finger (Coup by Clam), then it's trying to match in brains what Aeryn brings in physical courage. I've had the idea that Sikozu's mission -- self-appointed or not -- is to protect Aeryn, though I'm not entirely sure why. It's certainly odd to have someone who does not wield a weapon protecting the soldier, yet that's how it's been coming across. Sikozu's a quick study, and the answer may be as simple as seeing that while John may be the center, Aeryn is the defensive perimeter -- get through her and the others will pretty much agree to trust. Not to mention, Aeryn's mind is comprehensible to Sikozu, whereas John's is not.

If protection is her agenda, I suspect Sikozu either began with the intent to impress Scorpius, or was assigned by him to integrate with the crew in ways he could not. I also suspect that over time, her agenda may have changed somewhat. Her moment of realisation that she survived while Aeryn did not seems to contain a real note of grief for a friend that's been lost.

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:: fialka 3:52 AM [+] ::

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Random observations:

-Noranti's eye shows a colour I haven't noticed before -- red, which appears to communicate fear. Apparently, the eyeball is more of a mood ring than I previously figured.

-For some reason the two women at the gene-change-massage-parlour remind me of a double-dose of Jane Horrocks, with a nice dollop of menace in the older one. Not quite sure why the masseuse needed to shape-change to do the massage (the nails didn't seem to get in her way ) but my money would be on her natural shape being the dark woman, and the morphs having something to do with adding strength.

-Francesca Buller does a marvelous turn as Ahkna, so much that I did not even recognise her at first. The personality she projects is so huge it's only afterwards that I noticed she's still a teeny tiny woman on huge platform shoes underneath a lot of latex. Ahkna's face is the most Sebacean yet, and though we've been told the experiment that produced Scorpius was apparently not repeated, one wonders why the ruling class look so very different from the warriors. Unless -- since I don't think we've ever seen a female long-neck or a male member of the ruling class -- their physiologies as well as their roles are gender-differentiated. The Scarrans are ruled by the females...hmm, they're The Big Bad, but I could still get into that.

-Gee, could Granny shout their secrets any louder? Who needs comms, just yell "Aeryn!" No less subtle and at least they'd find her.

-I've often wondered if Scarran is like Pilot's language -- certainly one dialect of it is not translated by the microbes. The creature shop has done a marvelous job of articulating the Scarran warriors' faces, but like the Hynerians, I'm always hard pressed to see how this physiology makes adequate soldiers. Scarrans are slow, musclebound (not to mention the warrior-caste ones don't seem too terribly clever either.) Perhaps that's the Sebaceans' one advantage -- in a face-to-face confrontation they are faster and more agile.

-"Wow"??? Aeryn said 'wow'??? I don't know if I was meant to giggle at that, but I sure did. Yeap, Aeryn's turning into a proper American teenager. Knew they shouldn't have turned her loose in the mall.

-Interesting toy Sikozu's got and where did she get it? My instamatic cameras never come with long-range mics.

-Continuing the lesbian supertext, we have Granny and Chiana getting oh-so-close and quite enjoying themselves. Granny's statement -- "If you have true love you don't need drugs" -- could be taken as a clue to the J/A tag in 'Twice Shy' that's gotten so many wondering if he's really taken Aeryn back, or if he's merely keeping his enemy as close as he can. Or, it can just be taken at face value, Granny being twisted, which is my inclination at this point.

-One of the other subtexts I quite enjoyed was the intimation that women secretly rule the world. Well, we knew that, nice to have it acknowledged.

-Aeryn's time with the assassination squad doesn't seem to have taught her too many tricks -- all she needed for a clear shot was another vantage point. Something has changed from the Aeryn willing to die to keep the names of her employers secret back in 'Promises'; here she clearly doesn't wish to give her life, even if it means the Luxan worlds falling into Scarran hands. A measure of being in love again, or something else, some agenda she's kept hidden all along, which hasn't come to fruition yet?

-Rather brave of Granny -- she seems to have a completely unwarranted faith that the two Charrids will actually shoot straight. Lucky for us they do.

-I'd generally thought Moya could starburst further than that.

