Skip to main content

Farscape: Exodus from Genesis

Season 1, Episode 2 (on Apple's box set) — Exodus from Genesis 

Is this about Peter Gabriel's departure from his prog-rock band, only to be replaced by Phil Collins, then the band turns power-pop? 

Maybe. 

It more reasonably appears to be the trope-y "Aliens tribute" episode that every SF show eventually does. Except... it's not? Not entirely? We learn that Aeryn, like all Sebaceans, is unable to regulate her body temperature against heat. 

The crew is being pursued by Crais' (rogue?) Peacekeeper faction, and flies into a nearby nebula-cum-anomaly to hide from them. Unfortunately, they pick up a passenger entity: an alien lifeform. It releases chitin-covered critters (they move like DRDs) that stay hidden and occasionally stab the crew from cover. Not a great guest for Moya's hospitality. It also start ramping up the heat onboard, blocking ventilation shafts, and Aeryn starts to overheat. 

The alien lifeform starts cranking out doppelgangers of the crew, sowing confusion. The crew fights the critters and their own dopplegangers, which display awareness and even some shared muscle memory (Crichton notes his copy uses his own fighting moves against him), but the dupes cannot talk. Moya hosts a running battle inside of her, the crew against the voiceless swarm. 

It injects Pa'u Zhaan with a venomed claw that turns her into a puppet for the entity. The voiceless swarm finally finds a voice. Though initially defensive, after a sovereign-ruler-to-sovereign-ruler pow-wow with Rygel, the swarm agrees to cordon off a portion of the ship allowing Aeryn to stabilize, as long as no-one interferes with its reproductive process. 

Then the Peacekeepers return. Fuck. 

Crichton determines it's better to crank the heat up, Aeryn appear to agree (whaaaa?) and he and D'Argo roll out and fuck up the heat-challenged Peacekeepers, send them packing. 

A nice inversion of the "alien invaders on our ship" trope, bravo. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tony diTerlizzi and classic D&D monsters

The sixth entry of his series on drawings of classic D&D monsters is up. He's one of my favorite fantasy artists. His work tends toward the charming and cozy, rather than others' focus on machismo or melodrama.
Post a Comment
Read more

sad fate

“Our legendary personalities are evergreen ‘brands’ with the benefit of worldwide recognition,” reads a message on the Richman agency’s website. Guardian UK Article *vomits* Where is the line drawn between “public figure” and “celebrity”? How can a dead person have an agent, particulary where there are no specific works concerned other than a sense of character? It’s one thing to insist that Duck Soup is a work that should be protected (which any more simply means controlled by whomever has the most buX0rs), but shouldn’t personalities and such pass into the public domain as well? ( boingboing : Bill Gates 0wns Einstein, Groucho , Freud, Asimov, Fuller, et al )
Post a Comment
Read more

on sheeps and androids

The movie Blade Runner is very dear to my heart. It is a treatise on the nature of existence expanding on, and perhaps exceeding the reach of the Phillip K. Dick work which inspired it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Perhaps I have missed out on some greater subtlety of PKD's work, but the point of DADoES pursues the definition of fake, while Blade Runner instead focuses on what is real. Where the replicants in the novel are sociopathic monsters who emulate emotions solely to gain traction against humans who may hunt them, the humans there rely on machines to dictate their own emotions for them. They dial for "energetic determination" or "six-hour self-accusatory depression." As much as the replicants are machines incapable of real emotion, humans are similarly reliant on a machine to simulate emotion for them. In contrast, the movie's central them is spelled out for us in Deckard's apartment, when Rachel is playing the piano. She professe...
Post a Comment
Read more