The Choice
Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections:
Farscape:
Season Three:
The Choice
"If you’ve got a deity, you’d better make your peace with it now. Because I’m going to lead you to the other side real quick!"
--Stark
"If someone starts shooting you’ll make a very good shield."
--Rygel
PLOT SUMMARY:
Aeryn goes to a planet of mystics and criminals. She wants to speak to her dead father. No wait, she wants to talk to Crichton, no wait! Aw heck, she's looking for some dead people. Anyway, she finds this creepy looking guy with a big fang on the side of his face. He introduces himself as Talyn, Aeryn's daddy. He claims to know someone who can help her talk with Crichton.
Meanwhile, Stark and Rygel see Xhalax Sun roaming the halls of the planet. That's right. Xhalax Sun. Aeryn's mama. It's a Sun reunion.
Stark and Rygel confront Crais. He admits to making a deal with Xhalax. She tells high command that they're all dead, and in return, he spared her life.
They all go down to the planet of the dead to find Aeryn to bring her back so they can leave. Stark keeps hearing Zhann's voice in the distance somewhere.
Talyn-dad (as opposed to Talyn-ship) comes to see Xhalax. Seems they're in league with each other. They both want Aeryn dead. (Talyn-dad's motives are never revealed).
Talyn-dad returns to Aeryn with a box. Inside the box is... well... it's a four-eyed brain man. (That's right. You read that properly)(I've always wondered if people read these summaries who haven't seen the show?? :^))
Anyway, Stark and Rygel find Aeryn and tell her that they've seen Xhalax. Since she's been having visions, she assumes that they are too so she ignores them. Then she confronts Stark and Crais about how they're both drooling over her and how they both treat Crichton like some dumb idiot. She puts them both in their place.
Xhalax heads off toward Aeryn's room. Stark, Rygel, and Crais beat up the clerk in order to get a freight elevator up to the top floor. Xhalax gets there first. She kills Talyn (who wasn't really Talyn BTW. Just an imposter. Aeryn knew it all along) she makes ready to kill Aeryn but Aeryn sweet talks her into putting the gun down. Just before they're about to have a mother-daughter hug, Crais bursts in and blasts Xhalax off the roof. You can practically see Aeryn shoot fire out of her eyes at Crais.
Finally, they're ready to leave. Talyn-ship has detected leviathan lifesigns nearby (It's Moya) and they're about to set course. They recieve a message from Stark. He thinks Zhann is on the planet so he's staying behind.
Back in Aeryn's hotel room, her vision of Crichton appears one last time. But this time, Aeryn has her hair pulled back again, she's totin' her gun, and she's wearing her spiffy leather PK-like outfit. It's Action Aeryn again. And she's done cryin' over Crichton.
ANALYSIS:
Sometimes I have a hard time deciding if I don't like an episode because things didn't happen the way I wanted them to, or because it was a poor episode. I think it was a little of both here. I remember back when Aeryn died in "Die Me, Dichotomy" and it looked like Crichton was going to lose his memory of ever loving Aeryn. I thought it was a cheap shot and that it would be a dumb idea. (Fortunately, I was wrong) Now they're doing the same thing here. And poor Crichton on Moya won't have anything. No wormholes, no Aeryn, no nothing. This whole season is turning into meaning nothing (save for some Scorpy time in INCUBATOR, this season's strongest episode by far). I don't know what I'm getting at. This is more of a complaint about the arc as a whole, not about this particular episode. This episode was so dark. There's dark, and then there's DARK. Sometimes, too dark as not so good. I miss how things started out not so good at the beginning and got better as everyone started getting along. Now they're ending the episodes on a sour note. I'm not sure I like it. And what was with the cheap makeup this episode? The talking four-eyed brain man, the fanged Talyn, the blood-eyed mystic. What the heck? On the plus side, they're going back to Moya next week.
>> Also a plus, Rygel and Stark continue to work together well. In fact, the Rygel/Stark/Crais combo is pretty dang good.
NITS:
>> Why was Pseudo-Talyn in league with Xhalax? Was that ever explained?
>> Aeryn should have known right after the blood spectrographs were done that she was getting scammed. It would be impossible for even her father to match her because of the altered Pilot DNA she has!
>> So does Aeryn now remember everything that happened in "The Locket"? (That was the most confusing part of the episode. Made ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE)
>> How did Aeryn find out Talyn’s last name? And why isn't his name Talyn Sun?