And the end. Oh, the end. Some things I've been expecting all season long -- Aeryn being captured by one side or the other being one of them. Knowing from the blasted TV guide blurb that it would be the Scarrans didn't stop me from chewing on my nails all the way through, wondering how it would be accomplished.

Since I can see quite clearly what the next step would have to be, it's worth tossing in another theory -- is it not possible Scorpius planned all along to gain a measure of John's trust, then have Aeryn captured to force John's hand? Scorpius has been in contact with Braca all along, so he might know where they are going, even if neither knew why. And isn't it fortuitous that the girls are alone here, while Scorpius has dragged John and D'Argo off to Katoya? Who would expect Aeryn to be able to protect herself against ambush by a squad of commandos, when she is the only one trained to fight? (Scorpius' plan might even have involved the capture of all four alive, since I don't think he would have wanted Sikozu to die.)

Such a lovely plan -- kidnap Aeryn, convince John to hand over the wormhole knowledge to save her, return to the command carrier with that knowledge, oust Grayza, and develop the weapon for the Peacekeepers to win, or even prevent a war.

Alternately, he may well have planned for the Scarrans to take or even kill her, thinking that John is motivated in the same way he is, would stop at nothing to either get her back, or have his revenge. I think though, that he knows John well enough by now to fear that instead of sharing the wormholes to create the weapon he'd need, John would go off half-cocked and fall into Scarrans hands. If he were to fall into Peacekeeper hands, well, they might pull the equations out of his head, but they'd still need Scorpius to decipher them. If even *he* can. W been the better dramatic choice for Aeryn and John not to have made up before she was taken. In this season where 'time' is such a presence it's become a character itself, how much more painful for them to have had their second chance, and foolishly waited too long to take it.

However, having said that...it's not the sort of choice that makes the story fall down and go boom for me, just a personal preference. Many, I'm sure, were thrilled to see John and Aeryn get back together. Perhaps I'll just pretend those two brief scenes -- the tag of TS and the opener of MAA -- never happened. Whoosh, there they go. Ah, yes. I'm very happy now.

But. (Because it seems like there's one of those every week...)

I'm beginning to wonder if, when all is said and done, there will be no rug to pull out from under our feet, no key we didn't catch quickly enough, no red herring we ate by mistake. Perhaps the evil gotcha that will reveal itself at the end of the season is simply this: everything was always exactly as presented.

Sigh. I hope not. After all the brilliant speculation people have been doing, *that* would be the one answer I'd find completely depressing.

Back to the ep, where a beautiful variation on Aeryn's theme from The Choice is playing softly through the tag. I forget everything else, lost in the expression on John Crichton's face. And it occurs to me that whatever the answer to the season is, this is what Farscape is really all about -- not logic or lack thereof, not the intellectual back-flips, not keys or bots or whether we like the way certain production choices seem to be playing out. Just this, these moments where a fictional universe becomes so emotionally true, it leaves you breathless.

So, I guess that's my final analysis of Bringing Home the Beacon. It didn't hedge, it didn't play dumb, and it didn't leave my mind when the credits were finished. For 45 minutes it kept me on the edge of my seat, kept me guessing, and then hurt me bad.

Really, how much more can a fangirl ask?

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:: fialka 3:46 AM [+] ::

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mental as something or other

Comments on Mental As Anything finally finished, though entirely possible no one will care after tonight's ep.

It's a completion thing {g}.

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:: fialka 11:09 PM [+] ::

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here's one I made earlier


Not the one below -- this one's actually finished. Worlds Enough, and Time

Many thanks to Maayan, for letting me play in the Sleep While I Drive sandbox. Castles, castles everywhere.

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:: fialka 11:27 PM [+] ::

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...be careful what you wish for...

Unbeta'd, untitled and unfinished. Read at your own risk.

(Note: Due to Blogger not allowing me to see updates until the next day, I hadn't noticed that once again it had eaten a substantial portion of the text. Here's the real version. Second section below.)


Halfway through sleep cycle, it's quiet on command. My preferred time, my preferred shift. No company, just me, my controls and the stars.

I was always good at this. Shoulders loose, relax the calves, sink into the hips. It's a position I can hold for arns, suspended between sleep and readiness, between thought and silence.

When I'm allowed it.

