Episode Report Card Jacob: A | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT A Human Reaction
By Jacob | Season 1 | Episode 16 | Aired on August 19, 1999
John storms into a pool hall, staring around at everyone doing nothing in particular. "Yeah! Here we go!" He laughs in that crazy way he laughs in every single episode, because in every single episode, there will be a point at which John goes insane and starts laughing. Frankly, I'm proud he held on this long. "This is exactly the way I remember it! I know all you guys, don't I?" He nods to his own crazy ass. "It's a little out of context," he mumbles, drawing his gun on a random guy to the side, behind whom a girl is hiding. "...But I know you." He walks over to a table, picks up a mug of beer, starts with the Crichton bravado. "How the hell you been?" He drinks from the beer and than jacks an old lady's cigarette and snuffs it out. "Quit." He strides around, in the chest-out pose we'll know so well by the end of the series. "And what the hell are you doin' here? Yeah, I've been here." He strides to the men's washroom, throws the door open. "Been in there." The music and camera go wonky as the men inside stare at him. "Nothin' new." He turns to leave the pool hall, crazy as a junebug, but stops short. Close-up on his eyes: "But I've never been in there." He turns toward the Ladies, strides over crazily, kicks it open. He is greeted by a wall of orange light. His WTF face is matched only by our own.
There's a story-parable by somebody -- Guattari? De Saussure? Derrida himself? Google fails me, so it's probably Lacan, because you know his dead ass is just too good for common Google -- in which a boy and a girl are sitting on a train which, when it pulls up to the platform, occasions the girl to ask which station they are at. The boy looks out the window at the restrooms, and states very matter-of-factly, "We're at WOMEN." Because, you see, he's misinterpreted the bathroom sign for the station name. "Don't be silly," says the girl, who has apprised herself of her own window view. "We're sitting at MEN." The point of the "joke" -- which isn't really a joke, because old dead European white male literary theorists don't really joke in the way that you and I think of "jokes" -- is that you're already caught in the linguistics of your experience. You think you know what it is, for example, to be a boy, and it's a natural tendency to view all "other" as the most simple "other" possible, and get caught up in the myth of that, rather than looking at the forest instead of the trees. But combine that with the wormhole stuff, and you're really cooking. Of course John's never been in the Women's room -- that's the point of the episode. But now that he's jumped in the wormhole -- the literal one, days ago, alone, and the metaphorical one last night, with Aeryn -- he can go there. He can open the door, and explore the wonders he hasn't yet seen. Talk about Rabelais, try "Women's Pissoir As Holy Grail." That's hot, and just as filthy as anything else that happens on this show. Sure, I feel like an idiot 'Scaper loving this show; it's got Muppets, who wouldn't? But the difference between forcing yourself to read Ulysses and watching this show is the difference between hitting yourself in the head with something heavy, and watching people who are entirely too hot blowing shit up and making out. No fucking contest, Joyce. Sorry. Point being: having lost everything, John can now look out at this fairy tale from the outside, and realize how well he's been tricked, by whatever force is guiding this particular quest. How his homesickness, now processed, now outside his heart, is something to be looked at, instead of something to be coveted and kissed and cried over. John has his life back. His bravery has earned him that.