This recap is written from my DVD, which might differ from what you've seen due to broadcast differences in the U.S./UK -- I don't think it really matters, but between writing for the Battlestar Galactica and the Firefly fans, I know it can be deeply upsetting when the details don't match up with what you've watched a hundred million times. This is me apologizing in advance for the extra dialogue and editing differences. This version's better anyhow. Thanks to the 'Scaper posters in the forums who contributed a great deal to a wonderful charity to make this recap happen. You rock. I hope this makes you happy.
Short shot of Moya flying through space, and then a roller-coaster shot that zooms around an interior corridor (um, also known as "the" interior corridor). There's a dreamlike feeling to almost the entire episode, even after things get rough, that should clue you in to the fact that something weird is going on. John Crichton records another message to his father -- "It's always the same here, Dad: nice and quiet" -- and we cut ironically (John's not exactly a surgeon of irony) to Zhaan and Chiana, bickering as they wander down the corridor. Zhaan is blue and bald and gorgeous, a priestess with a secret Wolverine crazy side, and Chiana is gray and a freak and gorgeous, a mutant member of a scary-orthodox race, and has a not-so-secret crazy side. She's kind of like the obnoxious little sister, while Zhaan is the mothering, insufferably patient one. We won't be seeing them again, so live it up. Zhaan's bitching at Chiana for stealing her stuff, and Chiana's acting irrepressible about it, and Zhaan's concerned that, when they let Chiana onboard Moya, she promised at least to try not to steal everybody's shit. "You promised to adapt to our ways," Zhaan reminds her, and Chiana does her usual: "I've changed my mind! You 'adapt' to me!" She plays cute so much of the time that you forget how fucked up she actually is, which is good, because when you have to think about it, it's awful.
The fighting recedes into the distance as John continues his message in the maintenance bay. He seems to be having a tough time of it, talking into his recorder, which has been established as his kind of depressing, futile way of keeping in touch with Earth. He laughs tiredly and stretches. "It's late...No. It's space. I don't really know what time it is. It's, uh..." Close in on John, meaning it: "I miss the sun. Days. Nights. Simple things." The past seven months haven't been easy on John: he got sucked through a wormhole while working for (just call it NASA) IASA, accidentally killed an insane military commander's brother, ended up on a living ship with a bunch of jacked-up escaped prisoners, caught 'roid rage, brain-screwed a creepy alien that looked like Debi Mazar, fell a little bit in love with two different Sebacean chicks, joined a cult, got kidnapped by a psychic vampire-slash-clown, got kidnapped by another cult, had more brain-sex -- this time with Zhaan -- and went native on a random planet. He's tired, and he's homesick, and he's just discovered his first gray hair: "I wouldn't mention it, it's just that...I'm afraid I might be growing old out here." Wouldn't you? Moya's Pilot distracts him, calling him up to command. He hops up to go deal with whatever the huge problem is, and whispers to himself, "...Can't deal with this."
Down in command, we can hear the sounds of Moya's engines winding down. Rygel, the hungry Muppet with an inflated sense of personal worth, complains about that. Pilot explains to John that they've noticed something -- a thing they haven't seen since John first arrived onboard. It's a wormhole. Pilot warns him that it's unstable, already breaking apart, and Chiana wanders in as Rygel addresses them all, self-righteously: "That is a pathetic little waste funnel, of which I care little about. We're supposed to be on our way to [a] commerce planet where, I believe, they have Hynerian marjools." He giggles. A Hynerian is what Rygel is, in addition to being a deposed monarch. Marjools are best not talked about. Chiana's concerned about whether John is or is not the captain of Moya, because she doesn't think he should be allowed to stop the ship for any old reason. She's only just come aboard, so she and John don't have a relationship: she's just bitching about any semblance of authority. Which she hasn't had a whole lot of opportunity to do, considering that there's not a single person on the ship who knows what the hell is going on, because they are all crazy. Rygel and Chiana are not getting why the wormhole is important to John, because all they understand is stuff having to do with Rygel and Chiana. Pilot screams for John to look closer at the wormhole: at the other side, you can see a planet that pretty much looks like Earth. John is wounded by hope, as Rygel and a badly-looped Chiana continue to scoff. The show's theme song, gone ethereal and weird, plays as John stares through the wormhole: "That's Earth. That's my home."
Credits. The most beautiful thing about maybe this entire show is the way the credit sequences change from season to season, updating the story boilerplate while mirroring John's adaptations to his situation. "I'm just looking for a way home" becomes "Look upward, and share the wonders I've seen." There's a lot of emotion coded into those little changes. It gives me chills every time.
Aeryn's sitting against a wall, somewhere else, brooding. Aeryn was a Peacekeeper, a soldier, before she met Crichton and got exiled. Now she's nothing, trying to learn to be something else. Earlier, when the crew was doing pretty hideous things to each other on the off chance that they'd be able to find maps to their various homes, John promised her that she could come home with him, since she no longer has a home, or a people, of her own. It was pretty devastating, and they've kissed since then, but the subject really hasn't come up again, because John and Aeryn are still busy being idiots. John approaches her, wearing his IASA flightsuit. "You're going, now?" she asks, refusing to look him in the eye. "Yeah, Pilot says we're runnin' out of time," says John. He's got a southern accent that comes and goes, depending on how freaked out he is. I'd put this scene at about a 6. "I can't go with you," says Aeryn, cold as stone. John complains that this is possibly their only chance to find home. Aeryn: "No, this is your only chance. I'm not certain I'll belong there." John promises that she will, but she shakes her head, swallows, apologizes. Pilot calls down to John that the wormhole is continuing to destabilize, and he looks at Aeryn awhile before standing. "I'm on my way," he calls to Pilot, and turns away. She looks at where he was standing. It's easy to blow this off, because we know how their relationship will twist and turn, but this is the beginning. This is Aeryn, terrified, not even beginning to understand what John meant when he said she could be "more." She's still empty. The last thing she needs is to go to a place where everybody knows John but still looks at her funny.
Zhaan and Rygel are waiting for John in the maintenance bay, where his small craft, the Farscape, stands ready. Zhaan warns him of the danger of traveling through the wormhole, the instability of it, the fact that he could end up anywhere. She's really just begging him to stay. She's always loved him, from the beginning; she went all Sith to save him from Maldis, giving up everything that means anything. They've shared Unity, they've been one soul. She loves John more than anybody, even D'Argo (maybe Rygel, although Zhaan would never admit it). John checks over his module, knowing what Zhaan's actually saying: "It could kill me, Zhaan, I know. You've given me every good reason not to go. I could end up dead, I could end up more lost than I already am. You've given me every single thing except one." She's so not feeling any of this. "This could be Earth. This is the way I got here, through a wormhole. Could be my way home." I don't see how Zhaan can argue this, considering that she was willing to torture Pilot for her own opportunity -- and that was even before she went all dork-sided. "However this works out, this could be goodbye." John thanks her for the many times she's saved his crazy bacon, and then thanks them all. Zhaan smiles peacefully, looks down. This whole show is a series of goodbyes.
