FARSCAPE: SEASON THREE (2001-02)

 

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

As I noted in my review of Season 2, the character of Pau Zotoh Zhaan is infected with a fatal illness and winds up her membership in Moya's crew by passing away in the early eps of Season 3. Zhaan's passing is well handled, being that she's the first regular character to die. If the fugitives weren't technically guilty of the various crimes of which they're accused, the loss of Zhaan instills all of them with an even greater sense of mortality and morbidity. Not that this keeps any of them from continuing to yell at one another at the drop of a spaceman's helmet.

The producers were clearly in no hurry to find a substitute den-mother, and if anything, the crew started including even more outrageously dysfunctional types. One of these was Stark, introduced in the first season as a jittery maniac who wore half a mask over that part of his face that gave off weird radiation. 

Second was new character Jool (Tammy MacIntosh). She's inducted into the crew when Moya collides with an outer space research vessel, on which (for some reason I forget) Jool is being stored in cryogenic hibernation. Unlike most of the other characters, Jool is an educated academic who sometimes functions as ship's doctor, but she's also prissy in the extreme, thus bringing her into frequent conflict with the hard-edged Chiana. 

With Season 3, the recurring character of Commander Crais gets regular name-alongside-the-title billing with the established ensemble. He's not technically one of the Moya crew, but because Crais is bonded to Moya's unruly offspring Talyn, the ex-Peacekeeper finds himself frequently consulting with Crichton et al as to their mutual defenses against their common enemies. As I noted before, the writers really never get a handle on Crais's raison d'etre. There's a weak attempt to make him seem discontented with his former Peacekeeper lot, but this just seems like copying the template of Aeryn Sun. Actor Lani Tupu does what he can with the character but he may well have breathed a sigh of relief when both he and Talyn are terminated at the end of Season 3. (For that matter, the subplot with Talyn never becomes anything more than an extra source of danger to the travelers.)

Speaking of the common enemies, Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) gets his own origin-story, relating how he was genetically engineered as a combination of genes taken from the race of Peacekeepers (the human-like Sebaceans) and the reptilians known as Scarrans. Despite all the revelations of the hells to which Scorpius was subjected from birth, he never exceeds the status of a one-note villain. The writers found a method to keep Pygram busy by having two versions of Scorpius: the physical entity whose ships keep chasing Moya hither and yon, and a psychic duplicate that resides in Crichton's mind. This makes for a lot of tedious scenes in which Crichton doggedly withstands the villain's Mephistophelian enticements, and by the end of the season the writers find a way to terminate all of these skull-sessions, though Scorpius ends up being sort of a "guest prisoner" in Season Four.

Though the overall feel of Season 3 is uneven, most of the regulars get one or two episodes devoted to their character arcs. In line with the climactic raid on the Shadow Depository in Season Two, Ka D'argo is reunited with his son Ka Jothee. However, the young Luxan expresses animus for the father charged with killing Jothee's mother, and he quickly parts from the Moya crew after transgressing against D'argo by sleeping with his current bed-partner Chiana. Stark gets to pilot Moya when she's pulled into the orbit of a star, and Stark is the only one able to hear the voice of a victimized alien woman pleading for his help. Aeryn is forced to deal with a Peacekeeper pursuit headed by her own estranged mother, and, most memorably, Crichton falls into a dream-fugue wherein he imagines himself, Scorpius and D'Argo as animated characters out of a Chuck Jones cartoon. Crichton and Aeryn finally get together, but predictably for a series high in histrionics, their pleasure is occasioned by new iterations of pain.

Oddly, the last few episodes of Season 3 introduce a loose substitute for Zhaan's den-mother duties: Noranti, an ancient three-eyed female who ends up being something of a counselor-type, albeit with considerable eccentricities. Grayza, a new Peacekeeper commander, takes over Scorpius's authority to pursue the Moya refugees. Rebecca Riggs plays the character with a steely determination that makes her seem more formidable than the scheming Scorpius, and I for one would not have minded if she had taken over from Crais back in Season One.