Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Believing The Strangest Things
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 05.07.1999
When the Long Hot Farscapey Summer was go, this was one of the episodes I was most excited about, which led invariably to questions of the "Why the hell do you like that random episode so much?" sort. I tell you this upfront: it's one of my favorites, so it's going to be one of those recaps. I'll keep it short.
Last week, everything happened, and then this episode got kicked out of sequence. Which at the time might have been better, because it is about a lot of things that don't really become clear until a few episodes in, but it's now in its right place because we can look at the whole picture at once. Basics: it's John's first day in his new school, and everybody's freaky and kind of off-putting, so he's still incredibly lonely. He's also twitching up a storm thanks to a siren that's going on all through the halls of Moya. We get to see a bunch of DRD's bumping up against a hatch, but nobody else has noticed that yet.
Twitching John is joined by Aeryn and D'Argo in the corridor, and D'Argo asks where the hezmana the sound is coming from, and John tries out his new vocab word for the day: "Sounds like it's from the inside of my head -- and what the 'hezmana' is it?" It's cute. Aeryn recognizes the beacon as a Peacekeeper thing, and immediately demands that he stop twitching at her. There are hilarious nonverbal twitching movements, and she gestures at her eye. I am so feeling her on the stop-fucking-twitching issue. It's pretty obnoxious. He's like vandalizing his own face with that shit. John apologizes and blames the frequency of the alarm, giving the simile that it's like it's melting his brain...and then realizes that this is Farscape, so it's quite likely that it's actually melting his brain. My question is this: if the alarm were actually melting his brain, would anybody notice? What, like he'd start acting really erratic and shifting in and out of his accent and going crazy for no reason? Wouldn't that be fucked up?
Zhaan and Rygel have located the hatch where the DRD's are going nuts, as has Pilot. Rygel is, of course, complaining about the noise, and Zhaan is, of course, pretending that she's in control. She removes the hatch cover as John and the Adrenaline Twins come pounding around the corner. D'Argo peeks inside, Aeryn peeks inside, John twitches and peeks inside. The camera is very woggly so you know this is no ordinary Moya malfunction, but something really important. Zhaan congratulates Pilot on having stopped the alarm, and the silence is something that you, as the viewer, are in a position to also feel grateful about. "I have only neutralized the internal sound -- the device itself is still broadcasting some kind of signal into deep space using Moya's hull as a maximizer." Twitching John: "Using my skull as a maximizer. Why am I still twitching?" He just told you, dolt. Aeryn identifies it as a "Paddac beacon," which is set to go off if it doesn't get a regular signal from the control collar the PKs put on the Leviathan. Which, Zhaan reminds us, was removed when they escaped. D'Argo asks Aeryn why she hasn't brought this up, and her answer is just vague enough that I think it's kinda obvious. The things that lady will do without letting herself know she's doing them. I generally think Aeryn's got her shit together better than anybody else, but her capacity for denial rivals that of even Zhaan's stupid blue ass. John's simple, but there's something nice about being so very simple that you have to actually take drugs to start repressing, you know?