Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Last Tanga In The Paris Commune
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 04.22.1999
Zhaan asks Aeryn if she'll be okay in the heat, due to the delirium factor, and she says she'll be okay as long as it's nighttime. Rygel points out how it's fairly bright outside, and John spares a second to explain the planetary concept of white night, which translates here as an infinite workweek. Rygel calls the phenomenon "find the Luxan and save ourselves from heat seizure," instead, and they halt outside a rockin' bar. "Shall we?" says Zhaan drolly.
Inside the bar there is not-entirely-horrible drummy dance playing, and everywhere there are horrible hippies dancing stupidly. John's like, "Sebaceans, right?" Aeryn snorts, disgusted -- I feel you, girl -- and tells him they're just "common laborers," a "distant cousin species, at best," and notice how we're still not going to the Marx place there, and John calls them "kissing cousins, just like humans and Sebaceans," which is hilarious because of last week, and the whole kissin' cousins issue there. I doubt this is on purpose, but I do like that we're getting another offshoot so early in the game. Maybe next week there will be people just like Zhaan, only...green! Aeryn chuckles at the concept of human-Sebacean links, saying that the day they prove that is the day she'll "let Palmolian meat hounds tear all the flesh" from her bones. I, of course, assumed immediately that somehow John and Aeryn would be making out by Act Three. And then the dogs would come, I guess.
John sees D'Argo across the bar and takes off like a shot, but D'Argo chases him down and tosses him onto a couch and jumps on top of him. John squeals and smacks D'Argo a couple of times, but D'Argo just laughs and gets closer and closer to his face...but then he giggles and squeezes John really hard -- "Is this the end of hyper-rage? I get hugged to death?" -- and tells him how great it is to see him. Credits, during which probably they make out. Come on. Just a little?
Everybody is sitting at the bar and the music is still going on, and the very giggly and weird D'Argo is walking Rygel through apparently his first chug. Aeryn watches D'Argo and the look on her face is really complicated. She's a soldier, a warrior, like him. That's their thing that they have in common. That and John. So imagine she's about to either puke or burst into tears for the rest of this whole scene, and you'll have the right image: "D'Argo, you've been laboring." He has. "What is wrong with you?" "Nothing," he says. "Everything is right! Everything's very right." Across the bar there is a totally grotsky lady staring him down with her shiny teeth and creepy eyes. Rygel asks -- almost off-hand -- if he killed anybody, with the hyper-rage. "No, that is all gone. Now there is just...contentment." Aeryn now adds "terrified" to the previous list of "barfy" and "sad," and smacks the hell out of him. "You are a warrior. Act like one." D'Argo claims he is not, in fact, a warrior, and points out that, technically, he's been a prisoner and a fugitive longer than he ever was a warrior. "Don't you feel it's time I stopped lying to myself about who I really am? Here, my efforts have purpose." And, like, that's a way better point in this episode than the undergrad political stuff: the confusion of what we are with what we do. There's at least one scene in each act in which they directly talk about how D'Argo has absolutely no plan for his life and no career to speak of, no army since the Ilanic approximation didn't work out. How he has no family; how if he's nothing, that means he can be anything, which is terrifying...and then there's Aeryn, looking like she might kill him. If she can stop shaking.