Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Believing The Strangest Things
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 05.07.1999
Aeryn makes to stomp off after snitting at D'Argo all, "Look, I'm new to all this escaped prisoner crap, alright?" I assume she wants to leave immediately so nobody will have the chance to remind her that "Don't expressly notify the enemy where you are" is not exactly on the AP curriculum -- it's more of a Fugitivery 101 kind of thing -- because that would lead to questions about how she still can't admit that she's not a Peacekeeper anymore, and that while she knows with her head that they'd shoot her ass in the eye, her heart just wants to go home. Luckily, she's saved by a DRD, which enters the hatch and gets fried all to hell. Pilot notifies everybody that the broadcast is actually getting more intense and that if there's a PK patrol within a "quarter light-cycle," they're nicked. D'Argo looks at Aeryn and she's like, "Hell." The whole time, D'Argo thinks the mission is to help Moya, but Aeryn thinks the mission is really to keep running: ops v. tactics. I like that.
I thought at the time that a lot of this D'Argo bugging Aeryn stuff was just shorthanding it for us that nobody trusts anybody else because it's only the second episode, but now I think he's got the right idea. Zhaan asks if the beacon can be removed, and Aeryn shrugs like she just wants a cigarette and why can't they just stop bugging her. Claudia Black doesn't have a whole lot to do in this episode, and we don't really get inside Aeryn very much except for the next scene, but I love the choices she makes in this episode: 40% annoyed, 30% out of her depth, 10% condescendingly amused by everybody, 100% kind of an asshole. She's hilarious almost the whole time. Less so: D'Argo getting all slapsticky "I'll handle this," and sticks his giant head in the tiny hatch, and that's as far as he can get, because he's gigantic, which: maybe D'Argo just doesn't have a gift for spatial relationships but I'd think you could eyeball that one pretty easy. (Poor Chiana. Or, I guess: "Way to go, Chiana!")
Zhaan, who is still not the boss of me, asks Pilot whether the device can be removed, as if nobody thought of doing that. Pilot says the jury's still out, and Rygel bitches some more and says they're broadcasting their position "like a two-headed drunken..." something, that I'm going to pretend was "trelkez," which will make more sense when we get to "That Old Black Magic," because that episode bookends Zhaan's story here. As well as exposing her as a big blue fraud, and being the only Maldis episode that doesn't make me want to poke out my own eyeballs with fondue forks. John asks if they can't muffle it somehow, and everybody tells John he's an idiot and makes "John is an idiot" faces at him and each other, because (for the third time, now) it's using Moya's entire hull. D'Argo tells Pilot to shut down the entire section of the tier, and Pilot is very pissy because he's already thought of each and every one of these ideas: "That is Moya's primary neural nexus, I cannot shut that down." In these early episodes it's like a zombie movie, and everybody thinks they know best all the time. Well, that is a constant throughout the series, but in these early ones they're also strangers, which is the best part of any zombie movie, the thrown-together part.