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
Upstairs, Lyneea connects some kind of TV to the satellites and they talk shop -- she says they call wormholes "ribbon holes," and that they don't exist. John's like, "I agree with you to a point, and that point is the time I got ate by one." He admits that he really has no idea where he is, and then she asks him the awful question: "You didn't really choose me, did you?" But she's smiling, and they're connected, so he just makes a gah face and says, "No." She waves it off and smiles, and tells him the signal is routed through the big dishes outside, a very wide signal as strong as possible. John starts calling for them, and it's Pilot who eventually shows up, asking how he's doing this. Lyneea stares at Pilot, the music goes crazy, she's seeing a real alien. "Is this guy more what you were expecting?" grins John, and she just watches, transfixed, overjoyed. Pilot fills him in on the Moya stuff.
Ryymax finds the analyzer on Lyneea's kitchen table, but is interrupted by a terrible actor of a soldier, who calls him outside to see the other one they've captured -- D'Argo. Heh, Aeryn was half right. D'Argo fights a bunch of soldiers out in the house's driveway, and gets stunned as John watches, worried.
Aeryn watches Zhaan shivering with pain, holding fast to the bulkhead. Inside, Rygel apologizes to Moya. And continues to cut, and to hate it.
Lyneea comes into the barn, where Elliott stares at D'Argo. His wrists have been chained to the walls, so he's all spread out. They always do that to D'Argo because he's so big. D'Argo tries to tongue-whip the soldiers, but they step back. Lyneea and Elliott, for all their protestations of xenophilia, are as freaked out by D'Argo as they were by an armed and crazy John Crichton. "He's phenomenal!" crows Ryymax, who then tells Lyneea she and her son need to evacuate. "It's no longer safe for you here." She just stares. I've decided not to worry about the translator microbes here, except to say that the only person who speaks to Lyneea is John -- D'Argo just hisses and growls and yells and acts crazy, and may or may not actually be doing this -- because the only person who speaks to John, in the galaxy, is at this point Lyneea, and that's why I like this episode. There's a reason the only non-Aeryn girl he ever loves in this story is a PK Tech Girl -- he's an Urp Tech Boy, for now. That starts here, I think. I really like that Aeryn's at the end of the tunnel of love, though: start with things like you, and gradually move toward their opposite, because you change along the way. Start with chocolate, end up with broccoli, you know? He likes techs now, because the rest of it's too scary. (Don't even get me started on Winona.) The point is, this fellow-feeling and unspoken understanding between Lyneea and John is the best part of the episode, because it reads true (it's also what makes his relationship with Katralla in "Look At The Princess" work, too), not as romance but as love all the same. All this time I thought it was sad and he'd miss her because she was so human, and the planet was so Earthlike, but that's not it at all. It's sad because she's so John-like.