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
Aeryn and Crichton in the corridors, listening to Pilot fugue out, and now also the DRDs are freaking out and not responding to Pilot's requests to go help them. "Whatever is affecting Moya is bugging Pilot too," John finally realizes, and posits that something's going on with Pilot and Moya's "symbiotic fusion." "Pilot's tendrils run all through this ship." He thinks maybe they both got hit by something, and exposits awkwardly: "Man, I am never going to get used to walking around inside a living ship." Aeryn asks if they don't have similar things on Urp, and John mentions Jonah and the Whale (a story Rygel and Zhaan might find interesting) before comparing the situation to a horse and its rider. Horses? "Not as large as or as sophisticated as Moya here but kinda similar, loyal and intelligent." Which, Aeryn snorts hypocritically, "you capture and make work for you." John counters that we love our horses too, and Aeryn says: "You love what you enslave?" I don't even have time for you right now, Officer Sun. Zip it if that's the best you can do.
John smells a smell, stale air, and notices two DRDs busily filling up the hole D'Argo kicked in the wall. "I don't read any of the DRDs in that section," Pilot murmurs weirdly, and Aeryn reiterates that they actually are there. Then a DRD shoots some glue at her boot, which causes her to fall down, and then it glues her hand to the deck and prepares to shoot glue at her face. John deals with it. I don't know when you get over seeing DRDs get their antennae and nozzles and whatnot snapped off, but it's way less troubling when they're cocking back to shoot Aeryn in the face. So in addition to D'Argo completely losing it, you've got Pilot dropping all ability to deal, Moya randomly freaking out, and DRDs gone rogue. Last time this stuff happened, somebody was having a baby. If I have to watch Rygel crawl up another alien's ovipositor I will...I don't know. Something dreadful. Times twenty if Aeryn gets hit in the body yet again, so soon after last week.
Zhaan's in her apothecary, noting that her scanner is frelled, when John comes in with things stuck to him: Aeryn's boot, the poor DRD's nozzle part. Aeryn is wigging out because she's got DRD goo all over her, but Zhaan notices that they've also got "debris" on them. Zhaan reveals the not-yet-disgusting fact that D'Argo also ended up aspirating and ingesting some of the debris too. John wonders if maybe that's not part of D'Argo's current weirdness, but Zhaan dismisses this. "The particles are biomechanoid." Aeryn spends this entire scene screeching about getting the glue off her, it's awesome. She manages to make Zhaan and John look like scientists, which is what they are, which is the point here. John wonders aloud how the debris from an explosion could have such uniform makeup. Go back and watch this episode from the beginning, because the most innocuous conversations become hysterically disgusting.