Pilot nags John about the wormhole as D'Argo enters, with a bag of John's stuff. D'Argo's a gigantic man-lion with face tentacles. He is awesome. He shoves Rygel -- who's in his ridiculous floating Jazzy -- out of the way as he approaches. It's hilarious. John and D'Argo are boys together. "Goodbye, big guy. I um...I hope you get your chance one day," says John. They can't even look at each other, almost. D'Argo extends his hand for an Earthling handshake, and D'Argo's strong, and beautiful: "Goodbye, John." John puts his hand against Zhaan's cheek, recalling their Unity. She does the same to him. It's rough. "John Crichton," she says. "Remember. There's a part of me, inside you." A tear runs down her cheek as she whispers, "Take care of it." He wipes the tear away and promises that he will. He moves on to Rygel -- picture Donald Trump, only two feet tall and green -- who furrumps and won't smile. "Sparky," says John, as Aeryn appears in the doorway, looking on. John tells Rygel -- who's a hoarder -- that he's giving all of his stuff onboard to Aeryn, so Rygel can't have it. She smiles as Rygel begins to rage about it; Aeryn trains her eyes on John's face, memorizing it. Rygel looks up at John, about to freak out, and sees John's wide grin. He begins to laugh, because that's the kind of joke Rygel thinks is really funny. John looks across the bay at Aeryn, in the doorway. They stare at each other for a good long time, Aeryn's face hard and soft: "Dare me to cry, motherfucker." He says goodbye, and she nods sharply, looking anywhere else. He turns away, and she fights off her tears. D'Argo watches her fight with herself for a while -- they've always fought, and met in the middle, about being soldiers, and now they meet again in the new territory of love, loving John, and there's nothing he can do for her -- and then she takes off. Even in the just morning of their relationship, John's the only home Aeryn's got. And she's too weak to leave with him, and that's something she has to deal with, alone. Sucks to be Aeryn, a lot of the time, but she's pretty cool about it. Way less of a whiner than, say, John.
The music abruptly changes as we se John's module leaving Moya. He maneuvers it over the wormhole and checks in with Pilot, who's still worried about him cutting it too close as the wormhole continues to degrade. In command, the whole screwed-up crew watches. Pilot talks John through the navigations, and shouts when it's time for him to go. John is paralyzed, at the edge of the wormhole, too scared to go in, too scared to stay lost. (Buffy's got the Hellmouth, Farscape's got the wormholes, which starting with this episode pretty much slowly take over the show, for good reason. Even Stargate has, you know, the Stargates. Even Dune's got those huge traveling birth canals that change reality and perception with their excretions. Didn't Deep Space Nine have something similar? On the other side was God. On the other side is always God, or something just as wonderful, and just as scary. You come out of them reborn, and if you go back in, you turn into something else every time. Most genre shows are created by men. Just a thought. If the Giant Space Vagina Theory of Science Fiction creeps you out, I don't know that this is the show for you, because the relatively sterile wormholes are only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the Rabelaisian goings-on in which this show excels. There's a reason the show is such a neverending dorky descent into the Australian BDSM scene, as they say.)
D'Argo, as the only other man onboard, gets it: "Crichton." He snaps John out of it as the rest of them yell insults. "...Yeah, D'Argo." Aeryn swallows, victim of her own, parallel choice paralysis, as D'Argo talks John through it: "I understand the fear. But if you don't do this now, you will regret it forever. You must go, now. Do it, John." John's face hardens, as back on deck, Aeryn stands, quietly breaking. She has nothing to add, because she just had the same choice, and wasn't strong enough to take it. "Thanks, big guy," says John, and hangs his dad's puzzle-ring, given him the day this adventure began, around his joystick, asking his father for luck as he drops down into the wormhole. Circles and circles: the ring's on a chain, the ring goes around your finger, the chain goes around your joystick, the joystick takes you down into the giant wormhole. John has his father's blessing; at the end of the tunnel lies home.
Back on Moya, they lose visual contact with John. D'Argo, tearing up, calls out to John in the silence. Zhaan confirms with Pilot that John's off their sensors: "He's gone." D'Argo and Rygel lower their heads, alone in their grief. Zhaan prays. Aeryn looks on sadly, opens her mouth, nothing to say. If John could take that plunge, it kind of makes them both idiots for not acknowledging their simple feelings, doesn't it? But then there wouldn't be a show, I guess. This show does romantic tension better than anything ever. On the Farscape, John calls for Pilot, hears nothing. He continues to travel down the wormhole, surrounded in bright white light. This man's face, I tell you.
The light becomes a glaring sun over a beautiful beach, where the Farscape sits, steaming and smoking. John opens the hatch, and we fade to him, squinting into the sun. In dreamy slow motion, John's got the funny legs, and finally lets himself fall on his back, in the sand. He laughs, a big laugh. A home laugh. "Helloooo sky!" he shouts.
We fade again, now to John approaching a woman walking down the beach. We can see that he's crash-landed in an urban area, buildings in the distance. "I know this is gonna sound insane, but...this is Australia. Right?" I assume that he was able to pick it out off the globe as he was hurtling toward it at incredible speed. The woman stares, and seems a little frightened, but we realize that she's looking past him, up at the bluff, where a helicopter rises and several soldiers approach. John waves to them, unafraid: he's military too. "Hey! Guys! Where you been?" His smiles fades as he notices that they all have guns pointed at him. Another man -- an incredibly Australian-looking man -- tops the bluff, in a dress shirt and slacks. He also pulls a weapon. "Wait, I'm John Crichton!" John screams, but the man -- Wilson is his name, sucking is his game -- fires, and a dart hits John in the leg. He pulls it out and looks at it, and then turns to run in slow motion. Under very, very bad '80s sci-fi music, John begins to stumble, and falls onto his back. He rolls around for a second, and we close on his eyes, twitching and rolling, and he's out.
Fade in and out as John's examined in a white room. They draw blood and stare, and he's out of it. Fade.
"Let's go again," says Wilson. John's now pissed as hell, fully awake, and stuck inside a concrete and glass containment cell. "So why did you land in Australia?" A soldier snaps a photograph. "I didn't land," says John. "I crashed." Flash. The pictures are grainy and cool, like an old-time GQ spread. "And what is your mission, here?" John -- straddled on a chair, brow furrowed -- whines that there is no mission, beyond what he previously stated in the credits. "Have you been here before?" asks Wilson. John's exasperated: "I'm John. Crichton. You know that, Wilson." As Wilson stares at him, John starts to finally figure it out: "You think I'm an alien?!" Wilson laughs and repeats the question, again. Flash. "Australia. Yeah. Three times. You were here with me, last year, when I tested the Farscape's engines, Wilson. So what the hell is going on?" Flash.
Fade in on an African man, speaking to John through the glass. Translator microbes have never mattered more than they do in this episode, so briefly: in all the cultures other than Earth that John has encountered, translator microbes are injected at birth. They take up residence in the brainstem, and translate for the carrier (and us). What this means is that John -- or Aeryn, or D'Argo -- can understand all languages, but can only speak his own, or whatever languages he actually learns to speak. "This is the twelfth guy, Wilson. How many more are you gonna roll in here, before you believe these are translator microbes in my head, and not some space virus?" Wilson sips coffee behind the guy, still all business. "What did he say?" "Well," says John slowly, his eyebrows and jaw doing that resolute thing that means he's actually focusing on what's going on, "I think he said that until he gets some answers, he's not gonna play anymore." Just in case Wilson's not aware of the power of the eyebrows, or the jaw, John rolls backward in his chair, then rises and retreats against the far wall, as far back as he can go.
