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selenakWiki summary: A datacam tape is uncovered showing Aeryn as part of a Peacekeeper firing squad that executed Moya's first pilot. The rest of the crew want answers but Aeryn is reluctant to revisit her past—especially her relationship with Velorek, the man who grafted the current Pilot into Moya's systems. Pilot refuses to communicate with the crew, not wanting to reveal his own complicity in the murky circumstances surrounding his installment as Moya's pilot.
One of the all time great episodes not just of this show, and the one most people think of when they tell non-fans "the muppets will make you cry". I'm not sure how often I've seen it - this must be the fifth or sixth time - but it hasn't lost any of its power for me. This time around, because the first season rewatch is still recent on my mind, I doubly appreciate how the series has build up the relationship between Aeryn and Pilot throughout the series up to this point, when they discover yet another incredibly painful way they are connected. Conversely, Aeryn's "but cutting his arm off is alright?" to Zhaan gains additional power if you the episode Zhaan did this wasn't that long ago, too. It occurs to me that while Zhaan, Rygel and D'Argo all have an initial fallback to their old distrust of Aeryn when confronted with a reminder of her Peacekeeper past, Zhaan being just that extra bitter might be for a similar reason why Pilot takes the reveal extra bad, i.e. she's projecting her own guilt on Aeryn.
Claudia Black's acting throughout is superb, and let's hear it for Pilot's puppeteers and Lani Tupu, doing double duty as old school "Insane Military Commander" Crais on the one hand and Pilot's voice on the other, so very young and vulnerable in the flashbacks and in the present so tormented.
What makes the episode for me is that both Aeryn and Pilot do, in fact, have something to feel guilty about. You understand why they did it, you feel sorry for them, absolutely, but in both cases the narrative carefully establishes they made choices they did not have to make. Neither of them was in a "do this bad thing or die/ see your family wiped out!" kind of position. They both could have made other choices. One of the things that irritated me about the Star Wars Sequel trilogy in The Force Awakens already and only grew with subsequent movies was that having given Finn a great premise of a background - a Stormtrooper who finds he can'd continue with this and deserts - the story then falls over itself to make clear Finn was, in fact, the one and only Stormtrooper who never shot anyone before, who isn't guilty of anything before he deserts, and who has no emotional ties to the fascist comrades he leaves. The Captain Marvel movie in its background material (though not on screen) does something similar because as I hear the background declares this was in fact Carol's first mission with the team. (Presumably for an identical reason - so that Carol has nothing to feel guilty for, and no ambigous emotional ties to her time with team bad guys.)
Well, Farscape doesn't do that. I always suspected that Chiana's remark was meant as a meta comment as well, i.e. directed to the audience on a Doylist level. Shooting the female pilot when ordered by Crais to do so is clearly not the first or the only time Aeryn has done something like this in her PK life. And while she feels clearly guilty about having denounced Velorek in order to get her prowler duty assignment back even while it happens, it feels that her guilt is mainly triggered because Velorek's feelings for her and hers for him, not per se because she reported someone who was going against a superior officer's commands. She was being a good soldier (in a fascist army), both times, and an ambitious one the second time.
Pilot shares with her the guilt of wanting his dreamed of future even at the expense of another person's life. Verlorek soothes his qualms by saying the female pilot would die either way, and it works on young Pilot, but the current day one knows: it might not have, if the PK's could not have gotten a replacement pilot. Yet it is impossible not to pity him. The reveal that he's been in constant physical pain ever since the grafting, the memory of Moya being tortured into accepting him, the self mutilation to "free" Moya from him - in a universe not lacking in painful backstories for our regulars, Pilot's is one of the most grim.
What also makes Farscape Farscape is that Aeryn and Pilot are now able to help each other. That they've formed a positive connection, that forgiveness is possible, not by prettifying or belittling the past but by fully acknowledging it, taking responsibility and moving forward by being there for each other. For lack of a better term, it's the show's humanism.
Other thoughts: Velorek isn't the only "good" Peacekeeper either; he clearly sympathizes with Pilot(s) and Leviathans, but not enough to have left the service a long time ago. Incidentally, given he finds enough helpers in his team to organize contraception for Moya in direct opposition to Crais' plan and given Gilina's empathic side and ability to think independently, I'm ready for a theory that PK engineers are naturally a bit more independently minded.
