Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Last Tanga In The Paris Commune
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 04.22.1999
Aeryn heads out on a transport pod and lands on a dark planet, looking for D'Argo. For some reason she has brought John, along with Zhaan and Rygel. Poor John, as usual he's the worst bet, due to D'Argo wanting to eat his lunch. All the people are wearing red, mostly knit fabrics, and they have white hair and they are ruddy and dirty and they have creepy pale eyes. They look like Fremen, and that is really not a compliment. They have their stupid hair all in crazy ways, including sticking up out of their stupid headbands, and the first thing I think of is Big Brother 3006 when we're all food for Morlocks, and then the second thing I think of is Burning Man, and I realize we're already there. Biceland. The people are uniformly gross and stupid-looking and they all have pothead smiles and they all sell t-shirts and sell furniture on the side of the road for an older, grosser hippie that can't even make change because he's so burned out. It's a good thing I like this episode or I would be very cross just based on looking at these bastards. John makes some reference nobody gets (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which...those movies look very different to me right this second), as usual, and then doesn't bother to explain it at all, as usual, and talks shit about Thunderdome in the process, for which he will soon answer to Master Blaster, because that movie rocks.
(You know what else looks really different to me right now? The Peacekeepers. They've chosen for themselves the moral authority to police the galaxy, and whenever anybody makes the mistake of complaining they can say, "You asked for it," they're just Keeping the Peace, and meanwhile they're self- and double- and triple-dealing and committing atrocities everywhere you look, because money talks and the armed forces don't recruit the best people, because the military has always been a really efficient machine for killing poor people. And nobody's morality is really all that impeccable in this world, at least not in a way you can centralize, so the insane commanders just roam all over the place with their insane agendas and insane amounts of power, and nobody actually knows who's in charge, because it's all...well, this is just a TV show so I guess fascism for its own sake is enough. You don't really need oil money or straw-man abuse of religion for that to play, in the context of the show. But remember Lynndie England, with her 80 IQ? Remember how they threw her white-trash ass to the dogs? Although it's funny you should bring up oil money, Dick, considering where this episode ends up. This episode aired April 23, 1999. Back then the Peacekeepers were an ideological metaphor. If you'd told me in 1999 we'd all be living there in 2006, I would have punched your face because I loved my country and the really fucking hilarious part is that I still do.)