Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Mothers & Fathers and Brothers & Suns
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 10 | Aired on 06.24.1999
All that dignity, washed down the drain. Hysterical. D'Argo does what he can with this, from his side of the hallucination. "I think I know why you are so upset. You are old enough now to realize that we're outsiders here. You look different to the others, and they're treating you like a stranger." Heartbreaking -- but again, you don't know how much yet. Rygel agrees that D'Argo is "strange" right now, but D'Argo comforts him. "I know exactly how you feel. You know when your mother's family first saw me ["What about my mother?"] they despised me. So that's why we had to go away. ["Not far enough!"] We came to a place where no one could tell us what we thought or felt was wrong." The ignorance of Rygel in this scene is twice as awkwardly hammered in than it was with Zhaan, but I appreciate that he would be less likely to pick up on the way D'Argo's acting really off than she would. I don't know, it reads not entirely believable. Rygel shrieks that D'Argo is, in fact, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" and D'Argo commences ticking him some more. "Ah, I love you, son." Rygel finally realizes what's going on, and gasps out something, but D'Argo just says, "Yes, son, no matter what happens I will always love you." Aww. That's rough in about sixteen different ways, and I'm only talking about the positions Chiana knows. Never mind how obnoxious Jothee is on his own.
John and Zhaan are still doing tests and looking at Moya's blueprints. "Pilot's tendrils run all through this ship. He could have picked up the virus anywhere, from any tier." Zhaan sneezes -- again supporting the virus hypothesis even though that's been disproven by the biomechanoid thing -- and she complains again that the air is getting staler. I kind of like how John's so stuck on this virus idea, because it illustrates how strange this world still is to him. He's the only one that keeps trying to tie it back to the things he knows. "Hey Zhaan, can this ship function without Pilot?" Theoretically. "Moya is an independent living being, Pilot and the DRDs are just merely services in aid of her operations." Pragmatic. John asks about environmentals, the lights and air -- the air and sun, the things he needs to live, and I can't help wondering if he's thinking back to the last time this happened too, and what happened to Aeryn Sun, and what she asked him to do.
"Those things are not here to keep Moya functioning, they're here for us. Pilot controlled those." John wonders, because clearly Psych 101 was not core curriculum, whether it's possible to communicate with Moya without going through Pilot. Other than psychosis, there's none. Aeryn notifies them that she's figured out that Pilot's blood is being nutrient-starved." Interesting. "It may not be the only reason why he's unconscious, but it's the only thing I can figure out for now." There's a good PK Tech Girl. Complete the thought: if Pilot's "tendrils" go all through the ship, and he's being starved, that stuff is going somewhere, right? And you've got a ground zero event on tier twenty-whatever. ...Nope. "The virus must be starving him, get him some nutrients." Except, Zhaan realizes, it's not a virus. "This test just confirmed that the particles are not a distinct organism, like a virus. They are actually make up of Moya's genetic material. They are a part of Moya, they must be fragments from the explosion." But again, they're uniform in size. "John, they are a part of Moya," Zhaan says. We're still talking about genetic material, folks.