Alitha comms from the galley, where she's making herself a quick meal before going to quarters for her sleep shift. She asks if I want something to hold me through. I think about it, decide I don't. I eat, of course, the proper amount at the proper time, when we have enough food for proper meals. We're stocked at the moment, so well that I expect we won't be landing anywhere soon.

It's a difficult part of space, vast distances between inhabitable planets and all kinds of anomalies in between. It's said that those who venture too far don't come back, and that's true, but not for the reasons given. Spend too long out here and you grow a little wild, a little farbot. You don't want to live in home territory again.

Tobay, our captain, keeps a tight rein of discipline to make sure that doesn't happen. Keeps it all familiar. I thought I couldn't return to that life either, but I was wrong about that.

"Tell me you didn't go to bed with your boots on again," Alitha is saying. I can hear a timer in the background. Making conversation while her food heats.

She likes to talk, Alitha. Reminds me of Chiana that way, though she's not young. I'm the baby of this unit, as well as the newest. We had one younger, but we lost him on Bedi Prime.

"I didn't sleep with my boots on," I say. I didn't sleep at all, but she doesn't need to know that.

"Good," she answers. "I hate to go to bed and find grit at my feet."

There are too many of us for a Banta-class freighter, we take it all in turns. Sleep and eat in shifts, fight together when there's need. Usually, we go in small detachments, two or three per assignment. When I first came I volunteered for every one. I nearly laughed when they told me I didn't have to try so hard to prove myself. They didn't understand. I craved the movement, the danger. The need to keep my mind in the present, my attention on my surroundings. Alone, lying on a narrow cot staring at the mattress above me, there was too much time to think.

It's better now. The discipline of being a soldier again has been good for me. Things I've remembered from long ago -- how to stand for hours and watch the stars and think of nothing. How to obey orders, let others be responsible, not attach myself to anyone else. It's not a place where anyone would attach themselves to me.

Allegiance to a cause is simple. Simple is good. That's enough for now.

"So, did you sleep well?"

"Yes," I lie. My patience with Alitha only runs so far. She spent half a cycle alone on a stalled marauder before Tobay picked her up; she's not particularly fond of silence.

"Good to hear it," she says, but her tone indicates she knows I'm lying. I shrug, safe where she can't see it, though the lens above my head will record the movement. That's another thing I had to get used to again. The watching.

It's how she found out. How they all found out about the dreams.

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:: fialka 11:35 PM [+] ::

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It began on Bedi Prime, just before we lost Yoshian. I had been sent for weapons supplies, an easy enough assignment. We left the freighter far out, came down in an ordinary pod. We were dressed like colonial sebaceans, dun weaves and canvas trousers. Our story was easy, we were miners, and we wanted projectile weapons to protect our colony from the scarrans.

Bedi lies along the edge of the Uncharteds, a small world with a sparse but rich population. After this, civilisation begins to disintegrate and there are no more designated commerce planets. Bedi is where the traders come, for exotic goods from the further reaches of what they call tormented space, for more mundane supplies from the settled territories.

I was looking for Felarian particle grenades, having left my supply on Moya. "You're lucky," the merchant told me. "I haven't seen those in awhile, but a supply came in not a weeken ago."

I knew the moment I saw the crate. "This came from a leviathan," I said and his head wobbled up and down.

"Could be. I got it off a kalish hunter."

I know about the kalish, but they rarely leave scarran space. I could not believe they had taken Moya, but I knew the grenades were mine, even before I opened the crate. There they were, exactly as I had stored them, carefully packed in layers of plant material snurched from Noranti.

I bought them, of course, and would have scoured the market to see what other of my things my former shipmates had sold, but that was the moment Yoshian took to violate planetary protocol. He pulled his weapon on a trader, shouting that the behlek was trying to cheat him.

It was our fault, really. We should have warned him that each of these traders would have guards in the crowd. No sooner had we noticed, than he lay dead on the ground.

Trey signalled me from several booths down. We packed up our purchases and went back to the pod before they picked us out as his companions. Another group would have to finish collecting the supplies.

I did the unloading, and I don't know how long I stood beside that crate before I was able to put my hands on it again.

That sleep-cycle, I dreamt John and I stood face to face, holding guns to each other's heads.

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:: fialka 8:26 PM [+] ::

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