#and one is aeryn as a bioloid

[scorpsik]

TWENTY FIVE

For Farscape's anniversary.

Lordy, I haven't written for Farscape in a decade.

Written completely live and unplanned right now.

TWENTY FIVE

She closed her eyes and inhaled.  The air was stale - staler than she remembered - but it was familiar; Moya's familiar scent. She traced gloved fingers over the walls, feeling where Moya was smooth and soft.  It had been a long time - a quarter of one of John Crichton's centuries.  Not that time meant much to her.  Not anymore, at least.

Time. Cycles. Years.

Her body had been dying, slowly, over these past years.  After Grunchlk had turned her over to the Scarrans... well, one couldn't complain, she supposed. After all, at the time, she had been a living bomb.  But not anymore.  Once the Scarrans had carved that piece of her away, she was... well... she no longer knew what she was.  A shell.  A husk.

Yes, she was a shell, a house for various organs and such, but she herself?  Sikozu figured that her essence was stripped away along with her radium.  She wondered whether Moya felt like a shell at times too?  She dipped her head against Moya's surface and whispered her question in Leviathan.

She stumbled, and strong arms caught her. She looked up in surprise, her brain still very much unused to company; to caring.

"Hey.  You okay?" John's eyes were still blue, but they seemed much clearer now that he had aged.  They were paler, and a little watery - but much like Moya, they were familiar.

She nodded silently, her voice still unused to speaking.

"You don't fool me, you know."  John said, his voice deeper and richer with years.

Sikozu felt a smile on her lips.  A smile?  Maybe it was a grimace?  She couldn't tell any longer.

"It was lucky we found you..."  John was saying.

"You blew up a minor Scarran planetoid."  she pointed out, her empty eye socket sending dead signals to nothing.

"Oh, that?"  John shrugged. 

"That."

"How long had you been there?"

Sikozu sighed.  That cell had ben home for so long.  "Since we last saw one another."

John frowned. "What did they do to you?"

"Everything."  She turned her eyes to his.  "Why did you bring me back here?  I thought you would have wanted me dead?"

John huffed.  "Even Aeryn went off that idea a decade ago.  Besides, it looks as though the Scarrans tried pretty hard."

"They succeeded."

"Say what?"

Sikozu sighed.  "You really are an obtuse Human."

"Sue me."

"I am dying, John.  My life expectancy is almost up."

John stopped her from walking away.  "Are you ill?"

Another sigh. "I am a bioloid.  I have a programme, and that programme ha been voided.  I am just waiting for my circuitry to shut down."

"How long do you have?"

"Less than a cycle."  She paused and fixed him with one pure green eye.  "I am glad you blew them up."

John nodded.  As the fireball ebbed, he saw her - Sikozu - floating in space.  He remembered that feeling; the feeling of space crushing his lungs and robbing him of air, and he took a pod and pulled her in without a second thought.  Even Aeryn stopped arguing with him one she saw the state of their treacherous friend.

"You can drop me at the nearest planetoid."

John scoffed.  "No way, Jose.  You're staying.  You're in no fit state to be out there alone."

"I betrayed you."  she pointed out.

"Hell, have you forgotten who we are? We've all betrayed each other here.  That doesn't mean we dump our friends."

"We weren't friends."  Sikozu whispered.

"No.  We're family."

ScorpSik x

[beatriceeagle]

I'm more of a fantasy than sci-fi person, but consider my interest piqued. Why should I watch farscape?

Okay, the thing is, every Farscape fan’s pitch on Why You, Yes You, Should Watch Farscape ends up sounding very similar, and that’s because Farscape is a black hole that sucks you in and does things to your brain, and after you’ve watched it you are never, ever the same, which incidentally is basically the plot of Farscape.

I would summarize the basic plot for you, but that’s work, and luckily, the show’s credits sequence includes a handy summary that I will provide instead of doing that work: “My name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit, and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I’m lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen, please. Is there anybody out there who can hear me? I’m being hunted by an insane military commander. Doing everything I can. I’m just looking for a way home.“

So let me break down that monologue into its component reasons you should watch Farscape.

1) Some of the strange alien life forms are Muppets.

Farscape a co-production with the Jim Henson Company, and while there are many aliens played by humans in make-up, there are also a considerable number (including two of the regular crew) who are Muppets. By which I do not mean Kermit. I mean really gorgeous, elaborate works of art.

