Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Farscape Geekwatch: S01E09 & S01E10

Another couple of episodes of Farscape are under our belt.  The show is still running a bit slow, but getting deeper into the characters and the story arc.

S01E09, DNA Mad Scientist, gives some wonderful character moments.  When a crazy scientists / evolved lab rat offeres D'Argo, Rygel, and Zhaan the chance for one of them to go home, they quickly turn on Pilot, then each other.  The scene with them severing his arm is particularly brutal.  No real geekwatch references here, though the talk about Mengele (and Namtar, the villain, hailing him as a visionary) was certainly striking.

S01E10, They've Got a Secret, introduces the arc of Moya's pregnancy.  This feels very Farscape.  It's one thing to have a living ship, it's another to give it a baby.  In many ways, taking sci-fi notions to their logical extremes is what Farscape is all about.  It was also interesting to peer into D'Argo's back story.  The big geek reference here was John asking if there is "some kind of 'What to Expect When You're Expecting a Baby Leviathan' book by Dr. Spock.  Mr. Spock."  Fun play off of the Trek and, of course, Dr. Spock's classic parenthood text, 'What to Expect When You're Expecting.'

Farscape: The Complete Series is for sale on Amazon.com, and I suppose there's not too much to recommend the series yet.  Still, it gets better, I promise.

1 comment:

Jesse said...

I have been slowly picking my way through Farscape as well and I agree that Moya's baby is, by far, one of the most intriguing elements of the show. I thought about the whole 'living ship' motif from HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey to River Tam pretending to have melded with Serenity in Firefly and I think that Farscape does something clever, and fresh while still staying true to the genre conventions.