The Flax

Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections: Farscape: Season One: The Flax
"You are the female of your species, right?"
--Crichton to Aeryn

PLOT SUMMARY:
Aeryn takes Crichton (our resident Earth Idiot) out for piloting practice in a transport pod. During practice, they get caught in THE FLAX (tm) and can't move. Their pod is damaged and oxygen is coming through the vents very quickly. This increases the possibility that a single spark could make the ship go FOOM.
Back on Moya, we encounter Stanz , a rather eccentric alien who used to be a pirate. He tells the crew that he's an expert on the flax and that he can help them avoid it.
He takes D'Argo out in his ship and tells him that he knows of a Luxan Voyager (no relation to our friends in the Delta Quadrant) that was caught in the flax a few cycles ago. D'Argo thinks he can recover a map fiber that will show him the way to find Jothee (his son). They alter course.
These pirates show up on Moya. They want info on Stanz but Zhann and Rygel stall by playing some kind of gambling game. Rygel bets the whereabouts of Stanz and loses. But he gives the pirates the wrong coordinates sending them on a wild goose chase.
Meanwhile Aeryn and John realize that they need to do some welding to fix the ship but that pesky oxygen would blow them to kingdom come should there be a spark. So they plan to vent the ship and then use their spacesuits to survive. But Crichton's is busted so Aeryn has to do the welding while Crichton dies for a few minutes. After the procedure is finished, Aeryn performs CPR and revives Crichton, but she didn't finish the job. Time was up for John so she had to stop welding before she was finished.
D'Argo and Stanz encounter the Luxan ship but D'Argo can't bring himself to abandon his friends. He wants to be able to look his son in the eye when he meets him.
Crichton and Aeryn are ready to die. They start making out and start to strip but then D'Argo shows up and spoils the fun. :^) Good ol' D'Argo.
Turns out Stanz is a female of his species. The look on D'Argo's face when this is revealed is priceless.

NITS:
>> Stanz tells D'Argo that he's never heard of Luxans. Yet he later tells D'Argo that he was scavanging aboard a Luxan Voyager.
>> So Aeryn and Crichton open the vents into space. The space in the Uncharted Territories must be a balmy 70 degress because here in the Orion Spiral Arm, it's just above absolute zero. Crichton should have frozen to death.

OVERALL:
Great episode. First one that really shows them all growing on each other.

NOTE FROM TUE:
You can always tell when I've seen an episode because I always write this huge synopsis. I wrote the ones prior to this before seeing them. That's why they're so short. I've seen them now but you probably hate these long synopses anyway so I'll stick with what's there.

NEXT WEEK:
"Jeremiah Crichton"
By Callie Sullivan on Thursday, October 18, 2001 - 1:43 pm:

Crichton should have frozen to death.
But Crichton was already dead, so presumably the cold couldn't affect him.

Crichton says to Aeryn something along the lines of, "Fixing this could take a couple of hours," then corrects himself and says, "... arns." Surely, having translator microbes, Aeryn would hear this as, "Fixing this could take a couple of arns ... arns."

John teaches Aeryn CPR and tells her to do fifteen heart compressions followed by two breaths. During her attempts to resuscitate him she only breathes into him once on a couple of occasions. I could have accepted this as a panic-stricken forgetfulness if Peacekeepers weren't such perfectionists.

When Gilena kissed Crichton in PK Tech Girl, she kissed his forehead. John then kissed her on the mouth and the impression I got was that this was new to a Sebacean. Yet in this episode, Aeryn immediately kisses John on the mouth.


By Merat on Thursday, October 18, 2001 - 6:50 pm:

Didn't she catch the two of them at it in that episode, Callie? So maybe she kissed him the way she knew he liked..


By ScottN on Thursday, October 18, 2001 - 11:32 pm:

Great Scene: Crichton wondering if Aeryn is the female of the species.


By Callie on Thursday, November 01, 2001 - 2:46 am:

Actually, in a future episode we see a flashback of Aeryn with another Peacekeeper some years ago. They kiss like humans do, so Gilena's kissing of the forehead must have been a personal preference.


By Spottedkitty on Sunday, December 16, 2001 - 2:33 pm:

I've just re-seen this episode (for about the 8th time) and the scene where Rygel dupes Krackage never fails to bring a smile to my face. The writing there was excellent. Keeping you thinking Rygel was selling out the rest of the crew then the bomb drop that he knew what he was doing all the time. I certainly wouldn't of reacted any differently than Zahnn did. :)


By Gordon Lawyer on Thursday, December 05, 2002 - 7:09 am:

A furnace-powered starship????? It's seems very impractical, though it certainly emphasizes what a piece of junk it is.


By Gordon Lawyer on Wednesday, December 18, 2002 - 7:16 am:

Why didn't Stanz's criminal record mention her gender? I can think of two possibilities. It could be that she didn't tell the Peacekeepers and they didn't know what to look for. Or the Peacekeepers figured that including that information would unnecessarily confuse any bounty hunters.


By Gordon Lawyer on Thursday, March 06, 2003 - 7:27 am:

Re: Stanz not having heard of Luxans before. There are two possibilities.

1. She was making her point in an obnoxious manner.

2. She might genuinely not heard of Luxans, but is able to put two and two together and get four rather than three or eighteen. Dargo tells her that the boots she scavenged are Luxan boots. Even without that, assuming the corpse wasn't too badly decomposed, she could recognize that Dargo is of the same species as it. She probably figured the purpose of the ship from its design. An exploration ship would probably have stuff like extended fuel capacity and a top-of-the-line sensor package.


By Callie on Monday, May 26, 2003 - 12:34 pm:

How did the message buoy get away from the pod? The Flax is supposed to hold everything in it.

Is this the only time we heard a human female voice doing an automated countdown on Moya or one of her pods?


By Josh M on Thursday, October 23, 2003 - 10:41 pm:

I just saw this one and I really liked it. All this time, I thought the first Aeryn/Crichton kiss was A Human Reaction. And they were going to go all the way too. Heat of the moment.

I loved D'Argo's expression when he walked in. And after he found out that Stanz was female. Those were some great moments. I figured Rygel would do something to get the upper hand on the Zenetan, but I thought that it would be that Rygel beats him at the end.


By Gordon Lawyer on Friday, October 24, 2003 - 5:16 am:

When she watched this episode, my sister, who is a nurse, commented that they did a better job of simulating CPR than most TV shows. Of course, that's not saying much.


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