Also, even a lot of the humans-in-makeup aliens just look cool, and incredibly weird. Here’s an alien who appears in a single episode of season 1:

Not that there aren’t, you know, occasional Star Trek-style “these guys are just humans with weird hair,” or whatever, but in general, the aliens on Farscape look really alien. And that’s more than an aesthetic choice; it’s Farscape’s driving narrative principle. The aliens look alien, they act alien, they have alien values.

You know how a lot of sci-fi shows will have a stand-in for “fuck,” like Battlestar Galactica has “frak”? Well, Farscape has “frell.” And also “dren.” And yotz, hezmana, mivonks, loomas, tralk, snurch, eema, drannit, dench, biznak, arn, drad, fahrbot, narl. Some of those are swear words, but some of them are just words, never explicitly translated, that the alien characters will pepper into their speech, because, well, why should translator microbes be able to completely translate all the nuances of an alien culture? You’ll pick it up from context. One time, in passing, a character mentions that he’s familiar with the concept of suicide, but there’s no word for it in his language. I cannot emphasize to you enough how fleeting this moment is; the episode is not about suicide, we’re not having a great exchange of cultural ideas—at the time, the characters are running down a corridor in a crisis, as they are about 70 percent of the time—it’s just that the subject got brought up, and this character needed to talk around the fact that he literally didn’t have a word, in that moment. Things like that happen all the time, on Farscape.

Because more than anything else, Farscape is a show about culture shock. John Crichton is this straight, white Southern guy, at the top of his game—he’s an astronaut! he’s incredibly high status!—and then he ends up on the other side of the galaxy, where none of his cultural markers of privilege hold any meaning, where he doesn’t know the rules, where he literally can’t even open the doors. And he has to unlearn the idea that humanity is central, that he is the norm.

2) John Crichton, an astronaut, is pretty great.

A show that’s about a straight white guy with high status having to learn that he’s not the center of the universe could easily be centered around a really insufferable person, but one of the subtle things that makes Farscape so wonderful is that Crichton is, for the most part, pretty excellent. He has a lot of presumptions to unlearn because almost anyone in his cultural position would, but he’s also just a stand-up guy: compassionate, intelligent, open-minded, decent, forgiving, brave, hopeful.

And the galaxy tries to kick a whole lot of that out of him. It doesn’t succeed, mostly, but if Farscape is about anything other than culture shock, it’s about the lasting effects of trauma. How you can go through a wormhole one person, and experience things that turn you into someone you don’t recognize.

That’s kind of grim-sounding, but ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that Farscape is almost fanatically devoted to character work. Crichton is not the only character who sounds like he should be one thing and ends up being another. All of the characters—all of them, all of them, even the annoying ones—are complicated wonders. And you don’t have to wonder whether the events of the episode you’re watching are going to matter. They will. Everything that happens to the characters leaves a mark. Everything leaves them forever changed. Whether it’s mentioned explicitly or not—and often enough, it’s not explicit—the characters remember what has happened to them.

3) The living ship houses a lot of excellent women, among them the ship itself.

Ah, the women of Farscape, thou art the loves of my fucking life.

There’s Aeryn Sun, former Peacekeeper (that’s the military that the “insane military commander” hails from) now fugitive, currently learning the meaning of the word “compassion” (literally). She will break your fingers and also your heart. John/Aeryn is the main canon romantic ship.

There’s Pa’u Zhoto Zhaan, a priestess of the ninth level, current pacifist, former anarchist. Sorry, leading anarchist. She orgasms in bright light! (Oh my god, Farscape.)

There’s Chiana, my fucking bestie, a teenage(ish? ages in Farscape are weird) fugitive on the run from a repressive authoritarian state. Chiana is like a seductress con artist grifter thief who mostly just wants to survive so that she can have fun, damn it. Characters on Farscape do not really discuss sexualities (sex, yes, sexualities, no) and it would be fair to say that several of them do not fall along human sexuality lines generally, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that Chiana is canonically not straight.

Then there’s Moya, the ship herself, and it’s hard to get a straight read on Moya’s personality, since she mostly can’t speak. But she definitely has opinions, and things and people she cares about. And she moves the plot, though that gets into spoiler territory.

Past first season, further excellent women show up: Jool (controversial, but I like her), Sikozu (I once saw a Tumblr meme where someone had marked down that Sikozu would lose her shit when someone pronounced “gif” wrong, and that’s absolutely correct, and it’s why I love her), and Noranti (who is incredibly weird, and incredibly hard to summarize, but man, you gotta love her willingness to just show up and do her thing). Plus, there’s a recurring female villain, Grayza, who I could write probably multiple essays about. (I don’t know how you will feel about Grayza, as not everyone loves her, but I think she’s fucking fascinating, especially because she’s not actually the only recurring female villain. We also get Ahkna!)

