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

:: Thursday, September 18, 2003 ::

apropos of some kvet-- er, discussion that's been floating about.


Farscape, Season 4. {Jewish mother} Vere, oh vere did it all go wrong? {/Jewish Mother}

Well. It's not *all* wrong. If this was my first season watching, I'd either think Farscape was pretty good or it was incomprehensible. Actually, it wasn't my first season and that is pretty much what I think. Mind you, those first three seasons are a hard act to follow, and we're an insufferably demanding audience .

I can't make this brief, but I'll try not to make it excruciating. Bail now, ye faint of eyeballs.

Oddly, if I count them up, this season was pretty much the same as others for me -- one ep I hated with the fire of a thousand suns, two I disliked which others loved, two I thought could easily have been done better, six I thought were utterly brilliant, and the rest falling in between really good and OkeydokeWhat'sNextWeek. My disappointment with the totality of the season is greater than my disappointment with the sum of its parts. And to be honest, if I hadn't been up to my ears in SFS.com and desperately waiting for the ratings every week, I'm sure I would have relaxed and enjoyed it all a lot more.

However.

For me, it has to do with a failure of coherence, the way the season hangs together (or doesn't) as a whole, especially in retrospect. I don't blame the cancellation for the glitches; the season was largely in the can before that happened, and aired largely unchanged. The child's tile, Jool, and the stuff on Arnessk being dropped bothers me not at all. They're tangential to the season; I assume they were either ideas meant to be developed next year, or the byproducts of the need to let TM go without killing Jool. I've never expected to see the Pathfinders again either; they served their narrative function by giving Zhaan a dignified death. It would be great if they reappear, but it's just a bonus.

Each year, in retrospect, has a throughline that's easy to see: the first is about the development of the crew into a family, the second is Crichton's madness, the third is the fulfillment of The Relationship with its attendent disastrous consequences. The fourth appears to be about a different descent into madness, one in which Crichton takes everyone else along. Or it could be about the entire crew finally becoming more dangerous than either the PKs or the Scarrans. It's about fragmentation, definitely, in more ways than were intended. I can tell you that it all leads up to the nuclear weapon in the flowers, but I can't *quite* chart how it got there. Which is the problem. In the end...I'm not really sure what it was supposed to be about.

In previous seasons, the one-offs felt like pauses, little stops for breath along the larger journey. So brilliant was the execution of the 2nd season that we didn't even realise those one-offs were giving us clues to the overlying story. This year though, the one-offs were less like pauses and more like starbursts -- we suddenly wound up Somewhere Else, literally and emotionally, and it took a bit of doing to find the arc again. It's not really about whether or not the production team were flying by the seat of their pants -- they were in S2 as well -- it's about continuing to fly in a single direction, and whether someone is there to make the catch.

The summer vacations, Aeryn's desperate bargain to save her child, the need to teach John to withstand intense heat (to take the three most glaring examples) -- these are seeds that should have come to fruition this year. They're set up as part of the overall seasonal arc, as things that will drive the story forward to the final trilogy. Except, they don't. It bothers me that those were dropped, because it makes them appear shovelled in. And they were interesting choices, they should have been followed through.

It is possible that the answer to the the summer vacation *was* given, at least in Aeryn's case in Promises, it's just that it didn't explain her constant begging for John's forgiveness from NE on. She came back as she left, dissociated and impenetrable. It was the Aeryn we first met back in 101 -- the stone-cold killer ready to give her life for the cause. All well and good.

It's in Natural Election that it all falls apart. Once the rift becomes about 'who's the Daddy' and Aeryn says she doesn't know, in terms of the larger narrative, that argument loses its impetus to keep them apart. What's odd is that NE brings up another point, a much deeper rift to explore. When talking about threads that were dropped, 'there's no difference in my mind' is a big one. This conflation of the two Johns, when it was precisely John's insistence that they *were* different which drove her from Moya, speaks of something like a mental breakdown on Aeryn's part while she was gone (which Promises already prepared us for). The absolute realist is flatly denying reality, which tells us she hasn't come to terms with Talyn John's death after all, therefore setting this up as The Really Big Issue for them to confront. Good. Nice conflict. But John never seems upset about *that*, which goes against everything we know about him from Fractures on. We lost 'that wasn't me' and as the season moved on nearly every tag was a conversation between John and Aeryn, which quickly became circular and repetitive; the same question about the baby asked over and over while the more important one -- you do understand that I'm not *him*, that I can't pick up where he left off? -- was tossed aside.

