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
John and Aeryn, getting washed up, posit that it's a virus left behind by the PKs, which...explains nothing, really, but makes sense because they've connected D'Argo's mental breakdown with Moya's. Aeryn wonders if it's not another passive weapon like the Paddac Beacon, and they agree that this makes the most sense. John and Aeryn are sweet as they finish up the cleaning job, and John reiterates what they just decided was the thing going on. "But you are saying this virus is biomechanoid," says Aeryn. "That means it shouldn't affect Pilot or D'Argo." But, John points out, something is messing with them, and also they're breathing it in right now, if it's a virus.
Zhaan notes the staleness of the air in D'Argo's quarters as she brings him there to recuperate, and wonders if she can't help make the recovery easier. He chuckles lovingly. "Lo'Laan, you must not worry about me. You work way too hard. You are so beautiful I can only dream that I make you happy as you make me." Ignoring the fact that he's clearly calling her by somebody else's name, Zhaan smiles sweetly. "I am glad I can make you happy, sweet D'Argo, but I also want to make you well." If they didn't run around talking and talking about everything and ignoring everything in front of their faces, this episode would be five minutes long. I'm not really bothered by it, but it's another one where the stuff that actually happens has a vastly smaller mass than the actual plot, and that always bugs me. "I'm never more alive or happy as when I'm with you," says D'Argo. Red flag! Even Zhaan's like, "Thatâs a fishy thing to say to Zhaan." She asks what it is that he's seeing, when he looks at her. "I see my future. No matter what the others say, I see you and me together." Yikes. She's like, "Cut the bullshit, who's Lo'Laan?"
Aeryn and John are hungry, and they lunch on rotten food cubes as the DRDs scoot around the commissary floor, fixing each other and worrying. Aeryn spits out her rotten food cutely, and John checks the fridge, which is bad news. "Pilot, we have another systems malfunction to report." Pilot gets it together long enough to tell them it's not a malfunction: "I'm seeing...signs of intent." His voice is all over the map; Aeryn gets worried. "Intentional sabotage," Pilot says, and passes out. Pilot! Unconscious! Not in charge! So scary!
Zhaan and John are on the bridge, worrying; Aeryn is trying to comfort Pilot. Zhaan notifies everybody that Moya's compensating for Pilot's blackout by getting systems control back. Which would normally be troubling but the best option, except she's wigging too. Aeryn panics about trying to revive Pilot, but confirms that he's still alive. "We'll do what we can for him," John assures her, "As soon as we get the ship stable. I'm getting a lot of peaks and valleys here." Zhaan points out that without Pilot, "Moya is out of control." She notes that Moya's showing major chemical surges, which plays nicely into John's whole incorrect "virus" theory. There's an elegant symmetry here to the fact of this assumption that it's death, not life, that she's harboring; that this assumption is being made by the people inside her; that they're all inside Moya for the duration as they grow and change. That even though she's the womb for all of them, hurtling through space, she's not allowed to be going through this herself. I like Talyn not for himself but for the fact that he allows Moya to make these calls: to pull in upon herself and protect Talyn above her adult children. From this episode on, Moya becomes as much a character as anyone else. It was always the case, but Talyn gives her the ability to define herself against the plot itself, which makes her much more awesome. Not to mention recalling all that symbiosis/invasion stuff from "Exodus" -- and radically recontextualizing the mother-as-goddess archetype we first saw in that episode -- and the way the story takes Pilot out of the picture, Moya's voice and messenger, so that she becomes strange and frightening both as a character and as our environment. Less "living ship" and more "living ship." More than most, this episode does a good job of telling the whole story in a way that makes it a mystery: you have to rewind through the whole episode to figure out how it all fit together.