FARSCAPE SCRIBBLES by Ron Edwards, December 2011
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FARSCAPE SCRIBBLES By Ron Edwards, December 2011 I moved in 1998, and again in 1999, in each case farther away from my very limited crew of TV pals. Deprived of both technology and social support for watching, I missed everything. Even Buffy, which I still have never seen. Hell, I didn’t even know either Stargate SG-1 or Farscape even existed. After that point, SF TV penetrated my intense but limited involvement in film and RPGs only twice: a friend seizing my hair and forcing me to watch Cowboy Bebop (which even then took almost a year for me to get back to) and various gaming acquaintances getting kind of girly and hysterical about Firefly. So what I’m saying is, I’m watching this completely cold, utterly in the dark about anything it’s about except that everyone I’ve mentioned our SF TV hobby to has instantly cited it as the one to watch. Season one, she say “go” Interesting: young protagonists; I hadn’t realized how that had slipped off the radar for a while. Cecilia hates the “fratboys” but says she will forgive them at least for a while. So the Adama good-luck father-son charm in Battlestar Galactica came from here. Oooohh, Klingons! Real Klingons! I am happy. That may be the first cinematic SF fart joke, unless Red Dwarf got there first (can’t remember). So. We are now firmly in the realm of Trippy. I like that; it’s about the only thing about Star Wars actually to appreciate as science fiction, and it’s cool to see someone pick up on it and give it one twist toward sexy and anti-authoritarian as well. Oriented and onwards! Because the upper chest area of a woman’s body is so expressive, that’s why it must be exposed. And as long as I’m being horrible, “Virginia Hey” is the best real-woman name I’ve encountered since “Vicky Beaver.” It’s different to see in-fiction references played straight, as with all the Yoda talk. (Later: they do this to the extent that it’s a feature. That’s a hard balancing act for a displaced earthman premise, between the utterly genre-naïve guy and the overly in-the-know fandom avatar.) “So much like us” – it’s probably time to think a bit about what the logistic constraint of human actors has meant to visual science fiction, and how it may well not have been a bad thing. See, that’s how you write an empath! Cecilia thinks this bug episode is the most interesting, with the implication that they generally aren’t. Gloriously beautiful as the full-backal for Hey is (mannn, is she cut!), it’s only for a moment. Whereas I get to gaze in awe at Black’s nose all the time. Most sexy nose ever. It helps too that both actresses are doing their jobs to the hilt, acting like gangbusters. Rigel’s cell-neighbor is Cthulhu? Fighter, cleric, techie, thief. I do hope there’s going to be more to it than this. Do I detect Scorpions-style rhythm guitar riffs for the action scene? It takes a certain audacity to use such things, as the match is too perfect. Action movies stay away from it for a reason; the only one which succeeded with it in my opinion was Mortal Kombat. Here it provides the nice combination of effective + cheeky. “Oh no, Moya won’t be able to maintain orbit, we’ll crash!” I realize full well that information like this, per episode, is empty. The show is not about how the dilithium crystals are doing today. This episode has lots of my favorite things. Sexy tentacle-headed hottie, non-The Stars My Destination but still plot-relevant time travel techniques. This one’s my turnaround for the series; I appreciate both the thought that went into it and the complete lack of tedious audience-oriented explanation. I guess my favorite example about bad-ass cinematic fighting comes from the entirely wretched film Bulletproof Monk. The heroine is supposed to be uber-awesome dangerous, but the actress is hopeless and no amount of doubling or editing makes it work. It so happens, though, that the villainess she’s supposed to beat up eventually is played by a woman of uncommon and beautiful martial skill, who IMDB tells me is named Victoria Smurfit. The result is getting to watch a lot of one woman throwing great techniques which mysteriously miss a lot, then fall over in defeat from what must be among the most amateurish and telegraphed strikes possible. The physical confrontation between Aerin and the scary chick isn’t anywhere near as painful, but it displays a good creative team working with a difficult constraint. Apparently a martial arts expert is helpless against backfists delivered