Catching Up: Farscape (Season 3 Beginning)
Virginia Hey minus the blue makeup
Last week I cheated a little by straddling two seasons of Farscape for the sake of a cohesive storyline. I'm going to cheat a little bit this week, too, by glossing over the episode in between the plot-driving premiere and the proper two-part episode that sees the departure of Virginia Hey from the cast. If I thought the love triangle between D'Argo, Chiana and Jothee was worth more time, I'd give it more consideration, but it's probably my least favorite plot thread from the entire show.
The two-part swan song of Pa'u Zota Zhaan, "Self Inflicted Wounds", is a pretty dark work of television. It also happens to introduce us to Jool, the biggest character miscalculation in the entire series. Aside from the clumsiness of dropping her into the very same episode that ousted the character she was ostensibly designed to replace, Jool just isn't that interesting compared to the rest of Moya's crew. Unlike everybody else, Jool isn't an outcast or a criminal. She has no dark past or horrible secret. She's just a sick patient put into cryo-stasis for so long that she doesn't have anybody left in her life. In other words, she has no real chance at depth. This in addition to the fact that she is shrill and possesses a patently absurd super power makes her the worst regular character to ever appear on Farscape.
As for Zhaan, she gets to put her inevitable death to good use. After a trans-dimensional ship collides with Moya, fusing the two vessels together, it's a race against time to find a solution before the Leviathan and everybody on it dies. There's also some kind of weird space-serpent slithering around the ship putting the bite to a few expendable characters and a little bit of dramatic fallout from the affair Chiana had with D'Argo's son, Jothee. Thankfully, none of those problems really factor into the rest of the season.
After a lot of hemming, hawing, dying and Pilot vomit, the crew discovers that the only way to free Moya of the interdimensional trap involves somebody staying behind to die in the resulting explosion. Zhaan takes the fall for everybody, but it's not just out of a pragmatic use of life as a resource. This is something Zhaan would have done anyway, so it gives her last action an extra slice of Aristeia.
With Zhaan out of the picture for good (not counting a cameo in a Season 4 episode), the crew spends the rest of the series in an increasingly fragmented, lost state of mind. They drift deeper into the dark parts of the galaxy and into the darkest parts of themselves. Season 3 is wild, outlandish, creative and deeply psychological. While Farscape never finds someone to fill the void left by Virginia Hey, the major destabilization of Zhaan's departure provides a system in which a lot for shifting around can happen without ruining the show. Season 3 is my favorite of the show's four seasons for this very reason.
