My Winter with Farscape – Episode 16

Girls’ Night Ouch
Episode 16 — Feb 7, 2003
“Bringing Home the Beacon”

Now, you have to hand it to the Scarrans, don’t you? They don’t just wait around for something to happen — they make it happen. It doesn’t matter how complicated their plan is, or how many unlikely contingencies they have to plan for. They have all the time in the world, these Scarran go-getters, and they know how to follow through.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, and you want to find Crichton and get the information on wormholes out of his head. Now, you or I would probably go about this all halfassed. I know I would, at least. I think Plan A for me would be to leave a series of plaintive messages on his voice-mail. If that didn’t work, Plan B would be to ask around if anyone’s seen him. And then, when that got boring, Plan C would probably involve giving up, and pointedly changing the subject when anybody mentioned it.

But not the Scarrans. No no. This is what they do.

Step 1: Wait until the women from Moya go shopping for a black-market sensor distorter at a commerce settlement, a depressing open-air flea market held inside a giant floating animal carcass.

Step 2: Get yourself invited to a secret conference on the commerce settlement by Grayza, the Peacekeeper commander with hypnotic breast sweat. Grayza will offer you a complicated peace treaty. Argue about the terms of the treaty, even if you have no real intention of following through on it.

Step 3: Sign the treaty. When everyone is standing around afterwards, start shooting. Take the Peacekeepers prisoner and bring them back to your ship.

Step 4: Hook your prisoners up to big complicated machines, and then wait around until the Moya crew infiltrates your ship. Lose your prisoners, but capture Aeryn in their place.

Step 5: Hook Aeryn up to a machine that instantly creates a cyborg replica of her, with a homing beacon in its head. The cyborg should be a perfect copy of Aeryn in every way — walking and talking just like Aeryn does, with perfect knowledge of all her friends’ names and relevant plot points, except for the fairly basic biological fact that she’s currently pregnant.

Then all you have to do is send the cyborg back to Aeryn’s friends, and follow them when they take off. It’s just that simple.

This is, in fact, such a perfect, logical plan — flawless in its every detail — that it wasn’t until after the episode was over that I thought to myself, hey, didn’t they make that Aeryn clone awful fast? The Scarrans must have had her for all of about twenty minutes when they sent the full-grown replica out. It’s a good thing they were in a mall, I guess, so they could send her right out to Friendscrafters, which promises a full-size, walking, talking copy of your friends… in about an hour.

Like I said, you just have to admire their resourcefulness. I wonder what they do when they want to get out of a speeding ticket.

by Danny Horn