Comic Con Report, volume 1: Farscape Edition

I spent the day in room 7AB, getting there early so I could have a decent seat for the Farscape 20th anniversary panel. Here's the footage I got:

The section at the end where Browder describes the scene in "Durka Returns" was in response to a fan who asked if Crichton and Chiana had a "brother and sister" relationship. As Chiana herself points out in "Taking the Stone", their relationship wasn't so easily defined. But given that scene in "Durka Returns" and the kiss they share at the end of season one, if it's a sibling relationship, it would certainly be an incestuous one.

One of the most exciting moments, as you can see in the clip, was the hinting from Brian Henson that Farscape may return eventually. It sounds like Farscape being on Amazon Prime has introduced it to a lot of new fans. The impression I had is that Henson hopes a deal can be worked out with Prime to shoot a new season of Farscape. Considering Prime rescued The Expanse when it, like Farscape, was cancelled by the Sci-Fi Channel, I'd say that's not an unreasonable thing to hope for. I'll keep my fingers crossed. It'd be nice to see the show return at this point, especially since Crichton and Aeryn's child would be a teenager now.

I have no idea why Gigi Edgley managed to remain in focus in my photos more than anyone else.

I sat through several panels waiting for Farscape and I'll talk about them at length in a longer post after Sunday. For to-day there is more Con . . .

Twitter Sonnet #1258

A kitten face regards the silent stones.
A talking quake conveys a shaky term.
The earth records a dream in brittle bones.
A sudden plate arrests the drifting worm.
A door was glass or ice or nothing real.
The window drained its colour late at night.
A green or blue decides to-day it's teal.
A safty pin would signal throats to fight.
A purple planet grows a set of limbs.
A loop of pitches brought to trial die.
The piping dream of dragons hardly dims.
A ruler measures sev'ral inches high.
A heavy radish weighs the muppet down.
But healthy veggies built the Fraggle town.

Finally Chiana

It's not that Farscape was bad before Chiana finally shows up, fifteen episodes in, but it sure gets a whole lot better. The inimitable rebel alien girl takes the show to new levels in its exploration of ideas about sex and social roles. So far the show has been about characters trying to get home, trying to find a community where they're recognised as fitting into conceived cultural ideas of intelligent species, whether it be human, Luxan, or Delvian. Chiana, on the other hand, is trying to get very far away from her people, physically and conceptually.

Season 1, Episode 15: Durka Returns

The title of the episode, though, marks it as a follow-up to "PK Tech Girl" in which the captain of a Peacekeeper ship, Durka (David Wheeler), appeared to have met his demise. Now it appears he's still alive--an incredible fact, as Aeryn (Claudia Black) observes, even if he had escaped the defeated command ship. He'd be hundreds of cycles (years) old now, longer than the normal Sebacean lifespan.

And he'd spent several hundred years torturing another member of Moya's crew--the Hynerian Dominar, Rygel (Jonathan Hardy). As I discussed in my review for "PK Tech Girl", Rygel's need to assert himself and his identity runs deeper than anyone else on the ship can likely imagine considering he spent centuries being humiliated and broken down by Durka. Now Rygel, as afraid as he is of Durka when he first sees him board Moya, has an eventually cathartic chance to show him he hasn't been broken. Neither, it turns out, has Durka, though it turns out he has himself undergone a century of conditioning.

Enter Chiana (Gigi Edgley) and the Nebari as a species. We don't meet many Nebari over the course of Farscape's four seasons and in this episode we meet only two but it's enough to establish an idea of their civilisation. Built on an ideal of rigorous social engineering, all negative or "inappropriate" feelings and behaviour are carefully expunged from the personalities of its citizens through a mysterious and sinister process known as "cleansing". Salis (Tiriel Mora), Durka's new Nebari boss, is escorting Chiana as a prisoner when Moya collides with his craft, and, it being Nebari space, the crew feel obliged to put Chiana in a cell. Crichton (Ben Browder) inquires as to the nature of Chiana's crimes but receives only evasions from Salis and vague, broad answers from Chiana herself.

But she's young and desperate, not likely to have had time to rack up crimes on the level of Durka's. So in terms of an argument for institutional behavioural modification, we have two ends of the spectrum--a man guilty of true atrocities, and a girl who's apparently guilty of just having another point of view. In both cases, cleansing doesn't seem to be very helpful.

I met Gigi Edgley at Comic Con a couple years ago and had the pleasure of discussing her performance. I complimented her idea to adopt strange mannerisms and body language as Chiana and she told me how she had not wanted to simply play a human in makeup and costume, she wanted to create an alien character inside and out. Obviously this adds a level of worldbuilding but it also has the benefit of adding an intriguing layer to interactions between her and other characters.

You can always tell there's something else going on. The way she holds Crichton's gaze or the pacing of her laughter compel the viewer to watch her attentively along with Crichton as we try to figure out who she is and what makes her dangerous or if she even is dangerous. She's beautiful and the shock of blue-white makeup against black eyes and dark backgrounds further arrest the viewer's attention. When she escapes and Crichton's forced to pin her to the ground she seems to get an, shall we say, "inappropriate" thrill out of it. After all the incidental cuddling between Crichton and Aeryn in earlier episodes, it almost feels like Crichton's cheating and the fact that Chiana seems more aware of the meaning of physical proximity, and less ashamed of it, becomes an increasingly important part of the show's ongoing discussion of sexuality. For now, though, it's the unspoken but plain as day reality. One can easily imagine, without being told, how difficult it must have been for Chiana to live in a society that sought to ignore en masse an unmistakable physical reality.

. . .

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton