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
John stumbles out of the boxcar, and you know, the great thing about John Crichton is he looks smokin' hot even when he's sweating and retching and hallucinating and rolling around, and the good thing about that is that that's what he's doing. He grabs some tannot root, which is the thing that they're all harvesting, and it's cool because the PA talks over the whole scene, framing it beautifully: "Be strong. Free yourself of all concerns. Be strong. Eat the tannot root. Be strong. Our way of life..." He considers the root and takes a bite, chewing madly. "Rejoice in your work. The guards are your protectors. Free yourself of all concerns. Trust them..."
I've completely lost track of what's being satirized here. I guess cults. I guess any time you realize you're fallible, and you stop voting for yourself and decide to put that power and trust in somebody else who's fallible -- because they automatically are, because that's part of the definition of being a person -- you are an idiot. An idiot in a cult. And worse, you're weak.
D'Argo and Zhaan are in the field, farming the tannot. They are both fucking awesome in this scene, just impeccable. Especially weird if you think about filming this scene over and over, in a field, with effed-up contacts in and/or a four-hour prosthetic face. Zhaan tries to get D'Argo to admit that a man as young as he shouldn't be committing to something like this all crazily, and he counters nicely: "Do you want to spend the rest of your days on the run?" She dodges this by talking about herself. "I know such decisions can come upon one quickly. My choice to join the Delvian Seek -- to become a priest -- occurred in the matter of a blink of an eye. One moment, I was lying in my cell, a savage capable of anything. The next, the truth was revealed to me, and I knew my true path." She is so heartbreaking: she's trying to elicit sympathy and deprogram him by...admitting that she's in the exact same boat, living a made-up spiritual fantasy that does nothing but cover up the emptiness of truth. So she gets to condescend slightly, because of course, he's completely wrong, and on the wrong path, while when she sat in that cell and thought herself to holiness, that was the right call, not a cult of one, and nobody can question her about that, ever. Hooray for sudden epiphanies that wipe out your whole history! D'Argo agrees that it's possible, considering that's like exactly what happened here with him. Zhaan begins digging alongside him and chuckles languidly. "This feels very..." Satisfying? "Yes! It does! Let me help you..."