Velorek calling Crais insane and Crais indeed behaving in full blown obsessive vein despite this being when his brother was alive and well: works for me in establishing just how invested Crais was in bringing Talyn into being from the get go.
The Other Episodes
One of the all time great episodes not just of this show, and the one most people think of when they tell non-fans "the muppets will make you cry". I'm not sure how often I've seen it - this must be the fifth or sixth time - but it hasn't lost any of its power for me. This time around, because the first season rewatch is still recent on my mind, I doubly appreciate how the series has build up the relationship between Aeryn and Pilot throughout the series up to this point, when they discover yet another incredibly painful way they are connected. Conversely, Aeryn's "but cutting his arm off is alright?" to Zhaan gains additional power if you the episode Zhaan did this wasn't that long ago, too. It occurs to me that while Zhaan, Rygel and D'Argo all have an initial fallback to their old distrust of Aeryn when confronted with a reminder of her Peacekeeper past, Zhaan being just that extra bitter might be for a similar reason why Pilot takes the reveal extra bad, i.e. she's projecting her own guilt on Aeryn.
Claudia Black's acting throughout is superb, and let's hear it for Pilot's puppeteers and Lani Tupu, doing double duty as old school "Insane Military Commander" Crais on the one hand and Pilot's voice on the other, so very young and vulnerable in the flashbacks and in the present so tormented.
What makes the episode for me is that both Aeryn and Pilot do, in fact, have something to feel guilty about. You understand why they did it, you feel sorry for them, absolutely, but in both cases the narrative carefully establishes they made choices they did not have to make. Neither of them was in a "do this bad thing or die/ see your family wiped out!" kind of position. They both could have made other choices. One of the things that irritated me about the Star Wars Sequel trilogy in The Force Awakens already and only grew with subsequent movies was that having given Finn a great premise of a background - a Stormtrooper who finds he can'd continue with this and deserts - the story then falls over itself to make clear Finn was, in fact, the one and only Stormtrooper who never shot anyone before, who isn't guilty of anything before he deserts, and who has no emotional ties to the fascist comrades he leaves. The Captain Marvel movie in its background material (though not on screen) does something similar because as I hear the background declares this was in fact Carol's first mission with the team. (Presumably for an identical reason - so that Carol has nothing to feel guilty for, and no ambigous emotional ties to her time with team bad guys.)
Well, Farscape doesn't do that. I always suspected that Chiana's remark was meant as a meta comment as well, i.e. directed to the audience on a Doylist level. Shooting the female pilot when ordered by Crais to do so is clearly not the first or the only time Aeryn has done something like this in her PK life. And while she feels clearly guilty about having denounced Velorek in order to get her prowler duty assignment back even while it happens, it feels that her guilt is mainly triggered because Velorek's feelings for her and hers for him, not per se because she reported someone who was going against a superior officer's commands. She was being a good soldier (in a fascist army), both times, and an ambitious one the second time.
Pilot shares with her the guilt of wanting his dreamed of future even at the expense of another person's life. Verlorek soothes his qualms by saying the female pilot would die either way, and it works on young Pilot, but the current day one knows: it might not have, if the PK's could not have gotten a replacement pilot. Yet it is impossible not to pity him. The reveal that he's been in constant physical pain ever since the grafting, the memory of Moya being tortured into accepting him, the self mutilation to "free" Moya from him - in a universe not lacking in painful backstories for our regulars, Pilot's is one of the most grim.
What also makes Farscape Farscape is that Aeryn and Pilot are now able to help each other. That they've formed a positive connection, that forgiveness is possible, not by prettifying or belittling the past but by fully acknowledging it, taking responsibility and moving forward by being there for each other. For lack of a better term, it's the show's humanism.
Other thoughts: Velorek isn't the only "good" Peacekeeper either; he clearly sympathizes with Pilot(s) and Leviathans, but not enough to have left the service a long time ago. Incidentally, given he finds enough helpers in his team to organize contraception for Moya in direct opposition to Crais' plan and given Gilina's empathic side and ability to think independently, I'm ready for a theory that PK engineers are naturally a bit more independently minded.
Velorek calling Crais insane and Crais indeed behaving in full blown obsessive vein despite this being when his brother was alive and well: works for me in establishing just how invested Crais was in bringing Talyn into being from the get go.
The Other Episodes
