When fans try and describe Farscape, the feature of the show that comes up again and again is Insanity. The slow descent into madness by the main character, marooned astronaut John Crichton, was as much a central story arc as his hidden knowledge of wormhole space travel or his romance with Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun.
One of the best episodes in this regard is Season Two’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” To recap, this episode opens with a flashback of John Crichton being caught in a wormhole in the opening episode, but instead of being whisked away to the far side of the galaxy, he instead wakes up in a hospital bed on earth feeling hot and dizzy. After seeing an alternate version of Aeryn as a nurse, Crichton suspects that he is trapped in a mental vision, which had already been inflicted upon him in a previous episode by the Ancients when they imparted the wormhole knowledge. There’s some great tension as Crichton comes across strange versions of his crewmates, hoping for some tell-tale sign that they are here to help him, but John slowly begins to realise he is trapped and alone. The sole person who seems to understand is a mysterious version of the season’s antagonist, Scorpius, who John refuses to trust.
Hoping to break the simulation, John tries dying in a car crash, but awakes in the hospital, with everything slightly weirder and more uncomfortable. After a heart-rending scene where he is haunted by his dying mother, John tries again to escape by killing all his friends but finds himself powerless as his surroundings become more and more surreal. It’s at this point that Scorpius re-appears, explaining to the hot and sweaty John that he has been captured by a Scarran, who want to break John’s mind to discover the wormhole secrets within. Scorpius also reveals that he is actually a neural clone, inserted as a chip into Crichton’s skull to keep watch for the wormhole secrets. While the visons become increasingly disturbing, switching through sex, pain and guilt, Crichton is brought to the edge of madness, only to be saved by Aeryn, who breaks through and offers to save him – as long as he tells her his secret. Realising that Aeryn is just another part of the mental prison, John sinks into despair, the visions now a cacophony of light and sound, overwhelming him until he drops dead on the floor.
It’s at this point that the audience finally gets to see the whole picture, John sweltering in a prison while the Scarran administers the mental onslaught. However, when the Scarran leans over the seemingly dead Crichton, John fights back, overloading his gun to explode in the Scarran’s face. Exhausted, delirious, Crichton talks to the vision of Scorpius one last time, the villain smiling and explaining he momentarily switched John’s brain off to trick the Scarran, before wiping Jon’s memory of the chip’s existence as the episode ends.
As I’ve said, this has always been an episode that sticks out in fan’s minds. It’s not just the wackiness of some scenes (although Dargo as a skirt-chaser and Rygel in bondage cracks me up), it’s the way the episode demonstrates Crichton’s deteriorating state. The visual oddities are funny, at least at first, but each time John resets in the hospital room after trying to escape the mental prison the familiar characters become increasingly bizarre until the images are truly horrific. This is where the descent into madness has been performed beautifully – to start with something familiar, but not quite right, then watch as it’s slowly twisted into something unrecognizable.
What’s important in this episode is John’s reaction to all this: he’s confident he can escape at first, but as the madness closes in, he becomes desperate, then resigned to his helplessness. From a character point of view Crichton fails as the protagonist; he’s slowly destroyed until “Harvey,” the mental clone of Scorpius, chooses to save him rather than let the Scarran steal the precious wormhole knowledge.
And here’s where Good Writing Matters. After feeling the relief that John is finally free, Harvey smiles and wipes John’s memories, and makes it clear that he is still watching from the depths of Crichton’s subconscious. To leave the episode on this note ratchets up the tension for the rest of the season, as we’ve just been shown how vulnerable our hero is to this type of attack. It’s not just what this episode does as a stand-alone story, it’s how it sets up the stakes for the coming conflict.
That’s it for this week, if you have any classic sci-fi shows you’d like me to pick apart, please feel to let me know!
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