Peacekeepers Keeping Peace

After Farscape used its Peacekeepers to criticise imperialism in its second season, an episode in its third season comes off as almost pro-colonialist. Paying homage to classic Westerns and perhaps Seven Samurai, we find a story that shows sometimes the cavalry is indeed a very welcome sight.



Season Three, Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations

I'm not sure why there's an ellipses in the title. Maybe it's the end of a quote I don't recognise.

The episode opens with much of the crew visiting a temple set up basically like a tourist attraction, complete with goggles that actually allow the visitor to glimpse the past.



Here we find Aeryn (Claudia Black) is not completely divested of her Peacekeeper sympathies after all. She becomes irritated when the others question the story presented by the temple of a Peacekeeper soldier (Dan Spielman) who died protecting nuns from alien barbarians. It's been painful enough for Aeryn to completely change and adapt her worldview, naturally she's not inclined to think absolutely everything she'd been taught is a lie.



Of course, this isn't the story of a nice afternoon at a tourist venue. When Stark (Paul Goddard) puts on the goggles it causes a rift in time, sending him and the rest of the crew back to the point in time memorialised by the monument. Crichton (Ben Browder), having seen plenty of time travel movies, immediately warns everyone against disrupting the timeline, even if it means letting some people die.



Jool (Tammy MacIntosh) kind of becomes the show's resident Willie Scott (of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) in this episode. First she's disgusted to find she's been drinking animal urine--the nuns used this to treat her injury--and then she becomes comically drunk on it. When Stark manages to get the time rift back open for a moment, D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) accidentally shoves her into a wall before shoving her in the right direction at which point she lands on her ass in the mud, back in the present, discovering the disrupted timeline in the process.



Of course, her outfit makes it all seem sexual, which retroactively makes me want to re-evaluate Kate Capshaw's performance.

Unsurprisingly, Aeryn finds the legendary Peacekeeper soldier isn't quite as awesome as he was supposed to be but it's only because he's an inexperienced kid. There's no revelation that the Peacekeepers were actually the villains and while among the leonine attackers there are some wise generals disinclined to slaughter nuns there are many more who are just as bloodthirsty as the stories claimed. This leads to an effectively tragic conclusion to the episode as Crichton places too much faith in his knowledge of how the timeline works to disastrous results. It's a good ending for an episode that nicely evokes memories of Fort Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. And Harvey (Wayne Pygram) continues to establish his personality in Crichton's head.



. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on

Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot

Episode 2: I, E.T.

Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis

Episode 4: Throne for a Loss

Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future

Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again

Episode 7: PK Tech Girl

Episode 8: That Old Black Magic

Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist

Episode 10: They've Got a Secret

Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear

Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue

Episode 13: The Flax

Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton

Episode 15: Durka Returns

Episode 16: A Human Reaction

Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass

Episode 18: A Bug's Life

Episode 19: Nerve

Episode 20: The Hidden Memory

Episode 21: Bone to be Wild

Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby

Episode 2: Vitas Mortis

Episode 3: Taking the Stone

Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter

Episode 5: Picture If You Will

Episode 6: The Way We Weren't

Episode 7: Home on the Remains

Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream

Episode 9: Out of Their Minds

Episode 10: My Three Crichtons

Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss

Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think

Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton

Episode 14: Beware of Dog

Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again

Episode 16: The Locket

Episode 17: The Ugly Truth

Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari

Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan

Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .

Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B

Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death

Episode 2: Suns and Lovers

Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a

Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel

Back to the Old House

Halloween month has officially begun so it's time I started watching more horror movies. I got started this month where Mario Bava finished, his final film, 1977's Shock. It's gory and stylish, as you might expect from Bava, but with a kind of nastiness unlike Bava's earlier work, a nihilistic plot about murder and revenge with heavy tones of incest. The movie's excesses become so absurd as the film progesses, though, I found myself enjoying it more. It's rigorously illogical but star Daria Nicolodi gives such a committed performance that the film comes off like a decadent nightmare.

The movie begins with Dora (Nicolodi) moving into a house where she'd previously lived with her now deceased husband. She has a seven year-old son from that marriage, Marco (David Colin Jr.), and a new husband, an airline pilot called Bruno (John Steiner). Bruno's at work for much of the movie, mostly he shows up to tell Dora to pull herself together after she's seen a floating x-acto knife or a zombie hand has sprung from the ground to grab her ankle.



Some early scenes feature Marco looking on wrathfully while Dora and Bruno have sex and we learn that his father, Dora's first husband, had committed suicide. One might easily imagine, maybe accurately, the screenplay was written by a vindictive misogynist. There are some similarities to American horror fiction of the 1970s, particularly works by Stephen King, that focused on horror based on domestic issues but Bava's instincts lead him to much more operatic places. So the process of punishing Dora with supernatural manifestations becomes much more about jump scares and weird sounds--pretty good jump scares and weird sounds, mind you.



The camera's focus on Nicolodi, though, and her persistent portrayal of raw terror anchor the film more in her perspective and it feels less like an exercise of bashing a woman as conveying the experience of being caught in a world of inescapable pain and shifting metrics of guilt. Dora's responsibility in her first husband's death is never entirely clear to us or to herself.



There are lot of impressive dream ideas and creative shots. I love a vision Dora has of an off-key piano being played that precedes her attempting to play piano but being cut by a razor between two keys. There's also a really neat shot that appears to have been accomplished by strapping Nicolodi to a bed and then slowly rotating the bed but keeping the camera fixed on her face. This seems to have been done entirely for the purpose of making her hair seem to wave about in an unnatural manner.



Shock is available on Amazon Prime in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1283

To choose a car above a boat's for land.
To fly a plane beyond a desk is real.
To sail a ship beside a fish is bland.
To catch a trout inside the net's a meal.
An extra sock encased the travelled foot.
A welcome chill accords a pleasant class.
Remember where the granite marker's put.
Between the licking rocks some dragons pass.
Between the roads a lake condemns a dam.
The mountainsides endorse the running car.
In awe the walking boat ingests a dram.
A week of bottles broke the lucky bar.
A steady house'd shake the tenant's feet.
Between the choppy waves the horses meet.