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
Behind them, nearer the bar, another gross native with hair sticking out all over grabs John and slams him into the wall, whispering close: "Listen to me. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, you must stay." She scoots just in time for Aeryn to come find John, and of course she ignores him talking about how he just got manhandled. Her face is very spare, still. "I just spoke to D'Argo. He says he's content. He wants to stay, so I say we leave him. And we go." John takes a second to register this and then stutters, reminding her of how it's clear that "Woodstock" has done something to D'Argo's head. Somewhere else, there are explosions and screaming Rygel, and Zhaan joins them as they run toward the sound. There's a joke about Tim Leary and Mrs. O'Leary's cow here but I can't come up with it, so here's the runner-up. The PA's all, "Noam Chomsky will be speaking in the Commons area in twenty minutes" or whatever, so everybody heads over that way.
Rygel, on his Jazzy, is hovering around some kind of tumbledown architecture -- the whole city is kind of bombed-out looking -- and there's fire flashing all over, and he's shrieking. Rygel cries out to John and the others that "the assassins, the bastards" are trying to kill him. John asks what the hell happened, and Rygel tells him there was a bomb very close to where he was..."hovering." Heh. John pushes, and Rygel admits he was relieving himself. Aeryn climbs up next to Rygel as he whines and gibbers. "...One minute, and the next? Bomb! I suffered many assassination attempts on Hyneria..." Aeryn interrupts and asks him why: "Nobody knows you here. It's only the people who know you who want to kill you." Also funny. This episode is funny. Zhaan murmurs to John that the sun'll be up soon, that the heat's going to get "very intense." John shouts up to Aeryn, and she swats absentmindedly at Rygel and tells them she'll take Rygel back to Moya. "Come on, Your Eminence." There's something missing from her face; everything she says is kind of disaffected. You can trace a line here from Matala, bringing up D'Argo's hopes and crushing them, to watching him self-destruct and have a pot-head existential crisis in the middle of his hyper-rage crisis, and across to Aeryn, seeing that's how it looks from the outside. Rygel whines, and she reminds John: "We agreed: no lingering. I'm coming back, and we're getting out of here. With or without D'Argo."
John and Zhaan knock on the door of D'Argo's apartment, and he answers in...is that a fucking cardigan? No, it's a robe. Damn. He giggles and wiggles and acts stoned and they chat for a sec before he invites them into the apartment: "It is provided." Zhaan tries to level -- "Something isn't quite right about this place, and it is affecting you" -- and John tries to back her up, asking D'Argo to come home with them. Before he can even bring up how expensive deprogrammers are, D'Argo pulls out a Murphy bed: "You are both welcome to stay as long as you want." It flops to the floor. John tries to continue the conversation, but D'Argo cuts him off with a languid "Tomorrow," and heads into his bedroom, where a horrible hippie with an admittedly amazing body is doing something very bendy. He grins at us and closes the doors; Zhaan and John agree that probably they're going to have to wait awhile, and negotiate their sleeping arrangements. Sex! That's so how they get you! Freshman year, remember? Along with drugs! And folk music! And collective ownership of the means of production!