Later, John's acting more like himself, zipping back and forth across the cell on his office chair, calling out to a soldier named Cobb who's sitting studiously reading his paper outside. They talk, but Cobb won't look at him. "Can I get a newspaper? Come on, Cobb! What am I gonna find out?...Look, I've been away, for-- What'd you say? Seven months? I just wanna know what's happened. Something. Since I've been gone. Who won the Super Bowl, Cobb?" Cobb raises his head and stares at just nothing, for several seconds, like he's accessing some kind of database or something. It's not a normal act. Finally, he says, "I don't know." John needles him: "I know you're Australian, Cobb, but you gotta know who won the Super Bowl! You know who Ty Cobb is, Cobb? No? How about Babe Ruth? You know who Babe Ruth is?" The southern accent is in full effect: John's losing it. Cobb: "Some fat guy that played for the Yankees." John does his wacky dancing around. "Good! Fat guy! At least you know something!"
The containment cell is in a huge hangar. Elsewhere in it, Wilson's at a desk checking over some sketches from John's experiences. There's a very pretty line drawing of Rygel. "You're kidding me!" The sketch artist is like, "I know, right?" Thank God there's no Scorpius yet, or they'd have to condemn John as a deviant. "No, seriously, I know it looks like your worst bondage nightmare, but see, he's only half-Sebacean, so he has to wear this whole outfit..." A soldier starts yelling at one of the hangar doors, trying to keep somebody out. It's John's very incredibly awesome dad, Jack, last seen comforting his son before the ill-fated flight of the Farscape. He's being very Crichton père here, all, "Out of my way!" and "Back off, soldier!" as they try to obstruct him. Wilson orders Cobb to turn off John's speakers as Jack approaches. The last thing we hear is John screaming, "Dad!" Jack yells at Wilson that he's been waiting two days to see his son, and Wilson's still chill: "Jack, that's what we're trying to determine. Whether it is your son." Behind Wilson, John screams, jumping, pounding on the glass, heartbreaking. Given their history, I'd imagine this is a nightmare John's had before: seeing his father, unable to speak to him, his father unable to hear his voice, calling out; so close to him, but unable to touch him. Wilson tells Jack, "He's got foreign microbes in his brain stem. And the Farscape module has been modified with non-human technology. You know how this works, Colonel. Once we confirm John poses no threat, then you can see him." Jack's not feeling it.
Immediate cut to Jack, having taken care of those assholes somehow, entering the cell. John's so happy to see his dad, so tired and desperate: "Dad. Get me out of here, please." Jack hates the conditions: "I need to ask you some questions," he murmurs, sick. John is minorly taken aback at the idea that his dad's siding against him with IASA. Again. This is a show that can't turn down the opportunity to go back to kindergarten with old John on a regular basis. On the other hand, the only thing worse than seeing John at the absolute edge of losing it, as normal, is seeing him happy, because that's when you know the awful shit is really going to come down. He snorts, and they stand, silent. Jack crosses around behind John so that he won't have to look at his son's hurt and accusation, and asks, "What happened on your tenth birthday?" John's confused for a second, and Jack can't meet his eyes. John: "I don't know. I can't remember." Jack leads him, reminding him that they were living in Annapolis. "Annapolis? Right. You were late. Again." Jack falls, because the guilt of his career choices, and the sight of seeing the continuing effect they have on his grown son, are two different sides of the same pain. "Why?" asks Jack. "You said," John says, sighing, remembering, "you said they held you at Houston for tests. You missed your flight. But you commandeered a jet and you came, anyway." Jack smiles a little, and nods. "I woke you up at 4 o'clock in the morning." Jack took his son fishing, John remembers, and Jack nods again, nearly crying. "And you caught the biggest damn bass I'd ever seen." John, stung: "It was a trout, Dad." (Note: if John and Jack ever meet again, this will be the question, because it sums up the sadder, scarred side of their history. It was a trout, not a bass, and even in remembering Jack can't help but screw it up, and that stays with John.) Jack swallows, but nods: "It was a trout. I missed you, son." They embrace, holding tight, and Jack sighs in relief. John's almost gone. He whispers softly, "What's going on? I know recovery procedure as well as anyone. This is way beyond routine." But Jack's on it: "Nothing's been routine since the day you left, seven months ago. That wormhole you went through is still there. You opened a door, son. A door to Earth we don't know how to close." John whispers, "Get me out of here," and Jack promises he will. Promises all of it, squeezing his eyes shut, holding his son, once lost and now found.
Jack and his son stand on a pier at the beach, John's seven-month bout of paranoia reasserting itself: "I don't buy this, Dad...Wilson, letting me out. There's no way he'd let me out of his sight, if what you say is true." Jack's surprised that John knows Wilson, and Cobb, but explains to John that they're surrounded: "See that van in the parking lot? Those two women to our right? The one in the red, with the headphones? The one sunning herself on the rocks?" We consider these spies, again in dreamlike slow motion: "They're watching us." John watches one older man in a Speedo rising out of the water. "They like to get real close." How close? Jack removes an eagle pin from his jacket, and radio sounds can be heard. He drops it into the water below them, and a crab crawls around on it all, "Breaker breaker? I'm just a lowly crustacean." Jack exposits that there's a global alliance that's been set up to track the wormhole, and that Ray Wilson is the Pentagon's chosen point man. John asks what the hell Wilson wants, and Jack's no happier about it: "He wants you relaxed, so that I can tell whether or not you're really my son." John's like, "OMG already, dude!" Jack continues: "And he wants to know everything you know about the wormhole, and everything you saw on the other side." John scoffs, because he's obviously spilling everything he knows. Jack respects that. John takes out his puzzle ring and hands it over: more proof. "I kept that safe for you," he tells Jack. "Don't know if it brought me luck but it saved my ass." True, and a hearty round of applause for the ring for that particular giant favor, but also: and Aeryn's ass, and D'Argo's ass. And Aeryn's soul. Jack finally admits to his stages of grief when John disappeared. "Well, now you know,"says John. "Now you know how I felt as a kid, every time you went on a mission." The accent comes and goes. Jack ignores this total foul, and puts his hand on John's shoulder. "Come on, son. We've got a lot of work to do."
Helicopters buzz about busily as guards patrol the hangar. Cobb stares at the wormhole on his screen, and John and Wilson walk through the hangar. John's really enjoying a chocolate bar: "They have worlds out there. People out there that you wouldn't believe. But they do not have chocolate." ["Neither do I, at this moment, and suddenly it's making me sad." -- Wing Chun] John stops short. "Hang on a second." John approaches a tech who's futzing around with one of the extra pieces John added to the Farscape. "Hey, no," says John. "Don't do it like that. It's a propulsion fin; it's part of the Hetch drive, okay?" He's a scientist first. Remember when John was just a scientist, and never had to fight or kill? Remember how much happier he was. Walking away, John stops again with a déjà vu: "Have we met?" The tech stutters: "Last year in the Simpson Desert, uh, when you were down there for the shuttle tests." He looks and talks exactly like the boy version of Naomi Watts in Tank Girl. "You were with Cobb, right?" Jet Boy assents. "Right. Well, it's, um...it's good to see you again."
