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selenakThe crew returns from a Commerce Planet with a load of crackers and an alien called T'raltixx, who promises he can alter Moya's electromagnets to make her untraceable. Crichton is skeptical; it seems too good to be true. As they pass through a constellation of pulsars, an increasing paranoia affects the crew, turning them violently against each other. Crichton must fight against his own paranoid delusions to work out what T'raltixx is actually doing—and how to stop him.
A deserved classic, though the more often I watch it the more I lose the humor and focus on the disturbingness of it all. T'raltixx is very clearly a MacGuffin to get the lot going - the episode doesn't waste any time on giving him motivation beyond "I want more light!" or fleshing him out, and you have to handwave why everyone other than Crichton trusts him enough to let him muck about with Moya's shieldings to begin with. But it doesn't matter because Traltixx is not the point. One last thing about him, though: maye it's a false memory, but I think the Amazon Prime version of this episode might be missing a bit, because I seem to recall there was a revealing shot in the last third of the episode where we see T'raltixx has arranged for Pilot to be practically bathed in light from above without noticing. (Thus explaining why he's as affected by the general paranoia as everyone else.)
The handheld camera gets a major outing, and all the waving about gives you a slight sense of seasickness and disorientation fitting with what our gang is going through, though note it ends once Crichton has assembled and chained up everyone. On this rewatch, it struck me that everyone but Crichton is really fighting about banalities like the titular crackers and making general distrustful accusations (Aeryn gets accused of being in league with Scorpius by practically everyone in turn), but John is the only one who turns the paranoid ramblings into truly vicious verbal assaults (more on this in a moment). D'Argo's stuffing Rygel with crackers till he almost kills him is also brutal, and he rightly apologizes for it, but it doesn't make me flinch the way John's scenes with Chiana and Aeryn do. Perhaps because D'Argo and Rygel don't like each other without artificially induced paranoia and rage, either, and D'Argo being angry about Rygel's food stealing is old news.
Whereas John's slut shaming of Chiana, complete with barely covered rape threat, and later his targetting Aeryn by denigrating two things he actually admires about her - her sense of loyalty and her beauty - while combining this with another sexual insult (only in this case of being frigid) is something new, happens in relationships that are usually depicted as positive and supportive, and offer a chilling look on John's darker impulses that have nothing to do with his increased willingness to kill."It's all inside" indeed. (S1 brought out everyone else's viciousness in different episodes, but John only play-acted at it.) His recitation of the Humpty Dumpty verse at the end also shows this isn't something just shaken off as soon as everyone else has gone back to normal, that he's aware he's hurt these women and still dealing with what it says about him that he was able to.
Now, while this is all intentionally upsetting on the part of the script, I'm not sure how to take Chiana's reaction, because it reminds me of nothing so much as the end of the TOS episode The Enemy Within, aka the one where Kirk gets split into Good (but passive) Kirk and Evil (but active) Kirk, who among other things sexually assaults Janice Rand. At the very end of the episode, Spock (!) says to Janice Rand "The Intruder had some interesting qualities, didn't he?" (thus implying that Janice might have secretly found Evil Kirk's molesting a turn-on) and we're meant to regard this as lighthearted humor. Given how well Crackers Don't Matter is written in general, and also the general Farscape writing for Chiana, I can't imagine it being tonedeaf in the same way, and thus I read Chiana's "no, I almost admired it" as her way of covering up how much the encounter scared her (Gigi Edgley certainly played her terrorized in that scene), i.e. bravado because she wants things to return to normal and not to talk about it. But I admit there's some room for ambiguity.
Crackers Don't Matter also offers the arguable debut of Harvey, i.e. Crichton's inner Scorpius. I say "arguable", because a) at this point, it could simply be another hallucination under stress, and b) even in the larger s2 context, the neural clone in s2 does not yet have the characteristics he'll have in s3 and onwards when John will give him that nickname. Then again, in s2 the neural clone is shaped primarily by John's darker impulses, the whimsical aspects like the Hawaian shirt not withstanding, so overall it probably is a fitting first outing.
Other aspects:
- Pilot saying he doesn't like his passengers very much: fits with their "Jerry Springer kind of family". I mean, part of it is the pulsar paranoia, but Pilot usually puts up with such a lot of bickering and annoyingness with just the occasional buzz that I wouldn't be surprised about him having loads of repressed anger at them under the (no less real) fondness.