down the centerline, and unable to score with front kicks although her opponent is stumbling backward. I can stand it if I squint, mainly because Black is carrying it through charisma. What’s he getting out of it? Aussie hotties! Why is everyone acting like this is weird? This episode is … dragging. I’m getting the idea that quite a few of them would have done much better as half- hour shots, actually. Nice pro-science exchange, with charm. And then application: flaming piss shot! Peacekeepers = America, in case no one was really paying attention about that. It’s the one thing different from them and the original Klingons. And Aeryn has a lot of gall getting patriotic about it, I imagine due to the influence of all those right angles. Notice John isn’t letting her hit him any more. The profanity attack, pre-Cartman V-chip even! Also, I like the space slugs – very Truman Grimjack. That “It replaced cockfighting” crack Is subtler than it looks. I’m realizing that when John most seems like a meatball, he subverts it through word or deed almost immediately. I want to stress this is different from the ordinary “talk tough, do sensitive” combo which is basically eating one’s cake and having it too. Yes, human-style kissing is always better. “Cue Aeryn,” says Cecilia. And oh, that conversation afterward Is everything that went wrong with men and women in the 1990s. Will we get to see red-and-blue sex? Huh. Crais is over the line. Over the edge. Quite likely batshit actually. Oh thank God, all that Renfaire charm and the Gandalf knockoff were the mask for outstanding rotten evil. What’s this? Crais is a person, not merely a sputtering threat? Things – not just “things,” the whole show, just got more interesting. And a bit later: when he can’t honestly lay intention on Crichton, he can only latch onto bigotry. That was a dark, grim episode: Crichton actually abandons his Kirk-esque stand on principle, Zhaan practically damns herself, Crais descends fully into madness and murder right when we know he was about to step back from it. Oh, these guys so must have been reading Grimjack in the 80s. The scientist’s assistant, not to mention the bar, Is straight from those pages. Holy shit, they’re cutting off his arm? Brutal! I guess all this traditional misfits-bonding content has its limits. We are talking about lab rat morality issues, and I have no objection either to raising the issue or presenting it in pointedly symbolic and simplified terms. My objection concerns clarity and accuracy. The first issue is juxtaposing the suffering of lab subjects to the greater good in such a fashion that the maximizing of the one is supposed (by the scientist personally or by “science” as a thing) to maximize the other. Whereas the reality is that suffering lab subjects yields shitty results, and that cruel lab practices universally reduce to careless/convenience and to profiteering. A person who is really dedicated to the perfection of their science is necessarily also a serious advocate for the ethical treatment of the subjects. The second issue concerns Mengele and the “men of science and medicine” phrasing. One thing is, in line with the above point, is that Mengele was no “man of science” – he was a butcher wearing a paper hat with “scientist” scrawled on it in crayon. His experimental design was nonexistent and his data worthless. Another more general point is that medicine is actually not itself science, but a body of professional service techniques, any one of which may or may not draw upon scientific knowledge, and any of which may or may not work. Crichton presents him as the ultimate example of the monstrosity inflicting the greatest cruelty in service to the greatest good (the above point), but Mengele does not conform to any such image. The third issue is that the story is curiously humanocentric. Crichton does briefly appeal to Nam Tar on the basis that “You of all people should understand,” but the issue is otherwise scrubbed – i.e., that apparently experimenting on humans is horrific, but on lab animals it’s OK. The “right” ending seems to be Kornata putting him back in his cage, in a kind of “now everyone is back in place” way, with her as the experimenter again. It strikes me as particularly weak for this show, and the one time in which Crichton’s science-hating namesake makes a characteristically incoherent thematic appearance. When they say Luxans are tough, they ain’t kidding. Not a virus? Praise the day! And it’s even turned nicely on its head when I realize that Moya’s now treating the crew as an infection.