Death and the Stone

Now for another story about youth versus age. Or relatively young versus somewhat older. I'm not sure how old Chiana is on Farscape (the Farscape wiki doesn't know either) but it's pretty clear she's much younger than everyone else, maybe late teens. It's enough to make for a nice episode about two generations misunderstanding each other.

Season 2, Episode 3: Taking the Stone

We learn a little bit more about Chiana's past, namely that she had a brother she looked up to. I say had because she learns in this episode, thanks to an implant in her belly, that her brother has suddenly died.

Crichton (Ben Browder) blows her off when she says she needs to talk, not catching on that it's an urgent topic from her tone. So runs away and falls in with a gang of misfit youths, apparently about the same age as her, who live on an otherwise deserted planet. They live in caves below the tombs of their dead ancestors, one of whom Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) expeditiously robs.

This leads to an amusing subplot about cursed loot, though the funniest part is when Rygel discovers a worm in the decayed face behind a jewelled mask. Instead of screaming in horror, he gasps and says, "Bonus!" and promptly puts the critter in his mouth. We'll never have another Rygel.

Meanwhile, Crichton and Aeryn (Claudia Black) play Chiana's surrogate parents. Crichton is the dad who doesn't like the dangerous games she's been playing with her friends and Aeryn is the wiser mother who continually reminds Crichton his aggressive techniques are going to backfire.

Chiana directly tells him he's not her dad or her lover or even her "tralk". We return to the series' thematic premise about lost people bonding as a new kind of family--it's not unlike Rebel Without a Cause, really. One of the main problems with a new kind of family is that it lacks the reinforcement of tradition so when trouble arises there's no device to keep anyone from splitting when they feel like it, even if staying is ultimately in their best interest. We've seen this already with Talyn.

The episode also follows on from "Vitas Mortis" in contrasting physically appealing youth with unappealing age. Here, Crichton eventually discovers the "lost people"--people older than 22--among the tribe Chiana's fallen in with are people shamed into hiding because their flesh shows signs of damage from the local radiation.

The young dislike age because it reminds them of death, it's an indication that they might not be as indestructible as they think they are. The priestess in the previous episode was almost ready to sacrifice Moya just to forget about being old. In "Taking the Stone", the kids defy death with crude extreme sports, most prominently a free fall down a chasm only to be caught by a "sonic net" created by their own carefully tuned screams.

Use the wrong intonation and you're dead. And Chiana's raring to give it a go herself--no wonder Crichton's worried about her. But is she really disgusted by age or does she really want to kill herself or is there some other issue that Crichton just can't understand? It's a good episode for her character--not her best, but good, though I think anything Chiana touches is gold on Farscape.

. . .

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):

Season One:

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
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis

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