FARSCAPE: SEASON TWO (2001-01)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Prior to re-visiting all four seasons of this show, I'm tending toward the view that Season Two was FARSCAPE's best season. Of course, it helps that this was the last season for "den mother" Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hey), whose character would expire in the first few episodes of Season Three. While she was around, she provided a calming influence on the rest of Moya's occupants, who from first to last tended to run around the ship yelling at each other.

To be sure, Zhaan's influence wasn't always needed, for the writers did make the protagonists less extreme once they became more accustomed to one another. Certainly there were no more scenes like the one from "DNA Mad Scientist," wherein the crew-members cut off one of Pilot's arms to serve their own ends. Chiana (Gigi Edgley) provides a much needed source of humor, distinct from the more ironic pronouncements by Earth-refugee John Crichton (Ben Browder). More progress is made with the off-on romance between Crichton and Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black), particularly when Crichton is forced to enter into a royal marriage in the three-parter "Look at the Princess." Following the resolution of that story, the romantic angle gets good exposure in "The Locket," an alternate timeline-tale in which Crichton and Aeryn end up spending their lives together in bucolic contentment. Both Aeryn and Pilot are disclosed to have shared a previous history on Moya in "The Way We Weren't," and though Ka D'argo doesn't find his missing son in this season, the final few episodes set up those events to be developed in Season 3. Even Rygel gets some shining moments, functioning as a lawyer defending Zhaan on an extremely legalistic planet.

On the down side, Season 2 doesn't quite find anything vital for the crew's former nemesis Crais (Lani Tupu) to do. I'm sure the actor preferred getting away from the original "Inspector Jauvert" conception of his character, but the writers never manage to make plausible Crais's shift to becoming the pilot-custodian of Talyn, the offspring of organic ship Moya. Scorpius, a new villain introduced toward the end of Season One, becomes the new "big bad," repeatedly pursuing the crew hither and yon, due to the fact that Crichton's brain has received an unwanted download of "wormhole technology" by some super-advanced aliens. Though there's no question that Scorpius, as played by Wayne Pygram, is creepy, his monomaniacal obsession is no better than that of Crais, and over time the character becomes tiresome. Stark, another malcontent who joins the crew in Season 3, appears a few times in Season Two, but he ends up providing no more than just another weird character who yells a lot. He does function well in the season's big "heist" narrative, which provides more sheer adventure than the average episode.

Still, both "The Locket" and "The Way We Weren't" provide strong drama with a strong sense of the anarchic. Possibly their dramatic excellence will be outdone by later episodes, but as yet, these are top of the FARSCAPE line.