Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT ...And Wash Away The Rain
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 04.01.1999
The Ilanics on the cruiser are wearing masks -- "We regret that our comm system has a malfunction" -- and they ask to dock. Aeryn, in command, as she takes navigation control: "Don't even bother responding, Zhaan." Even Pilot gets in on the action, ceding her control without a word. Even Rygel helped, sort of! Okay, maybe they won't all die horribly. Except for how they totally do in every episode.
D'Argo and Crichton run into the docking bay and D'Argo tells Verell to get away from Matala. "What are you going to do, D'Argo? Shoot me?" Verell's just like, "I need my prunes! Who are you people? Are you my grandson?" D'Argo says she'll be getting shot but good when those guys in the fake cruiser turn out to be Scorvians, which they totally are. Matala keeps talking crazy -- "No, D'Argo, you'll see. The coming ship, it's Ilanic. D'Argo, trust your hearrrrrrrrt. Your heart knows the truuuuuuth. You can trust me." She then totally grabs Verell as a hostage with a big knife and hisses in her Scorvian voice at them, ordering D to kick the Qualta toward her. D'Argo slides it past her, between some crates. Verell's like, "Are we going to the circus? Where are my pants?" and D'Argo gives his word as a Luxan that she's a Scorvian. Verell gets shanked for like the eighth time and Matala somehow manages to get to the shuttle, D'Argo and John hanging off her like attack dogs. D'Argo takes a billion years to finally extricate the Qualta, and John warns him about how they will all instantly catch black hole death if he shoots the shuttle. "You have to trust me!" Verell slumps and fidgets around on the work bench -- "Back in my day we called it a Model T, and it had a running board, by gum" -- and for some reason decides to set the black hole in the shuttle free. John orders Pilot to starburst, and they get the hell out of there as the shuttle totally crumples and fireballs into the Scorvian cruiser and becomes nothing. Science for war is nothing, it's a black hole with no end at all. Coming out of starburst, Pilot gives the all clear, D'Argo wows, and John apologizes for not seeing the green science blaze future that time.
Galley, where a sated Rygel is facedown on the table. John brushes him off lovingly and calls him "li'l camper" and tells him he looks good. I like it a lot when John is aggressively sweet with Rygel. I have no idea why. There's something having to do with a horrible smell that I don't really wanna know about, and Rygel apologizes, calling it the "back end of a food binge," and admits that it's "very difficult to stop when you get going." Which is, again, the point of Rygel. He asks vainly -- or perhaps just confusedly -- which bit of him it is that looks good, exactly. "The bit that's not jumping back and forth in time." Rygel starts gagging and John teases him adorably with a food cube, and he runs out just as D'Argo's entering. D'Argo heads for the fridge and doesn't really want to deal with John.