>> Was that the voice of Virginia Hey that was taunting Stark all through the episode? It sounded pretty dang close.
NEXT WEEK:
Return to Moya. And we all know what's coming with the Aeryn/Crichton reunion. (Boo! Hiss! Jeer! Jeer!)(Who knows, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised!!)
By cstadulis on Monday, August 20, 2001 - 11:49 am: Ok, I cried during this episode. Claudia Black was fabulous as a grieving Aeryn. Wow. The end scene, with her saying "You have to leave now" to her vision of John, was just so sad.
Of course, I also had the satisfaction of knowing I was right about her mom. I knew she wasn't dead! Although I think she's rather dead now (considering she got shot and fell ump-teem stories down.)
Next week's episode promises to be rather interesting, given the previews.
By Matt Nelson on Tuesday, August 21, 2001 - 6:29 pm: What I want to know is who pulled out the Ugly Stick and made the creature effects guys start using it.
I mean, there's the walking Peel-N-Eat Shrimp Shapeshifters that Xhalax hangs out with, and of course Scorpius, and now Talyn, and that little four-eyed-baby-brain-thing!!! GAAAH! I could hardly even LOOK at it.
Not that I complain about originality in creature design, don't get me wrong, but... Gad, make these guys watch some Pokemon episodes or something! I need some cute!
M@
By Merat on Monday, October 15, 2001 - 9:31 pm: If Rygel could fly all the way up to the window, why couldn't he just float above the throng of "mystics and criminals" when they bothered him?
By Harvey Kitzman on Monday, December 17, 2001 - 8:42 pm: Interesting episode. The city set from Blade Runner, the father who looked like Barclay/Fly from the episode Genesis from ST:TNG, and the psychic mutant puppet from Total Recall.
By Callie Sullivan on Tuesday, January 08, 2002 - 6:18 am:I’m with TUE on this – I felt this was a very messy episode where the writers didn’t seem to know where they were going and so wandered around in circles.
If they hadn’t brought so many people back to life so frequently in previous episodes, the double bluff of Xhalax being alive (especially after Crais’ denials in Meltdown) might have been more of a surprise – but as it was I almost sighed, “Not another one?!” I also disliked the convenience of Xhalax being able to track down our heroes so very easily and even having time to pay some alien to masquerade as Aeryn’s father.
The whole business of Crais sparing Xhalax’s life in exchange for her telling the Peacekeepers that they’re dead is pretty dumb anyway – why would a Peacekeeper keep her word made under duress to a renegade? And considering that Xhalax has shown no sign of emotion so far, the fact that she couldn’t then shoot her daughter was thoroughly unbelievable.
If that was Zhaan’s voice, I wonder if Ginny Hey got a fee for her voice being used, especially if they just took it from old footage? Does anyone know whether Paul has been written out long term or did he need some episodes off to do something else?
Is Claudia and/or Aeryn pregnant? In the scenes where Aeryn was standing on the windowsill of her room, particularly when the camera was looking up at her from below the window, she looked rather podgy in the midriff area.
By Merat on Wednesday, August 14, 2002 - 7:20 pm: Did anyone else notice the "FS" grafitti on the window ledge of Aeryn's room? The "S" looked very similar to the one in "FarScape" at the end of the credits.
By Douglas Nicol on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 4:17 pm: A few thoughts here. I was thinking 'Blade Runner' when you saw the view of the city. All we needed when Aeryn was on the window ledge was some of Vangelis's 'Blade Runner Blues'.
The Four eyed baby thing...Was anyone else thinking of that mutant in Total Recall or is it just me? The symbiote mutant that is.
And somehow, you could eventually feel a sort of sympathy for Xhalax.
By Josh M on Thursday, July 31, 2003 - 4:40 pm: Weird episode. Definitely a different followup after the previous episodes.
For some reason, I kept expecting them to jump to Moya's Cricthon when Aeryn starts screaming his name at the top of her lungs out into the city.
It's unfortunate that Stark had to go. I was wondering if the fact that he was hearing Zhaan's voice would lead to anything.
I thought that it was kind of poetic that it was Crais who eventually took out Xhalax. No mercy this time.
By Douglas Nicol (Douglas_nicol) on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 - 9:02 am:Just been rewatching this series. Did anyone else notice the Diagnosan from the end of season 2/beginning of season 3 when the clerk referred to 'he's collecting bodies'?