- The casual reveal Moya is full of warning signs which John and we the audience can't read because they're painted outside the colour spectrum the human eye can see:jesuswasbatman mentioned this last season. It's a very Farscapian kind of reveal fitting with
- "Humans are deficient/superior": not just Star Trek but also other Sci Fi like Babylon 5 sooner or later has that scene or scenes where a member of an alien species observes that human beings are really something special (see for example Londo's narration in In the Beginning) (or the villain abuses them and humans stand up for themselves). Also, pre-Farscape, if there was a human being ending up elsewhere, said human usually ended up as the leader. Farscape, otoh, never makes John Crichton the boss (though as the show continues he increasingly gets the rest of the characters to go along with his plans; still, when it's vote-for-a-captain time in s4, the winner is D'Argo, not John), and we're not treated anywhere to a narratively endorsed praise of the virtues of the human race. Instead, we get the gift for vids scene that's John Crichton covered in Zhaan's vomit with mock-heroic get up, able to deal with the MacGuffin of the week because he's physically less perceptive than your avarage Unchartered Territories inhabitant.
The Other Episodes
A deserved classic, though the more often I watch it the more I lose the humor and focus on the disturbingness of it all. T'raltixx is very clearly a MacGuffin to get the lot going - the episode doesn't waste any time on giving him motivation beyond "I want more light!" or fleshing him out, and you have to handwave why everyone other than Crichton trusts him enough to let him muck about with Moya's shieldings to begin with. But it doesn't matter because Traltixx is not the point. One last thing about him, though: maye it's a false memory, but I think the Amazon Prime version of this episode might be missing a bit, because I seem to recall there was a revealing shot in the last third of the episode where we see T'raltixx has arranged for Pilot to be practically bathed in light from above without noticing. (Thus explaining why he's as affected by the general paranoia as everyone else.)
The handheld camera gets a major outing, and all the waving about gives you a slight sense of seasickness and disorientation fitting with what our gang is going through, though note it ends once Crichton has assembled and chained up everyone. On this rewatch, it struck me that everyone but Crichton is really fighting about banalities like the titular crackers and making general distrustful accusations (Aeryn gets accused of being in league with Scorpius by practically everyone in turn), but John is the only one who turns the paranoid ramblings into truly vicious verbal assaults (more on this in a moment). D'Argo's stuffing Rygel with crackers till he almost kills him is also brutal, and he rightly apologizes for it, but it doesn't make me flinch the way John's scenes with Chiana and Aeryn do. Perhaps because D'Argo and Rygel don't like each other without artificially induced paranoia and rage, either, and D'Argo being angry about Rygel's food stealing is old news.
Whereas John's slut shaming of Chiana, complete with barely covered rape threat, and later his targetting Aeryn by denigrating two things he actually admires about her - her sense of loyalty and her beauty - while combining this with another sexual insult (only in this case of being frigid) is something new, happens in relationships that are usually depicted as positive and supportive, and offer a chilling look on John's darker impulses that have nothing to do with his increased willingness to kill."It's all inside" indeed. (S1 brought out everyone else's viciousness in different episodes, but John only play-acted at it.) His recitation of the Humpty Dumpty verse at the end also shows this isn't something just shaken off as soon as everyone else has gone back to normal, that he's aware he's hurt these women and still dealing with what it says about him that he was able to.
Now, while this is all intentionally upsetting on the part of the script, I'm not sure how to take Chiana's reaction, because it reminds me of nothing so much as the end of the TOS episode The Enemy Within, aka the one where Kirk gets split into Good (but passive) Kirk and Evil (but active) Kirk, who among other things sexually assaults Janice Rand. At the very end of the episode, Spock (!) says to Janice Rand "The Intruder had some interesting qualities, didn't he?" (thus implying that Janice might have secretly found Evil Kirk's molesting a turn-on) and we're meant to regard this as lighthearted humor. Given how well Crackers Don't Matter is written in general, and also the general Farscape writing for Chiana, I can't imagine it being tonedeaf in the same way, and thus I read Chiana's "no, I almost admired it" as her way of covering up how much the encounter scared her (Gigi Edgley certainly played her terrorized in that scene), i.e. bravado because she wants things to return to normal and not to talk about it. But I admit there's some room for ambiguity.
Crackers Don't Matter also offers the arguable debut of Harvey, i.e. Crichton's inner Scorpius. I say "arguable", because a) at this point, it could simply be another hallucination under stress, and b) even in the larger s2 context, the neural clone in s2 does not yet have the characteristics he'll have in s3 and onwards when John will give him that nickname. Then again, in s2 the neural clone is shaped primarily by John's darker impulses, the whimsical aspects like the Hawaian shirt not withstanding, so overall it probably is a fitting first outing.
