My Winter with Farscape – Episode 18

Not the Puppy!
Episode 18 — Feb 21, 2003
“Prayer”

Okay, so I’m a little behind on the Farscape reviews. Actually, right now I’m two whole episodes behind. This is partly because, y’know, I have a life and stuff, but it’s mostly because writing about Farscape is a lot harder than I thought it would be. When I started this column at the beginning of the season, I couldn’t wait to watch the new episode and then go and write about it. How innocent I was back then! I should have known better. Writing about Farscape isn’t a hobby, it’s work — serious, difficult work. I had no idea.

In fact, as of this episode, just watching Farscape feels like work. If you read the various Farscape websites, you’ll see a whole bunch of reasons why Farscape fans think the ratings went down this season. They say that Farscape is too intelligent for a mass audience, it’s too challenging… basically, it’s just too good for TV. Stupid Americans, is the basic attitude of the devoted Farscape fans, you don’t deserve a show like Farscape. Back to Joe Millionaire with you, you big losers, they say, and then they start using words like dren and frel, and it gets a little obscure at that point.

Now, granted, I think they have a point about the Joe Millionaire thing, but I don’t think that’s why Farscape’s ratings dropped off this season. If you ask me, the problem is that the show is just too damn messy. As in, watching the characters’ brains drip out of their skulls and onto the floor kind of messy. Farscape is fun sometimes, and I’ve written about the fun parts, but it swings back and forth between the fun Farscape and the dripping-brains Farscape on a week to week basis. You never know which one you’re going to get.

So, they set up a fun thing — for example, Aeryn and John finally getting back together, and being really cute about it — and then that instantly morphs into a not-fun thing, namely Aeryn being kidnapped by the Scarrans. She was captured two episodes ago, and this week’s episode is essentially all about Aeryn getting tortured on the transport ship. I think the not-fun aspects of this scenario are pretty obvious.

Basically, this is how the fun / not-fun ratio currently stacks up. In the last scene of “Twice Shy,” which was about a month ago, John told Aeryn that he loved her, and they kissed, and it was really nice. That was the last scene of the episode. At the beginning of the next episode, there was one scene of Aeryn and John snuggling on the bridge, before they separated on different missions. And those two scenes, apparently, are the beginning and the end of the happy times that Aeryn and John get this whole entire season.

As soon as that snuggling scene was over, John was off to the mental arts training camp, which was a whole episode of being shouted at, locked in a cage and being forced to pick up burning-hot metal with his bare hands. Then the next episode was Aeryn getting kidnapped, which ended with John shooting Aeryn in the head, and blowing half of her face off. (Okay, that wasn’t the real Aeryn, but still, ouch, right?) In last week’s episode John moped around and watched videos, which wasn’t that happy, but at least no one that we like got shot in the head.

Then this week’s episode turns the misery dial up to eleven. Not only are John and Aeryn still not getting any real scenes together, but Aeryn is actually strapped down and tortured on camera for the whole episode. Her interrogators give her a kind of painful sci-fi electroshock, and they smack her across the face a lot. Then they inject her with truth serum — and, as she begs them to stop, we see the needle going right into her pregnant abdomen. As a bonus, we also see an embryo twitching as it burns to death on screen, and the only person who’s even vaguely nice to Aeryn turns out to be a spy who’s trying to poison her.

Oh, and meanwhile, John goes through a wormhole to an alternate reality, where three of his friends get shot at point-blank range and die — including yet another Aeryn lookalike.

Now, I understand the soap-opera cliche that happy couples are boring, and unhappy couples are interesting. I don’t agree with it, but I understand the concept. But the ratio of two scenes worth of happy, immediately followed by two full episodes of graphic physical torture… that seems a little out of whack to me. There is apparently no limit on the amount of physical and emotional pain that the characters get to endure. Happiness, on the other hand, is measured out to us with a teaspoon, like it’s lunch time at Oliver Twist’s orphanage.

I can’t help but imagine what Christmas is like at Rockne O’Bannon’s house. The kids open up their presents, and they get just what they wanted. They tell Dad how much they love their new train set. “Oh, you DO, do you?” says Rockne. “Well, now I’m setting it on FIRE and throwing it out the WINDOW! Ha HA!” No, don’t do it, the kids sob. Please! Not again! “Now, where’s your puppy?” No, Dad! No! Not the puppy!

I mean, shooting people in the head is a lot of fun, and we all enjoy a good needle in the abdomen scene every now and then, but that’s not what the whole show is about, is it? I thought the heart of the show was supposed to be the interaction between the main characters, especially John and Aeryn. Why don’t they get any scenes together?

In my opinion, John and Aeryn is the puppy of Farscape. They just spark together, and they’re always fun to watch. So the producers, poisoned with flawed “happy couples are boring” logic, come up with one reason after another to keep them apart. In soap opera terms, John and Aeryn are a supercouple — and the hardest job on series TV is to keep a supercouple on screen together and still make it interesting.

When shows do supercouples well, they do it by giving the couple obstacles that they can work on together — and, really, it would be incredibly easy for Farscape to do that. What if — instead of the last three torture sessions — we had everybody else on Moya getting kidnapped, and John and Aeryn had to work together to infiltrate Katratsi and rescue them all?

I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I don’t need for Farscape to be the happy fuzzy fairyland show, where everyone smiles all the time, and there are singing bunnies, and I get a cannoli at the end of each episode. But does it have to be Schindler’s List in space?

by Danny Horn