One of the things I always liked about Farscape was how it managed to make soap opera plots more palatable by wrapping them in sci-fi trappings. Every romance, every pregnancy, every tortured backstory was excellently executed and spiced with something unexpected.

They've Got A Secret

Here's to an efficient use of time. This is a very arc-heavy episode, though you'd never know it from how everything is paced. A fairly simple procedure, the removal of a Peacekeeper communication device, dominoes into a series of events that almost kills the entire crew on Moya. D'Argo even gets ejected from the ship entirely after falling down a hidden chute in Moya's walls. Luckily, Luxons can survive in the vacuum of space for a short time, though not without some ill effects. When the crew wakes him up (and thaws him out) he's in an altered state of mind, seeing people from his past in his shipmates. This is the first we hear of D'Argo's tragic history with his Sebacean wife Lo'laan and their son Jothee. Of all the backstories on Farscape, D'Argo's has the biggest impact on the larger show.

After rescuing D'Argo, the crew finds that Moya's life support systems are shutting down. They begin under the assumption that Moya has been infected with some sort of Peacekeeper poison, but they discover that Moya is attacking the crew on purpose. The big reveal is that Moya is pregnant with a new Leviathan and she began to consider the crew a threat to her offspring. Cheesy as it sounds, the crew save the day by talking to Moya and reassuring her, not by using some convenient scientific whatsit. As if often the case on Farscape, the solution is a bit more esoteric than one might expect.

Till The Blood Runs Clear

All the psychological business and drama is all well and good, but sometimes Farscape just needs an action episode. Crichton's module gets damaged during some wormhole-related experiments around a star that keeps flaring, so he has to fly down to a nearby planet for repairs. There we meet Furlow, a humanoid mechanic with her own wormhole obsession. She'll play a much bigger part in a couple seasons, but for now she's just another sketchy obstacle to our protagonists' freedom. Add to that a Peacekeeper bounty on Moya's crew and you have a recipe for a fun, though dark, episode. Some blood-tracking alien bounty hunters capture D'Argo, forcing Crichton (who is pretending to be a bounty hunter himself) to hurt his friend in order to save all of their lives.

The development of D'Argo and Crichton's friendship is one of the most interesting arcs in Farscape. It takes them a long time to see the value of the other's approach to problems. Before long they become the go-to team for action and repartee in the show.

Rhapsody in Blue

Oh, Delvians. They're basically the Vulcans of the Farscape universe. Wise, spiritual and gifted with vague mental/emotional powers. The big difference is that Delvians have a tendency to abuse those powers more often than not, including those in the remote temple that is the center of this episode. Zhaan is called upon to use her abilities as a priestess in the Delvian religion to cure her fellow faithful of the insanity to which they are susceptible. In the process, Moya's crew gets some bad mind-juju put on them about their past lovers.

This is another backstory-filling episode. We learn about Zhaan's troubled history when she killed her lover because of his dangerous political corruption. With corruption of their own to deal with, the Delvians of the temple start inflicting their insanity on the others. After some not-so-G-rated mental fusion, Crichton and Zhaan save the day, or at least as much as any day on this show can be saved. As always, our heroes come into an impossible situation and leave having made it salvageable, but still in ruins.