The Moya transport pod flies down over Earth clouds. Those kids just cannot leave well enough alone. It's sweet, really. I hope they don't pay a horrible price. Cobb wigs and calls Wilson over to the screen, saying that something's just come through the wormhole. Wilson summons John and tells him that F-16s are scrambling for a visual: "Are they here for you? Are they here to save you?" John's at a loss. Wilson shoves him in front of the screen. I hate Wilson, but I really like the plausible deniability: he hasn't done a single thing wrong. Yet. The only reason we hate him is that he's being mean to John, and we like John. As the F-16s lock onto the Moya transport pod, Wilson screams at John again and again. The image finally becomes clear enough for John to see properly: "Wait, that's Moya's transport pod. Tell them not to fire." Wilson's still worried. "They're not here to harm us, Wilson," John insists. "Just tell them not to fire!" Wilson kind of shrugs, still yelling about how that's not his call, and John gets terribly desperate: "Wilson, they don't have any weapons on board the transport! Tell them not to fire!" They stare at each other for several seconds, and Wilson gives in.
The transport pod comes in for a landing...
...and we fade to D'Argo on a gurney. Medical crew and soldiers bring in Rygel and Aeryn and D'Argo -- which explains why we had that random Chiana/Zhaan screentime scene up front, but I'm not questioning it, because they're both anarchists, and the whole quarantine thing would have gone even worse than it will, if you can even imagine that -- each lying on a stretcher, in a long, slow, white procession.
Fade to John and his three friends, back in the containment cell. Given that this whole episode amounts to a Bene Gesserit test of Crichton's level of human enlightenment, it's interesting that these three now accompany him. You've got the cold anger of Aeryn and the hot rage of D'Argo, both warriors, and you've got the uncensored id of Rygel. Neither the higher self, Zhaan, nor trickster Chiana, half Rygel and half John himself, has any place in this ritual. This is about harsh realities, the human reaction -- no prayer, no wild cards. Aeryn's wearing her kick-ass black Peacekeeper suit, a nice nod to the way she's turned her separation anxiety into warlike worry for John's safety. They're all such fucking hypocrites, I love it: "I didn't miss you or anything, fag. I just thought they were going to kill you. Stop hugging me." "After you left," says Aeryn -- and can we talk about the voice, for a second? You could bottle her voice and you would make a billion bucks but you still wouldn't have approached everything that makes her wonderful -- "your Earth disappeared through the wormhole." Rygel betrays her: "It was her idea to see what was going on."
Outside the cell, everyone hears Rygel in his native tongue. He continues, and because we're outside now, there are subtitles. "But don't think for a minute we were going after you." Aeryn speaks, and it sounds like backwards dwarf talk, but I'm told that it's actually Claudia Black just doing her own little alien voice. She's so cool: "I just wanted to get a closer look, but the wormhole caught us and pulled us in. There was nothing I could do." Yeah, right. When in doubt, leave it up to fate. She's not earning it -- she didn't jump in the same way John did -- but she did jump in, and that's strong. John notices that Rygel is looking like hell, and it's a credit to the Jim Henson Creature Shop that you can even tell. "I'm frelling sick!" shouts Rygel, and again, Wilson's worried. John speaks without turning to the window: "They're scared, Wilson. That's what they're saying." Rygel gets all up on his uppity self: "I'm not scared! I'm sick! What the yotz did you give me?" D'Argo hisses and jumps at the glass. Jack calls into the room, asking if John's okay, and John rolls his eyes, because even with all the screaming and throwing of bodies at the windows, this is still calmer than most leisure times aboard Moya. D'Argo growls, and John explains to Rygel that it's the tranks: "It'll run off soon; you're gonna be okay." And Rygel, hating pain and loving pleasure as he does, whines, "Why are they treating me like this?" It's nominally pathetic, I guess.
I'll tell you right now, I have zero sympathy for Rygel. Not an episode goes by where I don't cross my fingers that he'll get airlocked. But that's the point of a lot of this show's ongoing themes: suck it up, because no matter how loathsome the little shit acts, he still depends on you, and in the end, while Zhaan's all very nice and good, you get closer to God by loving Rygel. Her spiritual ivory tower bullshit didn't do an ounce of good for her, when she got knocked down -- and her entire self-hating, scary story arc is precisely about her inability to recognize or acknowledge, let alone love, her inner Rygel, the beast that eats and fucks and shits and will hurt a friend in the blink of an eye for personal gratification. And maybe that's why Zhaan loves John, savage that he is, as much as she does, as much as we do: because on some level, he gets that. He's better in a personal crisis than she is, for sure -- she just doesn't have them as much. "They're freaking out," John comforts Rygel. "You're an alien, and they're freaking out." He's so sad and so tired and...the thing about John is that it was one thing to be stuck in here, it nearly drove him crazy after so much time lost in the black, but what really kills him is seeing his friends in the same situation. He is good. "I vowed I would never be taken prisoner again," says D'Argo, saying the same thing in warrior terms, and John tries to explain the difference: "You're not a prisoner. Trust me. I'm gonna take care of you guys." Rygel whines again, to the only person who ever shows him kindness -- even Zhaan barely does, and it's generally pretty condescending on those rare occasions -- "Crichton, I feel frelling terrible." (About the "yotz" and the "frelling" and so forth: it's the translator microbes; they may be small but they're as scared as anyone of the FCC. You get over it.) John goes to the door to ask for help for Rygel, looking at D'Argo, who breathes slowly, and there's an unavoidable stacking of the emotional deck here, because like it or not, these are John's people doing this, and there's no clearer sign of that awkwardness than the fact that John can come and go. Even if you know better, there's an inescapable feeling that John is somehow allied with them.
John questions his father outside. Like it or not, these are Jack's people doing this and Jack's been pulling this crap since John was little, and even if you know better, as an adult, there's still the feeling that your dad is still somehow picking them over his son. "What's going on?" John demands. "What's takin' so long?" Jack begs John to relax, but John's getting tired of all this mumbo-jumbo: "And do what, Dad? Read a magazine? They're all seven months old, Dad! They don't want me to have any idea what's going on." John stares at the table as Jack speaks: "If what you say about those aliens is true, they can help us unlock the universe. You're positive they're not here to harm us?" John almost rolls his eyes at the idea that any person on Moya could possibly have it that together. "They came looking for me," he says. "They were worried." And if the accent always comes back when John's with Jack, is that because it's hard, or because he still idolizes him? Was it a trout, or a bass? "You trust them?" asks Jack. John's like, "A fucking bomb more than Wilson, duh." "I like them," he tells his father. "They're my friends." There's a bit of an edge here, like when your work friends meet your regular friends or whatever: "I know they have a bunch of tattoos and tend to talk about Star Wars more than normal people, but come on, they're nice."