(Side note: I should mention, here, that the cast of Farscape is really, really white. There is one cast member of color, Lani Tupu, but he pretty much represents the entirety of even, like, incidental diversity in casting for the series.)

Anyway, Farscape is full of awesome women, and also awesome and unexpected men, and it really enjoys playing with audience expectations of gender roles, generally. Literal entire books have been written about the way that Farscape fucks around with sex, sexuality, and gender. It’s a little weird because it was the late 90s/early 2000s, and sometimes that does come through, but Farscape’s guiding principle was always to try not to present American culture of the time as the norm, so like. It is not.

(An aside on Farscape and sex: Literally every character on Farscape has sexual tension with every other character. If you are a shipper, this is a Good Show, because no matter who you ship, there will not only be subtext, you will get a Moment of some kind. Multiple characters kiss the Muppet. Farscape is dedicated to getting into the nitty-gritty of the galaxy—I like to think of it as showing the guts of the universe—so a lot of the show is kind of squishy. They live on a biomechanoid ship, instead of androids there are “bioloids,” there’s a lot of focus on strange alien biologies, and lots of weird glowing fluids and things. I think the sex thing is kind of part and parcel of the larger biology focus: Farscape is really fascinated with how we all eat and evolve and live and die and, well, fuck. Which is in turn, kind of part of its focus on making everything really alien.)

4) Other stuff you should know.

Farscape as a whole is excellent, but it was kind of the product of creative anarchy—an Australian/American coproduction (oh yeah, everyone except Crichton speaks with an Australian accent) that was also partnered with the Henson company, whose showrunners were based in America but whose actual production all took place in Australia, and who was just constantly trying new things. So individual episodes can vary wildly in quality. It really takes off in the back half of season one, but no season is without a few off episodes.

It is extraordinarily funny, and I really think I haven’t stressed that enough. It’s one of the shows I want to quote the most in my daily life, but almost all of its humor is really context-dependent, and if you just wander around going, “Hey Stark? What’s black and white, and black and white, and black and white?” people look at you really funny.

It’s very conversant with pop culture generally (although obviously sci-fi  specifically, and Star Trek most specifically of all) and really enjoys deconstructing tropes, often to the effect of, “Well, Crichton really does not know what to do here, does he?” but sometimes just to be interesting.

There are also a lot of themes about science, and its uses and misuses.

The whole thing is fucking epic, and if you get invested at all, will take you on an emotional ride.

This show is weird. I know that that’s probably come across by now, but I think it’s worth reiterating as its own point: Farscape is so weird. Like, proudly, unabashedly, trying its hardest, weird. An amazing kind of weird.

If you’re into fantasy, you should know that there’s a recurring villain who’s just a wizard. Like, they don’t bother to explain it any more than that, he’s just a fucking wizard.

In summary: You should watch Farscape because it is a weird, wild, emotional, epic romance/drama/action/allegory full of Muppets and leather and one-liners and emotional gut punches and love, and if you let it, it will worm its way into you and never let go, which, now that I think of it, is another Farscape plot.

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine!

[harveyscape]

(im so sorry im still on this lmao) maybe im just SLOW it took me So Long to piece together why they made sikozu a BIOLOID like comparatively to the aeryn + stark ones its so stupid that she doesn't SPARK or anything when she loses her hand or w/e. also she’s obviously waaaaaay more adaptive with learning Terminology than the aeryn one was,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

but like they establish in her debut ep that she cant understand John bc her bain cant handle translator microbes,,,,,,,, and i think ???? that’s the biggest hinderance they made???? like idk why they didnt just imply it only applies to Her and not her whole species,,,,, but im assuming that because Her Being A Bioloid was invented within the episode trilogy where we first see More Kalish who can understand john completely fine

[chaosqueery]

Man, I really wish I could make gifsets right now. I want to make one paralleling westallen’s current storyline to the John/Aeryn storyline when Aeryn was replaced by a bioloid and John was desperately trying to find the real Aeryn.

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

now that I’ve realized that the star we keep seeing throughout season 4 is Aeryn’s star I realized there’s so much symbolism in that! 

