Farscape
"The Locket"

Airdate: August 25, 2000

Cute together at any age.

Aeryn leaves Moya to do a long range survey in a thick space mist, only to return a day later and 165 cycles older. Despite their best efforts to reason with her and keep her aboard, the stubborn Sebacean escapes. John follows, as expected, and gets caught with her without hope of seeing Moya and the others again for 55 cycles.

What follows is what at first glance seems nothing more than a shipper fantasy with John and Aeryn spending a lifetime together and becoming the Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy of the Uncharted Territories with Crichton following the Dr. McCoy rule of Southern space travelers, that is, the older you get, the thicker your accent becomes. There's even a special guest appearance by the Scorpius image produced by the chip that has been implanted in John's head. And while 55 years is indeed a long time -- time enough, you'd think, for the couple to tell each other definitively how they feel about one another -- they dance around the subject until it's too late. Of course.

Back on Moya, a visiting Stark and Zhaan figure out what the deal is with the time fluctuations and with John's help are able to send everyone back to a point just before they entered the mist. It involves unity and reverse starbursting, but all of that's just fluff and in the end is merely a process that equals a big hit on the old reset button.

Except this is Farscape, not Voyager, so it's not quite as neat and tidy as it sounds.

Stark and Zhaan theorize that Aeryn's line does live on, even though she has no knowledge of them and with Farscape's nutty reliance on continuity, it's always a possibility that we will meet up with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren one day. Perhaps the most satisfying and frustrating aspect, however, is the feeling that Aeryn and John share that something happened, they just don't know what.

Oh, and there's a piece tacked on near the end about Stark presenting D'Argo with a lead on his son's whereabouts, but just enough to whet the appetite for a future adventure.

There's no escaping Scorpius.

A merely surface analysis would lead one to think that writer Justin Monjo was merely pandering to the `shipper element of the Farscape fandom. Or rather, screwing with their heads. But upon closer examination the viewer is given definitive insight as to the driving forces in John and Aeryn's personalities. Although resigned to making the best out of the cards she has been dealt, Aeryn still feels a responsibility towards her shipmates and spends decades trying to get them a message that they must leave. Crichton, for his part, is not content with his bucolic existence. He must return to his former life, if even for a day.

Their attitudes about their lives in the mist-planet mirrors the ones they have in the Uncharted Territories. Aeryn has not yet found what her life's goal is. She is about change, but while she embraces that change, she also feels a responsibility for those around her. Even when things don't go her way, Aeryn adjusts and finds a happy medium for herself. John on the other hand knew what he wanted and had achieved his goal in life. For him, the hope of returning is what keeps him going. Until he returns to Earth, even if it is only for one day, he will continue his search for a way home.

As a couple, John and Aeryn are an interesting mix. Nearly complete opposites, they nevertheless compliment one another in various ways. For a while, she was action and he was thought, but now they have taken on pieces of each other's usual modus operandi and act as one hell of a team. From their first days together, Crichton has urged Aeryn on in her quest to find her place in the universe, while Aeryn, although she has nothing to do with where he came from, has been the one continually bright spot in John's universe that allows him to keep going.

He is her inspiration. She is his hope.

And Farscape is my latest obsession.

-- Linda M. Najera

Farscape airs at 9pm EST, Fridays on The Sci Fi Channel.

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