Farscape - Season 4 - Episode 03
Synopsis
D'Argo and Sikozu come up with a plan to crash Elack onto the Peacekeeper pursuit craft, facilitating their escape. Crichton is forced to consort further with Grayza to ensure success. When the plan goes awry, the crew begins a search for the probe that will reverse the planet's deadly atmospheric conditions, but a most unexpected enemy stops them in their tracks.
[DVD]
Filler Quotient:
0, not filler, do not skip this episode.
- Numerous major long term plot threads are serviced here.
Problems
- Sikozu revealed that she's faking her status as a Peacekeeper to Jool and Chiana right in front of two Peacekeeper soldiers easily in earshot. They just stood there while the three of them exchanged information and broke through Chiana's handcuffs. WTF? They deserved to get their asses kicked for their incompetence.
Factoids
- According to Sikozu, Grayza's ability to seduce men with those pheromones is a surgically implanted enhancement that will rapidly reduce her lifespan.
Remarkable Scenes
- Rygel predicting that Sikozu will betray them again.
- John to Grayza regarding Braca interrupting the interrogation session: "Bad news from Smithers?"
- John attempting to kill Grayza but being unable to will himself to do so.
- Braca shooting Scorpius.
- John overcoming Grayza's pheromones and restraining her.
- Elack crashing into the planet.
- The old woman throwing Winona over the cliff to motivate John to go after the probe hunter alien.
- The reassembling of the probe blocking the magnetic summer and unfreezing a group of priests from 12,000 cycles ago at the moment they were frozen.
- Jool staying on the planet to shepherd the resurrected priests.
- The old woman revealing her name as Noranti.
My Review
While the weird looking aquatic alien plot twist toward the end was an annoying red herring, the rest of the episode achieved a much more solid focus which part one lacked somewhat. I greatly enjoyed John's clever, temporary ability to overcome Grayza's wiles and Elack's heroic death was also most fitting. I'm a bit sad to see Jool left behind; she's leaving right when I was starting to like her. Or at least not hate her.
I also rather enjoyed the ambiguous fate of Scorpius in this episode. By now the series has certainly earned this. I have no doubt that Scorpius survived being buried alive, despite his pleas in vain to Sikozu to save him. I certainly hope this isn't the last we see of Jool and especially the plot exploring the link between her species, John's, and Sebaceans. Overall this episode was a solid improvement over part one.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
Sikozu's statements in front of the peacekeepers seem so odd I think it must be a production error of some sort. Either the actual set ended up being much smaller than was thought during story boarding for whatever reason, or the scenes were originally designed with the old aspect ratio/cameras in mind, and when they switched to widescreen with the larger field of view and better cameras it made the peacekeepers seem much closer than intended and it couldn't be fixed in post. They were also playing games with color saturation at that point to indicate the magnetic flux so may not have been able to also pull off the normal narrow depth of view tricks used to indicate distances.
So what prevents Scarrans/Peacekeepers from retrieving the probes now?
So this episode was less difficult to follow than part one but the story regarding the lost alien priests, the aquatic alien and peace/weapon pieces, was still just as boring but now in this the conclusion it also ends up being badly explained.
And of course another we get another Scorpius is dead supposition. It should annoy me but somehow it does not. I guess I have just accepted that it is something Farscape does once or twice a season with it's villains. I do hope however, that they show how he manages to get out of this latest predicament.
I ratied the conclusion the same as part one - a six(6)