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
In Lyneea's kitchen, where she's still got the stunner trained on John. He explains about how they're looking for something for the ship, and she asks where it is, and asks if there are more like him. "Like me?" You're looking at her. He laughs. "There are...others, yeah." Lyneea gets very excited and starts babbling about her readings and how something flew in low over Kasta Swamp and realizes that's where his ship is. Elliott's like, "We gotta tell!" and she tries to hush him. "Look, I understand what a phenomenal moment this is for you," John offers, and Lyneea scoffs with a giant, adorable grin on her face. "Do you? Can you? I mean to you, space travel is commonplace, but to us here?" John gives her a short speech that parallels her day with the one he's been having, all about the wonder of being a scientist and loving E.T.s and having it all proven true in a moment, and she melts a little, and I think that they love each other, because they get it. She's a scientist, he's a scientist, they're both in love with space. And up on Moya, he's surrounded by a king, a priest, a soldier and a warrior. Nobody he understands, with troubling customs and no mercy in them at all, all of whom treat him like crap. Aliens = automatically better, because they have spaceships. And that's John now -- so he'd better turn it around and be sweet to this woman, because nobody was nice to him.
He smiles at her. "I'm not exactly what you expected, am I?" She grins at him and marvels that he's so much like them, that she assumed first contact would be with somebody "radically different." Thank God she's meeting him on a good day, then. "Radically insane" barely covers it. "So have you been searching long?" Comparing notes: how alike are we really? "Since I was Fostro's age. My parents bought me a telescope. I used to look up at the stars at night and dream...of this moment." They connect. "You said you chose me," she says, and his face falls. He didn't know how awesome you were when he said that, sweetie. Sad, now: "Well, we saw the radio telescope and we figured you'd be somebody who'd understand us, not hurt us. Hoped you would be." Since all John Crichton can do with his mouth open is dig himself deeper, he tries to change the subject. "You have star charts? And deep space photographs? There's a chance I might be able to recognize something. Constellations, galaxies. I might even be able to get a fix on the Milky Way." Elliott calls bullshit on the imputed omniscience -- "Don't you even know where you are?" -- and Lyneea looks back up at John. I bet he remembers that disappointment particularly well. It's kind of unfair that Lyneea even gets to have this limited degree of first contact excitement, considering things only started getting shitty when John discovered alien life. It's not Earth he misses, ever -- it's people. People and chocolate. I think we can all agree that he has the right idea.