Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Kiss Of The Spider Woman
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.23.2003
John lies around, having taken to his bed. D'Argo comms him the whole story. "We're heading back now, but we're very weak. You have to find those energy orbs." Which was exactly what he was saying in the last scene! To himself!
Commercial, I think, and then John's still in bed. Depression is the inability to think your way around a dead engine. The opposite of optimism. Complete lack of motivation and the inability to find a compelling way around the issue. The systemic inability to remember any of the tools in your toolbox or how to use them. It's not about being sad, it's about being nothing much of anything, and not remembering how you used to get yourself out of the hole; how you've done it every time before. Has there been an episode where John's clinical depression wasn't obvious to the naked eye? It's not that it didn't exist; it's that now he can't compensate. Maybe that's all Talikaa's really about.
Noranti comes upon him and yanks him out of bed. He fully tries to crawl back in! She grabs him and asks if he's ready to die. If he's ready to watch Aeryn die. He finally sits up, on the edge of the bed. Noranti tells him Plan A. Plan A won't work: "She could've hid them anywhere. Moya's huge. We'll never find 'em." He begins to slump; she grabs him again. Plan B: "That's it! Talikaa is the only one who knows where they are." Plan B won't work: "Yeah, so we're dead. She's never gonna tell us." This is depression in action; they should show this at workshops. Plan C: "But maybe we can get her to show us where they are." Before he can pooh-pooh Plan C, she sparks his interest again with the news that Scorpius is infected, but not harvested. Interesting that the only way she can get a rise out of him is with Aeryn and Scorpius. She explains that he's knocked out, so maybe Talikaa just can't sense him, "even though he is ripe and ready for her." John clears his head: Wake him up, use him as bait, and "let her harvest his mojo." Noranti nods. "What about Sikozu?" John asks. Noranti fudges: "Well, she's strong enough to help, I'm sure." He looks into her eyes(es) and comms: "D. We may not be dead...yet." Aeryn swallows and makes a face; D'Argo kindly replies that it sounds like John's maybe getting back to his old self. "We should be back to you within an arn."
So all of a sudden the episode's about John, even though it started out being pretty memorably about Chiana? Nope. When did the laka start? Right around the time John got raped. And now he's gone off the drugs, and all of a sudden he's depressed. It's got story logic and a spider lady behind it, but it's not the weirdest story ever told in space. It was always about both of them: facing up. This is John and Aeryn we're talking about; easy or hard: there's someone else in the room, and it's Grayza. Why on earth would he let her go again, coin toss or not? She pulled back, Harvey's Lovely Daughter, but she's been trying her damnedest all season long to get him back, and he's been standing behind a laka curtain, quietly drowning. Grayza took something from him, even adjusting for the difference in gender experience, and it was power. Did wonders for his wormhole abilities; wreaked havoc on his life. (For extra credit, compare Scorpius with Talikaa in this instance: the things he willingly traded to Grayza for what he wanted are the same things she took from John by force. John and Chiana are innocent; Scorpius and Talikaa are whores.) John laughed off Chiana's scary advances; he could only do it, without seeing the shattering beneath it, because it was too close to his own shit. "She likes me," he said. "Things are gonna be fine," he said.
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