First of all, I realized that yes, there are a number of nebulas that we see, but I’m pretty sure Aeryn’s star is only seen when the scene is about John and Aeryn. Also, I’m not quite sure what to make of the fact that the nebula surrounding the star is sometimes different colors. That makes me pause to say it’s always her star. But anyway, let’s forget about that and do some wild analysis!

The first time John tells her about it was in Green Eyed Monster, and there was some whispy space dust around it:

Their relationship was somewhat simple then. It was just the beginning. 

And then in season 4 we kept seeing it within a nebula. At the end of Promises John is looking out at this bright blue nebula that’s glowing from behind and Aeryn comes in and asks what he’s looking at and he says, “Nothing in particular.” OUCH. At that point things were so strained between them. Her star is there and giving off light, but it’s behind a bunch of space dust. Beautiful but hidden.: 

Then throughout season 4 whenever we see it, it’s within a nebula. As the season goes on it’s more obvious that there’s a star there but it’s still a bit clouded by a nebula.

In Unrealized Reality Aeryn is sitting in one of the windows practicing her English, keeping an eye on John who’s floating outside the ship waiting for a wormhole to open, and he’s literally right in front of Aeryn’s star shining in an amber-colored nebula.

At the end of Bringing Home the Beacon, When John killed the bioloid!Aeryn, and D’Argo was encouraging John that they would find her, and John is staring out the window at her star, which is concealed in a nebula bc he doesn’t know where she is:

Then at the end of Peacekeeper Wars it’s there, clearly visible, in the center of a blue and purple nebula:

idk, I could be reaching with all this stuff, but humor me, ok?

[themetamorphic]

One of those mysterious and upsetting Season Four things happens where you need like ten minutes to sit there with the thing on pause going, "What the fuck?" The show's layers and stories and meanings have accreted to the point where they spontaneously curl up around themselves, like superstrings or DNA. Too much gravity, too many echoes, in every single second: boing! Except it's not a black hole, it's a wormhole, if you're willing to take the time.

- [ x ]

i remember back when i first watched the show, and kept up with discussions on the twop boards (and things like that), that i’d hear people talk about how season 4 was the best season. i didn’t really get it then. i could tell that season 4 was doing something, but i didn’t see how on earth people could think it really compared to the solid, relentless inventiveness of season 3. the love for season 4 felt performative. and maybe it was.

but rewatching this time, in my adulthood...it was like being punched with that “mysterious and upsetting” feeling over and over and over again. small moments like aeryn sounding out the word “existence” as crichton floats, waiting for a wormhole in the starlit emptiness of space. i’d feel stricken for the rest of the day, in a place i couldn’t describe. every mixed up moyan in unrealized reality and john quixote. crichton and scorpius swapping blood. “i wore a bomb. a nuclear bomb in a field of flowers.” flowers trumping wormholes. the rueful, operatic burble of the 1812 overture. i’ve always had to love the soul! blowing off the bioloid’s face. karen shaw. every image in what was lost.

it gets overwhelming, and it’s bewildering that you can’t say why. you can only let it wash through you. it’s the same reason you can’t describe what makes the show good to people, because what makes it good--what makes it art--is not exactly the weirdness or the experimentation, or any specific twist of plot. the show is a mess. often problematic or juvenile or gross or lame or totally fucking stupid. what makes it good is it a commitment to history that allows density to happen. which sounds trite, but there’s a reason that “continuity” is always what reviewers pick up on. the show becomes this tightly woven tapestry of implication and trying to pull out and talk about one thread never feels like enough. i don’t love the pk symbol simply because it’s a cool symbol. i love it because the show remembers it and reuses and every time they reuse it it means something--but never the exact same thing. and the next time they use it it’ll have acquired yet another bit of implication. so by the time you get to season 4 everything is like this and you just cannot deal.

[harveyscape]

ive always hated that sikozu is a robot aka bioloid that functions Drastically Differently than the aeryn + stark ones,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, such a half-baked concept like Why Are They The Same Thing 

why the fire powers and reattach-able appendages as a robot like Conventionally

is she TECHNICALLY still a Kalish or is she just a robot who’s a kalish apologist

[harveyscape]

this one goes in the Embarrassing F*rscape Thoughts box but yknow like

when john asks fake bioloid aeryn to say ‘baby’ + also worth noting is him saying ‘what about the baby’ and she cant say the word bc she’s a robot and dumb for plot,,,, 

and then like,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 

when he rescues real!aeryn she’s frightfully quiet + whispers ‘what about the baby’ after establishing between the two of them that Her Being There Is Real and he gets this heckin SMIRK of reassurance that it’s actually her like WHATEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!