Cobb shows up and, for no reason except to further the plot/experiment/ritual, brings John to the medical unit. John sees something awful on the table, and comes closer. Lying on the table is Rygel's corpse, vivisected, his entire abdomen cut and stretched open. You know Inanna? Sumerian goddess, an Ishtar/Aphrodite type. Don't yell, I'm going somewhere with this. She went to see her sister Ereshkigal, or Death, and at each of seven gates she gave up her clothing, her jewels, everything that made her her, until she finally got to the bottom, naked, to be tested and reborn. In John's trip through the wormhole, this holy test of him, he's lost Zhaan and he's lost Chiana, and Moya and Pilot, due to the plot concerns. He enters without faith, without youth, without a home, without a compass. And now with Rygel dead, he's lost worldly concerns, body, all thoughts of pleasure. John has his anger, and he has love, and he has his father, and that's all he's got. It's a fairy tale. (I know I tend to get like this, but it's only with the stories that tell these truths: it's a fairy tale. Just be happy I never recapped Buffy. Or, speaking of stripped Inanna, Wonderfalls. My God.) John's face goes soft, and hard. You can see Rygel's organs, his body laid open to dissection, the gross matter of his body gone cold. He's a walking stomach, and that stomach is laid open. John's lips go all woggly and he sees Wilson, spying through the window.
John storms across the hangar, flinging papers and stuff left and right: "Wilson. We've spent our lives waiting for this moment! We sent Voyager, we left damn greeting cards on the moon, and as soon as they get here, look at what you're doing!" It's the human reaction. He stares. "They can help us. Just take a step back and you look at what you're doing. You think about it!" Wilson exits: "Don't worry. I've thought of everything, Commander." He's more right than John can comprehend. John mutters, hating the thing: "You make me sick."
Back in the containment cell, John takes on his father's role again, as voice of the bad guys, hating every word: "Official word is...Rygel died from allergic reaction to the tranquilizer." Aeryn's not buying it; D'Argo pushes further: "And what do you think happened?" "It doesn't..." John swallows, about to cry, or maybe puke. "...matter what I think, D'Argo," he concludes. He looks up at Aeryn, who looks away, and hardens. "No," says John. "I think they killed him." D'Argo: "You know that those animals killed him!" And Aeryn, quieter, throat raw. "And then they cut him open." John protests that they were trying to restart Rygel's heart, but nobody's buying, including John. "They were studying him! Like an animal. Like an alien. Which one of us do you think they'll kill , Crichton?" I'm guessing D'Argo. We've seen this story before. "D'Argo, it...it's not gonna go down like that," says John. He's broken; this is a travesty of denial. "Look, I know that you have no reason to trust me..." and D'Argo tells John he's fucking right. Aeryn's just gone cold. "You tell them," D'Argo says, cold and logical, "that when they come for me, I'll kill them." Against John's pleas, D'Argo continues. "We've tried it your way, and one of us is dead." Aeryn raises her head, looking at the wall, as D'Argo dismisses John: "Go." John crouches in front of Aeryn, begging her to look; she finally meets his eyes, sickened: "You know, Crichton, Peacekeepers wouldn't even kill their prisoners to study them." She just doesn't know yet, she's clinging to the same pack of lies that John now is, but we don't know that yet. (How is it that every episode of this show is a fucking monster cryfest of emotional horror -- or a ridiculous display of adolescent fart humor -- and yet never really seems all that overwrought? It tells these truths; it's a fairy tale.) Aeryn shakes her head almost imperceptibly, exhausted: "D'Argo's right. Just go." John looks at them, in turn; sighs; heads for the door. Aeryn covers her mouth, unsure how to cry. John asks for release, and leaves the cell.
John stands outside the building, leaning over a balcony, ripped apart, as Jack approaches. "I gave them my word, Dad," says John. "I told them I'd take care of them." The accent's at a 10. "You were naïve to think you could protect them from people like Wilson," says Jack. John turns around and looks away from his father, too naked: "I need a favor, Dad." Jack nods, and, simple as anything: "Name it." John asks Jack to call in "every marker" he has, "every General, every Undersecretary, every Pentagon mistress," and tell them what's happening to his friends: "And you get them to stop it." He turns back toward the building. Even Jack knows the eyebrows and jaw: "What are you gonna do, son?" John lies that he's going to plead with Wilson, beg for their lives, but Jack knows better: "You be careful." John smiles, because nobody knows what the last seven months have done, what he's capable of. It's heartbreaking, to see this and think how far across the line from scientist he already is; to respect and mourn that, knowing how far he'll still go. Jack doesn't know. Jack thinks John will get hurt. John, with a tiny hard smile, says, "I'm just gonna make him understand, Dad." Jack, scared now: "Son, are you willing to die for those creatures in there?" John levels Jack with the unassailable simplicity of his response, speaking the language they both know: "I gave my word." Jack is sad; John leaves him.
John walks through the hangar -- we see the Farscape, parts all over, a guy with a gun -- past the cell, and into the medical unit. The exam table is covered with fresh white towels. So clean. Like Rygel was never even there. John walks around the table, noticing a soldier's feet, a man lying on the floor. He crouches to check on him, holding his feet, thinking fast. Aeryn cocks a rifle at his head, silent and stealthy: "Did I kill him?" She didn't. "Are you with me? Or them?" she asks. So fast, and she's back to the Aeryn John first met. To be exiled by your home culture is one thing -- to be jailed and dissected by the culture you'd considered joining is to realize your worst possible fears. This is a woman raised in a soldier crèche, contact with her parents not allowed, raised to live and die by her army, a person who has no concept of solitude. And this woman has been bounced twice, out of that, in the last year. And now she's attacked a fellow soldier. "I'm with you, Aeryn," says John. "Trust me. Put down the gun." She slowly angles it away from his face. "Do they know you're out?" he asks. She nods: "They took D'Argo somewhere, and when the guard came back for me, I was ready for him." She's still choking on it. That's two down. We won't see D'Argo again. John lost his anger sometime between the scene with Jack and now -- and if not his anger, his rage, because it's not about him anymore and it never really was -- and only now does he have the peace to calm Aeryn, his hand on her knee, almost holding her up, holding her steady: "Where'd they take him?" Aeryn's like, "I don't fucking know and I'm not sticking around to find out." John nods: "All right, then. Let's move." John exits and Aeryn follows, with adorable and almost hilarious Peacekeeper precision, heels clicking, gun in hand. She knows this part.
Further into the building, Aeryn knocks out a soldier, and John approaches Cobb in the break room: "Hey, Cobb. You find out who won the Super Bowl, yet?" Again, Cobb doesn't look up: "What do you want, Crichton?" Aeryn enters from a side door, Crichton holding Cobb's eyes, and points her gun at him. She speaks to him in her language, and this time we don't get any subtitles, because we don't need them: "Don't fucking move, bitch." Cobb's confused, and Aeryn speaks again, checking all the exits. John: "She says that she wants to shoot you, Cobb." No doubt. "I don't know if it's a good idea, or not, but I figure since you've pushed us this far, it doesn't really matter, does it? Where's D'Argo?" Cobb looks over at Aeryn, and then smiles at John: "They flew him to another base. He's gone, Crichton. You can't save him." It's only a test. Aeryn bonks Cobb's head with the butt of her gun, and John muscles him into a sitting position and rips off his ID badge: "If you'd only been reasonable!" He takes Cobb's gun: "You're wrong in what you're doing here, Cobb. You're wrong." Cobb asks politely that John not shoot him. John knocks Cobb out, and heads for the door, gun still trained on him. "You're wrong!" He kicks him brutally. "That's for Rygel." That's a human reaction too.
