Farscape and Fray

[frayadjacent]

Farscape: I have just one episode left! Well, I think so anyway, I've been avoiding looking up lists of episode titles in case there are spoilers. I realize I've hardly posted about the show even though I've liked it a lot and I love love love Aeryn Sun. So here is an unsorted and unformatted selection of my thoughts.

I didn't give this show the attention it deserves and requires. I watched it over the course of something like 2 1/2 years -- I watched the first half dozen episodes of season 1, waited more than a year, watched up through the start of season 4 off and on over about six months, hated early season 4 and took at least six months to get through the first 12 episodes, and have watched the rest of season 4 this week. Furthermore, I often had one eye on Twitter or something else while I watched, which is not my normal way of watching tv AT ALL, but I developed the habit during some boring/bad S1 episodes and never fully shook it. So now I feel like there's a lot I missed, thematically, character-wise, and in terms of plot. I already feel like I need to rewatch.

I was thinking the other day about what it takes for me to fall in love with a show, and at what point in the show that happens. My favorite shows are Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, and Friday Night Lights. I fell in love with the last of these immediately, and the love uh, *almost* never faltered (coughmurdersubplotcough). Conversely, Xena was a show I enjoyed, but no more, until the final season, when I really fell hard for the Xena/Gabrielle pairing. Now I see the entire series through the lens of what the last season did in terms of their relationship (and what seasons 3 & 4 did for Gabrielle's character) and I love it all. Buffy was somewhere in between. I loved it a lot the first time I watched, but it wasn't until I started rewatching (and rewatching and rewatching) and discussing it that I got really into it.

I bring this up because I suspect that Farscape, like Xena and to some extent Buffy, will be a show that will impress me most when viewed as a whole. There has been a ton of narrative follow-through in these last few episodes. Like people told me when I started, shit *matters* on Farscape. I've been enjoying that a lot.

In terms of character, some of my favorite things include the radiant Aeryn Sun, as well as the way the show has depicted the impact of imprisonment and homesickness on the characters. I've mostly enjoyed their interpersonal dynamics. Relationships are fraught and tenuous, but for good reason. The plotlines with Crais, Scorpius, and Talyn have been interesting and I've liked them quite a bit.

However, I do wish the show was more of an ensemble, because I don't really connect to John Crichton the way I'm supposed to. I feel for his homesickness, I like his sense of humor and kindness. But I was also endlessly frustrated with everyone insisting that he was ignorant, that his ideas were bad and always went wrong, that he wasn't the hero we the audience were expecting him to be, when the narrative quite frankly kept making him pretty much exactly the hero we expect. The show put a lot of effort into telling us that John wasn't your usual sci-fi hero, but it did not succeed at showing it. Like even though he didn't earn or want it, he still spends most of the show as the most important single person in the known universe, and it just grates on me.

Also, I know this is pretty random, but remember in an early episode where there's a flashback to John's life on Earth, and a moment when he was about to propose to his girlfriend, but then she told him she was going to grad school or medical school or something instead of following him and building her career around his? And so he gets the super sads and is totally betrayed and doesn't propose and we're all supposed to feel bad for him? I cannot emphasize enough how much I fucking hated that, how close to home that shit is for me, and I think it's why I basically didn't like John for a long time thereafter. I know it's not a particularly strong argument, but the point is that so much of the show revolves around John, a character I've come to care about and like, but it took a damn long time due to some basic smart white guy tropes that the show fell into that I find particularly annoying. And I wish I'd seen more time spent on other characters, especially Aeryn (though she got a fair amount) and Chiana and D'Argo. Also I really, really liked Jool and her brattiness and ridiculous scream and super smartness. I'd have really loved more Jool.

Anyway this is not my final word on Farscape, I obviously, I know there's a lot to it that I've straight up missed and I'm looking forward to exploring it deeper through vids and some meta and rewatching certain episodes. I'm happy to take recommendations for fanworks including meta! And to know other people's thoughts.

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

Comment part two!

I'd also like to hear more Chiana love, if you're willing to share or point me toward other things you've written! I have to admit I haven't given her character as much thought as I'd like.

CHIANA. I don’t think that I’ve written anything about my love for her (though someday, SOMEDAY, I will make the Chiana/John totally canon non-otp vid that I’ve been thinking about for, oh, ten years or so) and actually many of the things that I love about her are probably things that turn other people off and also might be TMI & also include rambling, so … fair warning! This might serve as an anti-rec for the character, though I hope it doesn’t.

