Farscape
"Picture If You Will"

"Picture If You Will"
Air Date: April 21, 2000

A mysterious shape-shifting portrait brought aboard Moya exposes the crew to an old foe -- the evil sorcerer Maldis (Chris Haywood).

As if the series weren't bizarre enough, writer Peter Neale takes Richard Manning's original magic and combines aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Rod Serling's Night Gallery and maybe Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to create a warped, watchable episode that pits Zhaan (Virginia Hey), a character who struggles to repress her Dark Side; against Maldis, who is the Dark Side embodied.

"Picture If You Will" seems a redux of Season One's "That Old Black Magic". The episode's equation is the same. A routine shopping visit to a place of commerce goes helter skelter as Maldis in disguise lures Moya's crew into his lair. There he tries to scare them with their worst fears to feed off their psychic energies. A character known for physical strength and secular attitude attacks Maldis from without in the real world while another spiritually powerful character attacks him on his incorporeal turf and eventually destroys him.

In "Picture" the variables plugged into that formula are a bit different, however. For one, there is no character like Liko the priest who died aiding Zhaan the first time around. Zhaan must rely on Crichton (Ben Browder) for spiritual psychic support which she ingeniously and cleverly enlists telepathically through Unity. I didn't think Crichton had it in him to heed her on that level. He worships in The Temple of the Atom and reads from The Sutra of Scientific Method, content to leave the magical mystical crap to those like Zhaan.

Another new variable is the shape-shifting portrait from Hell, the agent of Maldis' will. The occurrence of paranormal paintings in film and TV is fairly recognizable (seen before in Charmed and the Christopher Reeve romantic fantasy vehicle Somewhere in Time). It's easy to see why Chiana (Gigi Edgely) likes the painting, as it magically produces a lost necklace. It's also new to her eyes, a breath of fresh air in her stale existence aboard Moya. It loses its attraction when it starts picking off the crew like something out of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Let me say a few words about the Twisted Funhouse Mirrors the SFX staff came up with to decorate Maldisworld. Great job, folks -- if you all aimed to creep people out, it worked.

A more significant variable is how the crew band together a bit more than in "That Old Black Magic". Sufficient time and events have passed that the crew have bonded as a familial unit. A dysfunctional unit, granted, but still tight enough to back Zhaan up in this second round in the ring somewhere in the Twilight Zone with Maldis. Despite all she's done to Pilot and despite her mysterious mystic ways they trust her implicitly enough to obey her -- no questions asked. That earned trust plus what they learned the last time results in victory for Zhaan. Over herself and over Maldis. If he crops up again I hope it's a more spectacular meeting, as this one was rather... anticlimactic.

Chris Haywood amuses as a solicitous shopkeeper in chuckle-worthy drag, reminiscent of Terrence Stamp in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. When he shows his true colors in his black Elizabethan harlequin's suit, hair so spiky not even shrikes want to perch on it, and yellow felinoid eyes, I was glad to know that people like him only exist on television. Cunning and keenly aware of people's nature, Haywood's Maldis is clearly willing to go for the jugular and doesn't mind telling you so. Gleefully predatory, he reminds me of another Farscape arch villain we know and love to hate. He's used to control and he's mad for some pay back from Zhaan for taking it from him. We can see the anger in his jaundiced glare upon Zhaan and the consummate joy with which he actually walks on her as if she were merely a blue carpet.

Speaking of Zhaan, she seems to hold up well considering Maldis' attack on her psyche so soon after her break with reality and her newfound spirituality in "Mind the Baby". We've seen how clever and capable she can be in past opportunities Virginia Hey's been given to let her character (and her thespian chops) shine. She overcomes with some realistic difficulty her fear of losing self control -- a struggle played with wonderfully restrained drama by Hey -- to kick Maldis' ass one more time. By the way, I like how she yells at Rygel for not being there for Chiana and when she grabs his eyebrows for messing with her power tools. I like that every once in a while something peeves her enough to make her lose her cool a little. Not to mention it takes some serious acting skills to have chemistry of that level with a Muppet. Saving her crew almost makes up for sniping at Aeryn Sun in "The Way We Weren't". Almost.

To sum it up, "Picture If You Will" is an interesting but not very spine-tingling foray into psycho spiritual territory and a solid character driven hour of small screen cinema. I did learn one thing: sometimes something had for free gets you more than what you bargained for.

-- Vivian E. Lee

Farscape airs at 8 and 11pm EST, Fridays on The Sci Fi Channel.

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