Then comes the very best part of this episode, and maybe one of the best of the series, and the secret reason I was so happy you guys picked this one. John and Aeryn are walking down a sidewalk, in the rain. "Aeryn, pick it up," says John. "I want to get out of this rain." She opens her mouth, smiling, and tastes the raindrops on her tongue. When John offered to bring her home with him, this was the Aeryn he imagined. Beautiful, delighted. She grew up in steel and concrete and plastic, her whole life lived in soldier readiness. This is the more that she could be: this woman, a child for a moment, in love with the wonder of the rain. In love with the universe, outside the walls of Peacekeeper Carriers and Moya, in love with all its mysteries. Even if John's not feeling particularly welcome at home right now, Aeryn can carry it for him for a time, because this is the home he was missing, and the home he tried to give her. Aeryn: "Rain. Is that what you call this? I like it." John's scarier half, his warrior half, the part of him he'll always fear, is falling in love with Earth, touching her, tasting her, even as John's pulling away. And that's what you get for jumping into a wormhole: everything.
Clearly, there is sex in the near future. John uses Cobb's badge to jimmy the lock on a condo, explaining that he and Jack stayed there last year. Aeryn's immediately suspicious, covering the entire yard with her gun: "Crichton, he is with them. This is the first place they will look for us!" John says he trusts his father, but Aeryn has no context for that, and she watches flank as he finally gets the door open. "Ladies first," he says, and she rolls her eyes as she enters.
Later, John looks out the room window, at the hazy city and overcast sky. Thunder rumbles. It's beautiful out there, and among the many technical joys of this episode, the lighting in this entire scene is just sick awesome. John's wearing a white tank, she's got her awesome soldiery underthings on, and very high-waisted slacks. She's holding a bottle, which John explains is beer, and she sniffs at it. John: "Trust me. It's just what we need, right now. Down the hatch." He takes a swig. She smiles slightly at him, and repeats it: "Down the hatch!" She tastes the beer, with her tongue, and quirks her head, as if to say that it is charming. "You like it?" he asks. She does: "It's like Fellip nectar. [The] Fellip's a creature on Tarsus, and they get the nectar from..." John stops her, shaking his head. "Aeryn, please. Don't tell me where it comes from, just drink the beer." She's like, "Um, okay?" but she keeps drinking. John apologizes, and Aeryn looks at him. "[For] everything. What's happened here. Getting you stuck on Moya. I mean, if it wasn't for me, you'd still be the....happy little Peacekeeper dominating the lesser races." Aeryn smiles lovingly: "Mm. I've got a lot to blame you for, Crichton." He whispers, staring out the window at the rainy city, "Look at that." She considers him. John: "That's it. Earth. Minus the sunshine." Police sirens ring out, bringing the proper amount of real-world beauty to the scene. "You know, you were right," she says. "It's actually very beautiful." John sits beside her on the bed, shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them slack and exhausted. "Were you scared to join me?" he asks. "When I left Moya?" Aeryn wonders if she can actually admit this to John, but everything else has fallen away: it's just them, now. In the whole world: "Yes." She nods and sighs, because the proof is in the quarantine and vivisection. "I won't be recaptured, Crichton. They will have to kill me, if they come to take me, tomorrow." He nods: "I know." They sit in the soft blue light. He sighs and lays his head on Aeryn's shoulder, looking out the window. He presses his lips against her shoulder, and she feels it. He pushes her head with his, forehead to forehead like always, more intimate than a kiss, and their faces are close. She's like a fawn, leaning in, and their faces are so close. She looks at him, his closed eyes. After about a million years -- and if you've ever tried to get either of these types into bed, you know it actually does take this long -- they kiss, gently at first. She tastes like the rain. They jump in, together.
I'm not trying to be funny or anything when I tell you that as I was writing that last paragraph, this song came up on shuffle. I'm just a lowly crustacean, but: come on. Case closed.
The morning, the sun is out, shining brightly over the city. (Now it's playing "Goldfinger," but God know what that means.) Aeryn sits in a chair, looking over a city map. She's wearing John's shirt and a black jacket and looks painfully sexy. John groans nudely from the bed, and Aeryn snaps, "Get out of bed, John. I've worked out that plan we talked about." He stutters: "Aeryn. Um...about last night." She's so awesome: "Yes. It's fine, John, it's just not top priority, right now." That's my girl. John groans and lies back. Aeryn: "I've gone through all of these pictures and I've found a few places that seem to be uninhabited enough to hide in." He's exasperated: "Aeryn." She looks at him, then away, like, "Fuck, are you gonna girl out or what?" It's about as weird as if Tango and Cash had woken up in bed together, is basically how Aeryn's acting, and it's hilarious. She doesn't know about any of this stuff, and what she does know, she has many different kinds of vested interest in pretending she doesn't, as we'll see later on in the series. John agrees, after a moment of silence, that they have to find a place to hide. "[So] let's go," she says, all frisky and businesslike. John: "No, no, no. You're not going anywhere, dressed like that." I guess she's just too hot to leave the house, because I see nothing wrong with the outfit except for the retina-burning awesomeness of it on her, in the morning light. She looks down, and then up at him, and we're I think up for a humorous quick-cut...
Yes. In the condo's living room, Aeryn's fretting over her new clothes, as we focus on her in the mirror being weirded out. John's almost smiling, because it's as weird for him as it is for us to see her in what she's wearing. Which is a strapless sun dress, with a light green sweater, and the dress is intensely flowery...but maybe only five years out of date, if it's 1999. For such an intensely beautiful and feminine woman, she gives good drag queen. It's weird to even look at, and Aeryn knows it: "Are you sure about this?" And: really? Is the point that she shouldn't be leaving the house in anything but a dress? Because it's not 1955. I mean, it's funny as hell and I love it when she wears "Earth clothes" for just this reason, but...whatever. I'm sure I'm missing something. Maybe it's a size issue and the only clothes they could find were the ones left behind by the renters, who just happened to be the entire Ashley family. If that's the case, you'd think the furnishings would be uglier. John cuts himself off, comforting her, at a knock at the door. They rush forward, Aeryn of course pulling her gigantic gun, and Jack calls to his son from outside. "It's my father," says John in a library whisper, and Aeryn's vindicated and pretty scary, given the outfit: "I knew it! He's betrayed us! There'll be soldiers outside!" John's like, "Dude." He opens the door, and Jack steps inside just enough for John to close the door.
"Are you okay, son?" John says he's okay, and archly indicates the woman with the dress and the gun. "Remember Aeryn Sun?" They stare. "We actually never met," says Jack. Aeryn orders John to search Jack, again in her alien language from our perspective, and John refuses her once, then again. Aeryn gets huffy and keeps her gun leveled at Jack. "Is she ever gonna put that down?" asks Jack. But remember, she can understand what he's saying -- the only one without translator microbes, including us, is Jack. That's important. She shakes her head, grinning like steel. John's like, "Uh, doubt it." Jack assures them, still staring at Aeryn, that Wilson has no idea any of them is there: "It's not gonna take them long to start searching places we've been before." John asks if Jack talked to any of his contacts, and Jack goes quiet: "Everybody. No one's gonna help us, son. It's too dangerous." John asks if Jack will help, himself, and Jack shrugs: "I don't matter in this. Official word is that these aliens never existed. D'Argo's on his way to a military base in Utah, and the warehouse has been swept clean." Aeryn advances, speaking angrily, and John grabs her wrist: "Aeryn! Back off. Please."