So, to understand my love of Chiana, I think you have to understand what sorts of characters I loved and didn’t love in high school (& earlier), which is when Farscape was airing and I was watching it. So, see above, re: Aeryn, I tend not to glomp on to characters who are fighters/warriors/etc and that tendency of mine was even more pronounced ten+ years ago when Farscape was airing. At the time, to me, it seemed like the “strong female character” thing got a lot of play in sci-fi/fantasy, at least the stuff that I was familiar with. A woman who could beat you up and who was physically powerful. But it usually left me cold and to some extent still does. It’s not that these aren’t great characters, but they’re not *my* characters, they aren’t the characters that I grabbed on to, the characters who changed me, the characters I wanted to be when I grew up, the characters of my heart.

I also didn’t tend to glomp on to female characters who were genius scientists or book smart like Willow, Scully, or Hermione because, even though I am smart and did well in school, I always felt as though I was in the shadow of my older brother who was much better at math and science than I was. (And listen: I was no slouch, but I didn’t realize that until I was basically done with high school because my baseline was someone who got a PhD in mathematics and who was always the smartest person in the room when I was growing up. My parents often said, totally seriously, that he was smarter than them and they’re no slouches either.) So I liked the scientist genius types more than the warrior characters, but they still weren’t *mine*. They were my second and third favorites, not my first.

There were exceptions — I loved Eowyn, despite the fact that she is a fighter/warrior, but that was less because she was a warrior and more because of her isolation and how she felt claustrophobic in the choices available to her. Susan Ivanova was also an exception, but that is largely because of her rejection of and hesitation to pursue romantic relationships, which (more on this in a second) was instantly fascinating to me. But most of the characters I loved when I was growing up were characters who were distinctly weird or off-kilter — Luna Lovegood, River, etc. That otherness was something that immediately connected with me. And characters who were uncertain of their place or who were forced into different roles immediately got me — Ezri Dax, worried about living up to Jadzia, Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, who was forced into existing in this weird and incorrect role where she couldn’t be herself, but also at the same time found something liberating in that — they were hugely exciting and important to me.

Anyway, looking back, I’m convinced that a major the reason I liked these characters was because in many ways they helped me understand feeling different and wrong because of mental health issues and feeling different and wrong because of sexuality confusion, both of which were present in my life in high school, but which I was only aware of much, much later. To this day I can’t talk about my sexuality with talking about mental health; I can’t imagine a time when I can apply a label to myself and not have the caveat that depression and anxiety have permanently altered my ability to … have a sexuality? To know what my sexuality is? I’m not sure how to talk about it, because, even though I’m pretty well-versed on mental health lingo and sexuality lingo, I still don’t have the vocabulary to describe how my sexuality is intertwined with anxiety and depression and I’ve never quite seen other people describe their own experiences in a way that clicks for me. (Side note: mental health stuff is also a reason I like Crichton. He was one of my first examples of a character with mental health issues, who still got to be a hero.) The closest label I have for myself is ace (I hate the word asexual — that’s a whole different rant/discussion), and even that is … wrong, imprecise, missing context. We’ll come back to this in a second.

These lines have mellowed with age, but they’ll always be the undercurrents informing the characters I like/dislike. But back then they were much stronger and finding female characters who were obviously weird or had to hide something about themselves or who started out as being less confident and found their confidence as they went on resonated with me quite a bit. When those characters managed to save the day or be heroes despite that, that was … huge, to me. So in many ways Chiana fits into this perfectly: she’s a nonconformist, which is so dangerous to the Nebari that they want to brainwash her (and brainwashing and mental fuckery is something that hits me hard, to this day); she’s often lying or presenting half-truths about who she is; she’s not a warrior or fighter and uses other means to get by; she often helps save the day; she is incredibly vulnerable when it comes to letting people close to her; she has this child-like wonder at life and yet is often very jaded about the world. I also have to admit to liking characters who are thieves — blame my childhood crush on Robin Hood, the fox from the Disney movie — so that was a definite plus for liking Chiana.

But one of the main reasons Chiana caught my eye was that she was all of that and still confident in her sexuality. Terrible things had happened to her, yes, and she weaponized her sexuality, yes, and she was unsure when it came to actual relationships, yes, but there was a kind of surety to her sexuality that really fascinated me/attracted me/made me envious. To this day female characters who are confident sexually and who pursue sex and even use sex to their own ends — Sarah Manning, Jesse Flores — fascinate me in a way that I find hard to articulate. How does that work? How do they know? How do they want? I loved watching Chiana because I wanted to figure out her sexuality; I wanted to mimic her sexuality; I wanted to be sexual. Looking back I’m sure there are many feminist critiques that you can make about Chiana’s sexuality: I don’t care. She modeled for me something that I still struggle to understand and she did it in a way where she owned it — it was hers and no one else’s.