Other aspects:
- Pilot saying he doesn't like his passengers very much: fits with their "Jerry Springer kind of family". I mean, part of it is the pulsar paranoia, but Pilot usually puts up with such a lot of bickering and annoyingness with just the occasional buzz that I wouldn't be surprised about him having loads of repressed anger at them under the (no less real) fondness.
- The casual reveal Moya is full of warning signs which John and we the audience can't read because they're painted outside the colour spectrum the human eye can see:
jesuswasbatman mentioned this last season. It's a very Farscapian kind of reveal fitting with - "Humans are deficient/superior": not just Star Trek but also other Sci Fi like Babylon 5 sooner or later has that scene or scenes where a member of an alien species observes that human beings are really something special (see for example Londo's narration in In the Beginning) (or the villain abuses them and humans stand up for themselves). Also, pre-Farscape, if there was a human being ending up elsewhere, said human usually ended up as the leader. Farscape, otoh, never makes John Crichton the boss (though as the show continues he increasingly gets the rest of the characters to go along with his plans; still, when it's vote-for-a-captain time in s4, the winner is D'Argo, not John), and we're not treated anywhere to a narratively endorsed praise of the virtues of the human race. Instead, we get the gift for vids scene that's John Crichton covered in Zhaan's vomit with mock-heroic get up, able to deal with the MacGuffin of the week because he's physically less perceptive than your avarage Unchartered Territories inhabitant.
The Other Episodes
no subject
Date: 2020-08-30 11:17 am (UTC)That is the reason this is one of my very favourite eps of the show, in spite of the rough parts (John! How could you DO that to Pip!) -- that and everyone being able to read the sign but him, and "I got GREAT eyes, they're twenty-twenty, and they're BLUE!" which is still a line we say around the house. And it's great that John's flaw is why he can deal with the threat to them all -- I just love that so much.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-30 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-31 04:53 pm (UTC)What's great about this is both the mastery of tone, giving both the humorous and the grim/frightening moments their weight, and the way all the characters stay fully in character despite their increasing insanity.
I may be giving the show too much credit, but I don't interpret Chiana's final line as having any element of sexual/sexist "I'm such a kinky femme fatale that even sincere and genuinely dangerous violent misogyny turns me on, tee hee". There isn't anything flirtatious about the delivery, which I think would have been there in that case. Rather, I think it was the fact that, as someone who lives on her wit and verbal agility, she could admire an incredible spur of the moment speech that knew exactly what buttons to push, even when she'd been the target of it. And remember that we've already had the first demonstration, in "Nerve", that it's the threat of sexual abuse/exploitation that drives her to really savage violence.
It's typical that Zhaan forgets everything and is frightened of what she might have said and done, when she was the one who spent most of her time in a daze of sexual arousal.
On your memory of a scene showing Traltixx shining light on Pilot, it rang a bell when I read it (I read your post before I got round to watching the episode), but I think you're imagining it, because I'm watching the same DVD as I did the first time and there's no such scene. I think it's because Traltixx has set himself up in the "laundry" chamber we saw in "Vitas Mortis", and that has some similarity when seen from above with Pilot's Den. Also, I think that the episode eventually comes down on the explanation that the crew's mental state isn't because of the light, but due to a psionic attack by Traltixx that is powered by his absorption of light.
Also amuses me that Crichton kills Traltixx when he's in the middle of a rant about how his people will rise up and conquer the universe... and we never see or hear of a member of Traltixx's species again.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-01 04:11 pm (UTC). And remember that we've already had the first demonstration, in "Nerve", that it's the threat of sexual abuse/exploitation that drives her to really savage violence.
That is true, but she hadn't cared about the guy in question before this happened. Still, given the rest of the show and how it's one of the few that's always very clear on how traumatic sexual abuse can be, I'm 90% sure you're right, and this is how Chiana's reaction is supposed to come across. (John using the word "rape" in his conversation with Grayza near the end of s4 was the first time I'd seen a male character describe something that had been done to him which had clearly been exactly this but which in most shows then and partly now would have been handwaved as sexy.) (I did love Once Upon A Time, but was stunned to hear the show creators didn't realise that the s1 Regina/Graham relationship in both timelines by the rules they themselves had established re: the power having Graham's heart gives Regina was clearly non-consensual.)