Jack is now kind of freaked. "Listen," he says, handing John a bunch of cash, "the two of you have to get out of town, and you've got to find someplace that's safe. I'll hold them off here as long as I can." John protests that his dad shouldn't have to cover for him, but Jack's convinced that this is the only play: "You're in this too deep. They're not going to just let you walk away. Look, at least this time I get to say goodbye." Aeryn looks down, away, with respect, but also perhaps remembering her own parents' goodbye. She has no idea how bad that particular storyline will get. John: "I will...um...we'll hole up somewhere and I'll...uh...I'll contact you." Jack demurs and says that they'll "make him tell" if he knows anything. John says goodbye, and Jack nods. As they exit, Aeryn stops before Jack. She speaks to him in an alien language that we can't understand, kindly, holding his gaze, and turns to leave. This is not the last time Aeryn and Jack will touch, without us getting to know the entire story, any more than we can ever hope to understand how much our parents influence the people we love, and the way that we love them. I could do ten pages here on the way that Aeryn continually disappoints and tempts John to hope the same way Jack always did, and vice versa with her piece-of-shit parents and John's constant leaving, but it's not germane except to note: Aeryn and Jack have more in common than either of them do with John, and we can't see it all, ever, because that's not the kind of thing you understand with your brain. Close-up on Aeryn's face as Jack speaks: "Thank you, Aeryn Sun." (Transcendent symbolic moment in the family drama, or yet another clue to the puzzle of the episode? You decide. Either way, they understand each other. Either way, John's completely fucking clueless as usual. He's such a Joxer, just all "yoo-be-doo-be-doo, la la la" all the time. I like The Simpsons, but I never really felt like I understood it -- or John -- until I realized how many men automatically understand that it's more about Homer than anybody else -- the "I'm just an ignorant shmoe" card men play without even thinking about it. And once you get the reality of that, you can have any boy. Any boy in the whole school.) Aeryn stops short, looks at Jack, and then steps up as he looks away. She stares at him a moment, and then exits, leaving Jack alone, scared for both of them. We won't see him again. All we have is love, now.
John and Aeryn walk through the city, Aeryn wondering why everybody's staring at her. "They think you look good," says John, but I don't know how this is anything other than a placatory nothing, because if anything they're seeing how good she could look. The girl from the beach walks past them, and John turns to stare, and Aeryn wonders why. "That girl," says John. The girl turns back to look at them. "She was on the beach the other day, when I crash-landed," John explains. "That one." Aeryn's not feeling this particular paranoia, considering that they have an actual global alliance of governments on their asses. "[So] I think I know her. I think...we went to high school together? It was only for a couple of weeks, we never talked, but..." Aeryn giggles, but not in a funny way; more like how every episode somebody goes completely nuts and Aeryn's used to it. "Yeah, yeah, she looks familiar." She smiles at John, because you don't feed the beast of John being crazy, ever, or else you get Season 3. Best to just ignore it and laugh it off. The cameras whirl, adding an edge to the overall dreamy quality, as John starts going through the stacks of magazines at a newsstand, tossing aside magazine after magazine. "They're all seven months old. Why are they all seven months old?" Aeryn, worried now, keeps dipping into the shot, getting between John and whoever he's yelling at all crazy. It's very disorienting, because people on TV don't just jump in front of the camera like that normally. Quite inventive. "John, stop it," she tells him. He screams that he's seen all the magazines and shit from before, because they're from when he left, and Aeryn is getting scared that he's going to throw the whole "sneaky" part of their plan. He starts yelling at the newsstand guy, who is the Speedo gentleman from earlier: "I used to ride my bike past your house, in the fifth grade!" People are staring; Aeryn cannot deal. The guy -- who has an Australian accent, which I can see them giving him -- protests, but John starts yelling at Aeryn: "Everybody here, Aeryn. I know them all. I know Wilson, I know Cobb, I know you!" Not really getting the full implication -- and I must admit that, sitting down to review this episode, I couldn't even remember if she was real or not -- she just keeps trying to calm him down. John pulls a gun from his bag and tells Aeryn to get lost: "Get away from me, Aeryn! Get away! Back off! Every place I've been, I've been there before. Every. Place." He turns to a random guy nearby. "Greg Kukonus! I dated your sister!" John does an awesome Buffy move, jumping onto a nearby concrete wall and speeding off, down, away. Away from Aeryn. We won't see her again. All we have is John, now. He's ready for the test. He knows it. It's a fairy tale.
John storms into a pool hall, staring around at everyone doing nothing in particular. "Yeah! Here we go!" He laughs in that crazy way he laughs in every single episode, because in every single episode, there will be a point at which John goes insane and starts laughing. Frankly, I'm proud he held on this long. "This is exactly the way I remember it! I know all you guys, don't I?" He nods to his own crazy ass. "It's a little out of context," he mumbles, drawing his gun on a random guy to the side, behind whom a girl is hiding. "...But I know you." He walks over to a table, picks up a mug of beer, starts with the Crichton bravado. "How the hell you been?" He drinks from the beer and than jacks an old lady's cigarette and snuffs it out. "Quit." He strides around, in the chest-out pose we'll know so well by the end of the series. "And what the hell are you doin' here? Yeah, I've been here." He strides to the men's washroom, throws the door open. "Been in there." The music and camera go wonky as the men inside stare at him. "Nothin' new." He turns to leave the pool hall, crazy as a junebug, but stops short. Close-up on his eyes: "But I've never been in there." He turns toward the Ladies, strides over crazily, kicks it open. He is greeted by a wall of orange light. His WTF face is matched only by our own.
There's a story-parable by somebody -- Guattari? De Saussure? Derrida himself? Google fails me, so it's probably Lacan, because you know his dead ass is just too good for common Google -- in which a boy and a girl are sitting on a train which, when it pulls up to the platform, occasions the girl to ask which station they are at. The boy looks out the window at the restrooms, and states very matter-of-factly, "We're at WOMEN." Because, you see, he's misinterpreted the bathroom sign for the station name. "Don't be silly," says the girl, who has apprised herself of her own window view. "We're sitting at MEN." The point of the "joke" -- which isn't really a joke, because old dead European white male literary theorists don't really joke in the way that you and I think of "jokes" -- is that you're already caught in the linguistics of your experience. You think you know what it is, for example, to be a boy, and it's a natural tendency to view all "other" as the most simple "other" possible, and get caught up in the myth of that, rather than looking at the forest instead of the trees. But combine that with the wormhole stuff, and you're really cooking. Of course John's never been in the Women's room -- that's the point of the episode. But now that he's jumped in the wormhole -- the literal one, days ago, alone, and the metaphorical one last night, with Aeryn -- he can go there. He can open the door, and explore the wonders he hasn't yet seen. Talk about Rabelais, try "Women's Pissoir As Holy Grail." That's hot, and just as filthy as anything else that happens on this show. Sure, I feel like an idiot 'Scaper loving this show; it's got Muppets, who wouldn't? But the difference between forcing yourself to read Ulysses and watching this show is the difference between hitting yourself in the head with something heavy, and watching people who are entirely too hot blowing shit up and making out. No fucking contest, Joyce. Sorry. Point being: having lost everything, John can now look out at this fairy tale from the outside, and realize how well he's been tricked, by whatever force is guiding this particular quest. How his homesickness, now processed, now outside his heart, is something to be looked at, instead of something to be coveted and kissed and cried over. John has his life back. His bravery has earned him that.