But even beyond my weird growing pains, I liked her for other reasons: her physicality is so alien, her voice is captivating, the Nebari make-up is lovely. (Zhaan wins for best alien make-up I think, but Chiana gets second, in my book.) And I love her own idiosyncratic take on ethics; she will fight for herself and later for her crew, she will steal, lie, cheat, and fuck, but like Aeryn, she has her own well of kindness and love that is hers and hers alone. I also love her greedy understanding of Rygel and her friendships/antagonism with Jool and Sikozu. What little we see of Zhaan and Chiana I also really enjoy. I don’t love the plotline with Joffee and Chiana cheating on D’Argo with his son — nope, nope nope — but in general I like how Chiana and D’Argo both grow up with each other. I don’t buy their relationship as being healthy, particularly the first time around, but I do like how they try, for each other. I also find the Nebari really fascinating and terrifying and I’m half convinced they would have been the antagonists in the theoretical season 5. I would have loved that; I wanted more of that, particularly if we got backstory with Nerri, her brother, and the revolution. The revolutionary/non-conformist aspects of her and her past definitely hooked me.

I love her relationship with Crichton, their friendship, their sort of sibling rivalry, even that he lost his virginity to her. But even though he lost her virginity to her, I’m actually really glad that she’s not a real love interest and their relationship is mostly platonic. Part of why I don’t really like when romance plots take over the show or a character is because … see above confusion re: sexuality … there is a part of me that is unable to understand why. There are relationships that I love and ship and get invested in, but it’s almost always a function of … how do I put it? For me, liking certain romances is almost always that the text is selling a very specific kind of fantasy about a very specific kind of romantic relationship that taps in to my desire to be a “normal” person who understands the appeal of dating and sex and being in love. There will always be a part of me that wants to want that (or that believes that given the right circumstances maybe I can transform myself into a person who wants that) and sometimes there will be a rare show or book that taps into that desire. Farscape does not tap into it at all in the slightest. And so I am very happy that Chiana is mostly not a part of the John/Aeryn equation and that the D’Argo relationship doesn’t ruin things for me. I like her and Crichton’s back and forth friendship much much more than any kind of manufactured love triangle.

Anyway, I feel like this doesn’t sell Chiana very well: it’s all really personal, TMI, me me me. But please try to give her a chance! I think she’s worth it. She’s scrappy and there’s a lot of depth there.

Also when it comes to body fluids I have the sense of humor of a 7 year-old, so that works too

Rygel’s flammable urine!!!!!! HELIUM FARTS. Using vomit to pilot D’Argo’s ship!!!

[frayadjacent]

I feel like this doesn’t sell Chiana very well: it’s all really personal, TMI, me me me. But please try to give her a chance! I think she’s worth it. She’s scrappy and there’s a lot of depth there.

No, this is a *great* sell! It's always super interesting to me to learn about the specific reasons why we connect to the particular stories and characters that we do, how it's all wrapped up in our personal histories and has an element of "right place at the right time"-ness to it. And the things you like about Chiana are things I like about her too! I just hadn't exactly thought through them very thoroughly.

Regarding Chiana's sexuality -- I see three main aspects there and I view them all slightly differently. One is the way she weaponizes her sexuality. That is fine with me, at times it's interesting and well-done. There could probably be a feminist critique in the sense that it is mostly female characters that do this (in tv in general), but I'm not particularly bothered by it. (Actually there is a definite connection to Grayza saying, "if you had a powerful weapon, would you not use it" -- I was pretty annoyed by her character until that episode, and that moment was particularly helpful for me.) Then there is Chiana's sexual desire, how integral it is to who she is (I loved loved loved how Twice Shy emphasized this), and I really like that. Then there is the way she is sexually objectified by the cinematography, writing, and by male characters, and I don't particularly enjoy that. But it's good to keep them separate in my mind, and Chiana's strong sexual desire is a really awesome part of her character.

I also find the Nebari really fascinating and terrifying and I’m half convinced they would have been the antagonists in the theoretical season 5. I would have loved that; I wanted more of that, particularly if we got backstory with Nerri, her brother, and the revolution.

OMG I COMPLETELY FORGOT about that plotline. It was so good! Now I'm going to wish forever that Season 4 had been about that. Or that we'd have gotten a season 5 about that, as you said.

[laurashapiro]

Just had to jump in here and say Chiana is my FAVORITE, for some of the reasons you mention. At the end of the day, though I'd like to think I am a super-competent badass like Aeryn or a compassionate revolutionary like Zhaan, the fact is, I'm Chiana through and through: still figuring shit out, kinda weird, totally sexual but not totally sure where I put my heart. She is particularly like me as a teenager, but I retain a lot of her qualities down deep.

[frayadjacent]

That's awesome. :)