Radical Edward's Field Trip

On Mondays at 1PM EDT (UTC-4), I usually live toot an episode of a TV show. This week's show is Farscape. A scientist from Earth became stranded far away from Earth while running an experiment in space. He and his newfound friends must dodge forces that want to send them to prison, kill them, or do other terrible things to them.

The aliens in Farscape aren't the simplistic head appliances of Star Trek and they're not on a five year mission to seek out new life. They're trying to survive in a hostile universe. Jim Henson's company made the puppets.

Of this episode, TMDB says in part:

The crew returns from a Commerce Planet with a load of Crackers and a meek alien called Traltixx, who promises he can alter Moya's electromagnetics to make her untraceable.Join me in ~45 minutes!

#Farscape #ScienceFiction

Mar 16 at 4:16pmWeb
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
Pressing play now!
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
The episode opens with some very efficient Exposition with walk and talk. The crew are dodging wanted posters while trying to get food and supplies.

Crichton is skeptical of the guy they hired but T’Raltixx does make Crichton’s module disappear. Crichton is tasked with persuading Pilot.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
Down on the planet, Chiana bought a bunch of cheez-its. T’Raltixx says the light of the pulsars are his home may affect lesser species. Everyone is getting on each other’s nerves.

D’Argo and Rygel fight and D’Argo shoves crackers down Rygel’s throat.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
T’Raltixx eggs on Pilot. All of the rest (except Rygel and Zhaan) get into a fight.

Crichton, despite being affected, manages to calm everyone down. Meanwhile, T’Raltixx has been watching from shadows and damages one of Moya’s DRDs.

Crichton confronts T’Raltixx who claims he’s willing to turn around.

Aeryn tries to start a conspiracy with Rygel and Chiana tries to Start one with D’Argo. D’Argo tries to suss out Zhaan and ends up knocking her out. He says she’s working with Crichton.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
John gets into a fight with Pilot and then realizes Pilot shouldn’t be affected because he can’t see the light. He goes to Aeryn and Rygel and tries to engage them. He’s unsuccessful because of their obsession with crackers. He goes on a distracting tangent about ice cream slogans before leaving.

T’Raltixx continues to work on Pilot.

John talks to D’Argo and Chiana. He lets them know he’s sabotaged the bay door so they can’t leave.

Chiana observes that John wasn’t bothered about Zhaan. He wasn’t conspiring.

John “Here’s Johnny”’s Aeryn and Rygel who have been bickering about crackers.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
Chiana kicks John in the mivonks when he finds her working on the video message from Scorpius. He has a conversation with Scorpius’s hallucinations who tries to get him involved in the crackers situation.

T’Raltixx demands more light from Pilot while trying to make him paranoid about the others.

John gets the drop on D’Argo but ends up Holding a gun on the hallucination of Scorpius too. He shoots D’Argo non-fatally but allows Scorpius to distract him. D’Argo gets away.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
John captures Chiana and is persuaded to tie her up. He gets into it with Aeryn and Scorpius tries to make John shoot Aeryn. John shoots the hallucinations instead. They get into a fire fight.

After the break, John has captured everyone and then shoots the crackers. He says it’s not the pulsars affecting him. They’re acting even more weird since passing the pulsars.

Meanwhile, T’Raltixx gets even more light and makes Moya glow. John lets the others go once they’re on the same page. Everyone wants to go attack T’Raltixx but John says it has to be him. Chiana agrees but only because he has bad human eyes. That makes him less affected. They prove it by reading something he thinks doesn’t have text.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
They make him look ridiculous with protective gear and spit and then disappear him with T’Raltixx‘a machine. He goes into the control room and attacks the power cables. After ten seconds they have to make him visible again.

He ends up Using D’Argo’s qualta blade to attack T’Raltixx.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
After the break, Pilot goes on an apology tour. D’Argo apologizes to Rygel for the assault. Meanwhile, Chiana, Aeryn, and John put things back together. John tries to apologize but Chiana was more impressed than offended. He half apologizes to Aeryn who isn’t hugely upset or impressed.

John asks Zhaan how they can take it all back. She says she doesn’t know.

CREDITS.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
This one's an all-time favorite. In a lot of other shows, they want humans to be somehow special. While affected by T'Raltixx, John thinks he is. It turns out he is special ... because he has human eyes which are, comparatively, much less effective.

A series of conspiracies that is far more complex than DS9's Dramatis Personae plays out giving us some unique pairings. John's not the only one who realizes certain things are amiss. Despite being strongly affected, Chiana uses logic unprompted to realize that John is not in a conspiracy with Zhaan as she and D'Argo had thought.

The solution was hilarious and based on things we had already seen in the episode. The apology tours played to the characters' strengths and weaknesses.

After seeing this episode umpteen million times, I cannot comprehend what T'Raltixx was actually trying to accomplish. But it doesn't matter!

Crackers don't matter.
Show threadRadical Edward's Field Trip3d ago
There's this really important moment in the apologies that I glazed over a bit. D'Argo's attack on Rygel was really really bad. When D'Argo apologizes, Rygel says he can't forgive D'Argo ... yet.

In the year 2000, this kind of silly, underappreciated, cult classic said a thing that a lot of us still need to learn today, just shy of 26 years later.

An apology isn't always enough to warrant forgiveness. Sometimes forgiveness takes time. Sometimes forgiveness doesn't happen at all and sometimes that's ok. Although the previous sentence isn't something the show covered here.
Show threadJTW3d ago
@HabitatRing one of my favorite lines in the series: "Nobody ... has margaritas ... with pizza!"