Cut to John storming toward the facility hangar as Wilson pulls a gun. "Just stop!" John tells him. John's not having it, as the vans pull up and soldiers jump out, and he's just laughing, on top of it all, no doubt now, no fear. "Make me. You're not gonna shoot. You're not even Wilson." The thing with John and Aeryn is that he's the intuitive one, the dreamer, and she's the warrior, the hard one. She couldn't have figured this out any more than he could have been the one to escape and knock that first guard out. Without sacrificing John's masculinity, or Aeryn's femininity. (If this were The Apprentice I'd give you a quiz: compare and contrast with, say, Laura and Bill from Battlestar: the intuitive male dove warrior, the hardcore female hawk civilian.) Wilson: "Where's the female alien?" But John's so over the whole thing that he barely spares a glance. "I'm going to talk to the man in charge, and we both know it ain't you." Ben Browder's that boring kind of hot that never stops being hot, but never stops being so obvious that you don't need to mention it; nevertheless, Crichton's most beautiful when he knows he's right, without a slip of doubt. God knows it happens rarely enough, due to him being a fuckup.
John comes upon Jack, who sits alone in a chair, in the middle of an empty hangar. They are quiet with each other for a moment. "Who are you?" asks John. The question he's been asking since he was five; the question without an answer except for what his newly sci-fi life might provide. "You did well, John," says Jack, not looking up. "Most species don't do as well." John asks what the whole world really is, in this dream. "Everything here is a physical creation from your memory," Jack says, and John responds that Jack's not real. "Well," he says, and looks up. He's not totally proud of the shit he has been perpetrating. "I'm not your father." It's telling that John has processed that -- what's less surprising than another disappointment? -- and goes right to "And what about my friends?" Jack, to an increasingly close-to-freakout John, says, "They were investigating the wormhole we'd created from your memory, so we decided to use them in our trial." D'Argo and Rygel appear in glass compartments off to the side. "Crichton, enough is enough," says D'Argo, who's in no mood. "Get us back home." John's so relieved that Rygel is still alive, but of course, since this is the real Rygel, he couldn't care less about all the John-related bullshit: "Kill me? These people treated me splendidly!" Jack looks at John, hoping he'll chill out. See? "They gave me marjools, Crichton! Lovely Hynerian marjools! Mmmm!" Fucking Rygel. He slurps down some kind of disgusting spiny snails. "Whoever you are, I thank you!"
"Of course we didn't kill him," says Jack, like this wasn't cruel enough either way. "We created his corpse." John's hair is now totally fucked up, as Strega would want me to point out; he looks like a little kid. "Why? Why would you make me think that he was dead?" Jack stands: "We needed a human reaction, John. Your reaction." John grabs him by the shirt and throws him up against a pillar. "You made me think you were my father!" he screams. There it is. The last lie. A chunk of Jack comes off in John's hands, revealing some kind of gross alien shit. John drops the chunk, totally in shock, looking at his hands. This is where he loses Jack. We won't really see him again, unless we see him for real. "I'm sorry. For the trial to have value, you had to believe everything. Let me show you." Jack steps away, and John gives in to the craziness of all this. "Are we anywhere near Earth?" he asks. "Actually, we're not far from Moya. We brought you here to recreate your memory." John's all caught up. "Well, if you can make all this, why not just make a wormhole to take you to Earth?" Jack shakes his head: "That would use all our remaining power. We only have enough left to transport our race one last time. We had to be certain of how we would be received." Any other show, this wouldn't matter: aliens kidnap main character, fuck with him, lie to him, realize that Earth isn't ready for their jelly, let him go. But because this show is awesome, it's actually the beginning of the entire quest. Jack walks through yet another in a series of meaningful doorways, and John follows after. Have you ever seen The Truman Show? The ending always makes me cry. Something about that door, out into the world, and the man at the edge of the sky, stepping out, into the level of the game, the one that matters. It's too big.
Jack and John enter a large room, the lights dimming and brightening. Several odd sacs hang from the ceiling. As John looks up, one of them opens its eyes. We cut and fade from lots of angles, this side and that side, one alien and then another, John upside down. Their lovely eyes. "Though space is without boundaries," Jack intones, "there are but a few planets where we can live." John assumes, given what he's seen in the last fifteen episodes, that they're looking to take over. "Not take over," says Jack. "Cohabitate. To replenish our hive. The Ancients have stories of a world that will welcome us. We can only hope they're true. You can move closer." John's fucking cool where he is, thanks. "We had to find out whether humans would welcome us, or fight us." Images of John's life float across the screen, the walls, his face. It's very wack. It's worth noting that Browder came to utter hotness fairly recently. "You stole my memories," he complains. "I'm sorry to have taken this form," says Jack. "But I thought the best spy would be a father, as seen through his son's eyes." And he's right, especially with this particular son. Throughout the rest of the series, John will always love this Ancient; not as a father, but as a thing that knows him, knows his heart. The only thing he really wants. "You stole my memories," he says again, and Jack protests that they had no choice.
"Show me," says John. The first and last question. "What you really look like." Jack nods, and crosses to the side -- John walks away, around, keeping the chrysalises between him and the real deal. A bright light shines down from above as John blinks. The most important thing in the entire series happens right this second, but we don't know it yet, and we won't know it for a long time. A veil has been broken. Once you've taken the plunge, jumped into wormholes, you have knowledge of wormholes. Maybe not in a place you can put into words, maybe not in a way you can explain to Steve Carell, or even Steve Dedalus, but it's there. And you can't know what your father really looks like, underneath all the memories and lies and disappointments, until that day. Just because it happens every day, to every person, doesn't make the jump any less momentous, or any less terrifying. Other people's bodies are the scariest thing in the world until you've done it before. A sillier man than John might think of it as "conquering," as "exploring," but either way it's learning territory. It's moving out into the mystery, it's crossing the boundary from what's known to what isn't. Which is what astronauts do, as like, their whole job. This is a boy story; this is a boy's fairy tale, so it's about astronauts and wormholes and guns and the whole bag of boy bullshit. But it's still true, no matter your circumstance.
The light fades, and the Ancient is revealed. Doesn't really matter what it looks like, because this is a crappy, scrappy sci-fi show, but it's about the same height as a man, kind of like a bug, kind of like a rabbit. Kind of like a lowly crustacean. "Many of us hope that Earth might be our welcoming place. If all people were like you, maybe it could be. But they're not. In your memory, we saw millions of Wilsons, and Cobbs. It also lead us to a familiar conclusion. The highest life form on the planet is also the most destructive. And your humans would kill us." John looks up a moment into an Ancient's eyes, into the fading light there. "So what will you do now?" he asks. "What we've done since before I was hatched," says the Ancient. "We continue searching for a home." John turns to leave, still smarting: "So will I." The Ancient calls him back, offering the ring and chain, already a fetish to the father, now a symbol of so much more. Of the puzzle of everything. "Thanks," says John, and takes it. He opens the door, the ocean roars. "Maybe we'll meet again one day, John," says Ancient Jack, and we freeze, right back at The Truman Show, a boy who has become a man, caught on the edge of whatever the hell comes , John limned by ocean, standing in the shadow of that last doorway into the real story, which is just now beginning. "Maybe." But you and I both know this shit was a cakewalk compared to what will happen then.