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
"Will he do it?" Aeryn asks her outside. Zhaan says it's likely, and then touches Aeryn's wounded arm, offering to heal the bite. Aeryn pulls away and says they need to deal with the ship first -- again, PK training. Zhaan's like, "Right. I forgot you think everything's a training op and you're being graded. By all means, let that fester while we sit around doing nothing." Aeryn gets anxious about waiting for him to show, but Zhaan tells her to just give it a sec. "It's a big responsibility resting on those not-so-large shoulders," she chuckles annoyingly. Aeryn asks if it's true, that she can really remove the pain of the entire ship. "I only share the pain," Zhaan admits. "I'm afraid that Moya still bears the larger portion. I don't know how she's doing it." Aeryn's like, "Um, how about you?" and Zhaan sighs humorously and ever-so-slightly nastily. Of course, this gets Aeryn's back up, because she's an eight-year-old boy a lot of the time: "Are you laughing at me?!" And Zhaan's passive-aggressive priestly bullshit rears its head. "Oh! No, no my dear. I'm not laughing. You just seemed, very briefly, to be...concerned for me." It wasn't that I was making fun of you so much as trying to make you feel bad about yourself. Much effing better.
I mean, I realize that Zhaan's bitter about the PKs and all that, and Aeryn certainly does act like a dick a lot of the time, especially w/r/t (a) other races and (b) the utter uselessness, as she'd see it, of Zhaan and her religious stuff. But you know what's better than telling everybody that you accept their faults all the time? Accepting their faults and shutting the fuck up about it. A real Ninth Level would know that. (Except when she pulls that shit on Crichton, because she's a lot funnier when she does it to him.) So Aeryn takes back that moment of admiration: "I am concerned only that you are able to complete your undertaking to share Moya's pain," and Zhaan's like, "Of course, of course. See? You're an asshole just like I said." There are a bunch of So There Eyes bouncing all around the corridor and Aeryn takes off, and Zhaan smiles after her and thinks about how superior she is to everyone in the universe. But most especially her oppressors, PKs like Aeryn, because how else could she have stayed alive for the hundreds of years she spent in prison except by thinking that, so you can't fault her.
Outside Lyneea's house, Ryymax is ordering up a hot dish of "biological containment" for when they trap the alien. It is regrettable that, among all the similarities to Earth, they have not invented bicycles, or else we'd already know how to get out of this one. Originally, like years ago, I thought the cool thing about this was the slap in the face for John: if you point the finger at aliens, and you're in the middle of outer space, you've got three more fingers pointing back at you, that kind of thing. But the episode's a lot better than that, because it takes it one step further: it's a reversal not so much of us/them as it is you/everything -- they're all aliens, the whole universe is aliens, singular and unique and fucked up and weird, and the way that you resolve that is by getting the hell over it, looking upward and sharing in the wonders you can see, all that crap -- by making the connections. They're not aliens because they're blue or gray or made of rubber, up on Moya -- they're alien because they're violent convicts and soldiers, and he's just a nerd. My side, your side. We assume, as nerds, that he's on the right side -- that violence and conflict are less necessities than just hiccups in the system, problems to be worked out -- but so much of his growth and becoming a man is about violence (the science of violence, the violence of science), about learning to cross and use both sides in order to become something else entirely from either of them. When he brings peace, it won't be through science and it won't be through violence. It'll be through both. It doesn't matter where you start as long as you turn into the opposite: that way you get A and you get B, but you also get everything in between.