And that's where Aeryn disintegrated, for me. Promises works -- that's the Aeryn I know -- but from Natural Election onward I can only occasionally bridge the Aeryn that left with the Cher doll that came back. "Selfless Aeryn", no matter what else she became -- including John's completely besotted lover -- was always first and foremost a soldier. The label Zhaan bestows upon her couldn't be more perfect, for not only is Aeryn selfless in her continual willingness to give her life to protect the others, but she begins the series literally selfless, without concept of herself as an autonomous person, distinct from her function as part of the Peacekeeper whole. Aeryn's struggle isn't just about learning to love and be loved, it's a struggle for identity; to separate the warrior from the Peacekeeper, and the woman from both; to define what is Aeryn Sun. Throughout everything, even John's death, she is and remains a soldier -- practical, pragmatic, proactive, the consummate strategist. Aeryn loves John with every fibre of her being, but that won't stop her smashing a rifle butt into his face if that's what it takes to get him home.

I lost the warrior in Natural Election, pretty much never to be retrieved, and for me, that has a great deal to do with my uncomfortable reaction to this season. It was a starburst so far from the natural throughline of the character that even though I did recognise her in some of the subsequent eps, she never really seemed to find her way home.

There's a stellar moment in IP2 where Aeryn, knowing John is dying, is running around Furlow's facility placing bombs. For one moment she stops and nearly breaks down as the truth finally hits her, then she takes a deep breath and finishes the job. That's the Aeryn I know. What I didn't recognise was the dark-haired chick nattering with Chiana while there was an enemy destroying the ship. It's indicative of a general problem with a lot of the freelancer eps this year -- a misapplication of elements that would have been fine in another context. I'm not saying Aeryn can never talk girly with Chi -- just NOT in the middle of a battle. It's such a startling and unexplained break of character that the feeling it was A Big Clue to Aeryn's-Not-Really-Aeryn overshadowed and skewed my perception of her for the rest of the season.

I would also have to say it's exactly what I feared with the freaking pregnancy -- for almost the entire season Aeryn became someone who was done *to*, no longer someone who does. Even when she did get to be active, she'd gone from rockhard soldier to John's pretty gun-toting girl; from the two of them fighting side by side and back to back, to Aeryn standing three paces behind him; from warrior woman to gangster's moll.

Aeryn's newfound communion with her inner girlygirl made sense on rare occasion -- in TF, for example, when she is clearly unsettled by Earth and trying on our stereotypically 'female' persona along with Olivia's clothes. I recognised her in that ep. I recognised her in WSS2 as a traumatised, possibly psychotic version of the Aeryn from IP2. But for the most part, no. Who was that woman sitting in the window of Moya, thinking learning English would bring her closer to the man floating in space without a tether? I don't know.

I think I can see what TPTB were trying to do -- reverse the status quo, have Aeryn following John down corridors saying 'we have to talk' instead of him following her. No problem there, it's a good place to go. But Aeryn wouldn't be good at making first moves and she wouldn't be patient with rejection and she most certainly wouldn't be having the same conversation over and over, ep after ep, knowing she didn't have the only information John seemed to want -- the name of the father. She would have attacked John as a military objective, strategised, made her moves, pulled back to a position of safety when rebuffed, tried plan B...etc. That could have been pretty cool. Unfortunately both plan A and plan B seemed to involve a lot of mooning and sitting in corridors. I guess that's a pregnant soldier's idea of ambush.

And again, 'who's your daddy?' was the least important, and least interesting question to ask this season, certainly not worth the unprecedented amount of front-and-center screentime devoted to it. It's this that skewed the season so badly, robbing the writers of time to explore the other characters or develop some of the seemingly pertinent ideas tossed out in the first half. All the focus on 'who's the daddy' *might* have been worth it, if they had had it up their sleeves to make the father someone other than John Crichton, but -- alas -- they did not. Worse, the answer to *which* John Crichton was buried beneath the avalanche of action from BHTB on, so that by the time a semi-answer was shoehorned in, the question had become meaningless. I won't even start on the mistake of reconciling J & A by answering a question that had never been asked at all.

And yes, there is the matter of pulled punches. It was never like FS to bring up a huge issue and then pull punch on the answer, let alone to do it with so many things that would have driven the story beautifully right through the final eps and on into next season. The end of an ep like MAA should not leave D'Argo exactly where he was at the beginning. (Actually, no ep should.) How cool would it have been, in a season that placed him in the position of Captain, if he were left with the question of whether his lack of control of his temper had cost him the woman he loved? How cool to let Stark be not just mad, but bad and dangerous to boot. How cool if Aeryn had to make good on that foolish, desperate promise; if Scorpius had actually had something on her, and some discernable purpose for wangling his way on board. And how could John be scripted to say 'it was never Aeryn' -- such a delicious possibility, and one which would have immediately righted so many wrongs -- when apparently it always was?

Last, I don't believe the writers simply got lazy. If anything, the opposite -- the ending scripts have an aura of feverish overwork. And after all my kvetching I should add that what I did love, I loved very much.

And now I'll shut up. {G}

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:: fialka 12:57 AM [+] ::

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