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
So now what? Stuck in the mud with a quiet beacon they can't get rid of. Aeryn checks out the hatch and notes that the beacon was "hastily installed," and D'Argo says they should just chop it out. Aeryn pours out some forty about the fried DRD and everybody realizes that Rygel's the only person that can get in there. This is probably his best episode, to be honest. I like him a lot here: "Oh no! You covered me in mud because I had no say. But in this, I have a say -- and I say no! Get someone else to do your dirty work!" Aeryn makes to smack him, and Zhaan is of course very put upon. D'Argo rumbles, "He'll do it," and Pilot tells them all to cram it for a sec. "That is Moya's primary neural nexus. It is an intensely sensitive area." John asks "how sensitive is sensitive?" but Aeryn doesn't even know what that word means: "Look, she's just going to have to endure it." Pilot tells them that the level of pain involved in cutting the beacon out will be intolerable, and might kill her. Just one quick thing here about how, on this show, biology is personality -- which is why all the farting and shitting all the time -- so dig what we're saying. There's a thing in her brain, her mind, that's endangering her -- and getting rid of it would be so painful that it might kill her. Now, everybody on the ship wrestles with the same thing, in every episode basically, and they all think that it's so painful it will kill them, but that is because they are fucked up. Moya's the only one who could say, "I simply cannot cut this thing out of my brain because it's too hard" and you wouldn't accuse her of being a whiner. Well, I can think of one other example, about two seasons from now, but that's it -- and it's not a metaphor in that case either.
Because Zhaan is all about the palliatives, she immediately wonders if there's an anesthetic or something they can use. "For a Leviathan? There is without question no such...." Pilot trails off, and D'Argo warns him to continue. It's something called "chlorium," he explains -- and Claudia Black continues to be hilarious, staring into different areas of nothing space at random and being incredibly bored by all these grubby people doing surgery on the poor little Leviathan. She does everything but glance at her watch. Pilot explains that chlorium is one of "the six forbidden cargoes" -- this one because it's a numbing agent. Makes sense. D'Argo asks if maybe they happen to have some around, and Pilot's scandalized reply -- "Never!" -- is hilarious. Zhaan explains that it's a common element that comes in many forms ("an atmospherically induced isotope of twinium"), and John asks if there's any out on the planet.