I have a complicated reaction to this episode which dates back to my childhood, where it seemed that Children's BBC constantly had two "trapped in another world" cartoon series on: the 1980s US cartoon inspired by the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy universe (a group of contemporary American kids are transported against their will to the D&D world, and given mystic powers to fight evil), and the weird Franco-Japanese Euroanime Ulysses 31 (a bonkers space opera adaptation of The Odyssey, in which a human starship is transported to a universe ruled by versions of the classical Greek gods, who are complete bastards even by the usual standards of the original myths and non-bowdlerised modern retellings).
The memory may cheat, but I remember both shows constantly doing episodes where the main characters were given an opportunity to return to Earth, or actually doing so, and (a) it turning out to be a fake; (b) activating it required doing something grossly immoral; or (c) it was time-limited and they nobly let it go in order to save the downtrodden-person-in-need-of-help of the week. And the constant emotional manipulativeness of it really gave me a distaste for episodes of this type.
Nevertheless, this is a really good example. I didn't remember from my previous viewing of the episode how dark the depiction of John's reception is right from the beginning, even before Aeryn, D'Argo and Rygel turn up. And John really seems damaged in this episode, in a way we only saw briefly before in "Back and Back and Back to the Future". As you say, even though it turns out to have been all a fake-out, he's still been confronted with what he genuinely fears would happen to people he's come to care for if he brought them home with him.
I do wonder at what point all three of the others knew that it was a fake - whether they were told in advance or whether they only had it explained to them once they were taken "offstage". There is that moment where Aeryn says something to "Jack" in Sebacean that isn't translated for us, and he says "Thank you, Aeryn Sun", which makes me wonder if she was consciously acting by that point.
The question of whether Aeryn was in on it maybe explains why John and Aeryn sleeping together for the first time here doesn't have any immediate consequences for their relationship and isn't brought up again, as if she knew that they weren't really in danger there might possibly be some dubcon issues. Also, apparently the original US broadcast of it cut the relevant scenes entirely.
I've read that Aeryn's reaction to the rain was Claudia Black's own idea, imagining that she'd never encountered it before having spent all her life on spaceships.
A final note - John's joyful "Hello sky!" when he first arrives on the beach is a pop culture reference, to something that one wouldn't expect an American necessarily to know about, the molesworth boarding school comedy novels by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
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branchandroot
"Like a bolt of thunder from the blue"
Date: 2020-06-21 05:06 pm (UTC)The memory may cheat, but I remember both shows constantly doing episodes where the main characters were given an opportunity to return to Earth, or actually doing so, and (a) it turning out to be a fake; (b) activating it required doing something grossly immoral; or (c) it was time-limited and they nobly let it go in order to save the downtrodden-person-in-need-of-help of the week. And the constant emotional manipulativeness of it really gave me a distaste for episodes of this type.
Nevertheless, this is a really good example. I didn't remember from my previous viewing of the episode how dark the depiction of John's reception is right from the beginning, even before Aeryn, D'Argo and Rygel turn up. And John really seems damaged in this episode, in a way we only saw briefly before in "Back and Back and Back to the Future". As you say, even though it turns out to have been all a fake-out, he's still been confronted with what he genuinely fears would happen to people he's come to care for if he brought them home with him.
I do wonder at what point all three of the others knew that it was a fake - whether they were told in advance or whether they only had it explained to them once they were taken "offstage". There is that moment where Aeryn says something to "Jack" in Sebacean that isn't translated for us, and he says "Thank you, Aeryn Sun", which makes me wonder if she was consciously acting by that point.
The question of whether Aeryn was in on it maybe explains why John and Aeryn sleeping together for the first time here doesn't have any immediate consequences for their relationship and isn't brought up again, as if she knew that they weren't really in danger there might possibly be some dubcon issues. Also, apparently the original US broadcast of it cut the relevant scenes entirely.
I've read that Aeryn's reaction to the rain was Claudia Black's own idea, imagining that she'd never encountered it before having spent all her life on spaceships.
A final note - John's joyful "Hello sky!" when he first arrives on the beach is a pop culture reference, to something that one wouldn't expect an American necessarily to know about, the molesworth boarding school comedy novels by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.