Don't Worry, I've Managed to Put My Brain Back Together

(WARNING! Major spoilers for Farscape episode 4.07, "John Quixote.")

OK, so, after having talked it out with other confused fans on the internet, having read the Journey Log, and having watched the episode a second time (with a great many pauses to hit the "rewind" button), I have to say that, bizarrely enough, that last Farscape episode actually does make almost perfect sense.

The main thing that I was getting hung up on was the characterization of Stark. It seemed to me the first time around -- understandably, I think, because it's really not clear in the episode itself at all -- that Stark had somehow deliberately set this game up to trap Crichton because he blamed Crichton for Zhaan's death. And I simply could not buy that. Sure, Stark might well have good reasons for feeling that way, but all the indications we've had are that he didn't blame John. Indeed, he always seemed to like and respect John. I couldn't imgine why he should suddenly want to do something like this.

Well, the answer for that seems to be that he didn't. Trying to piece things together from what was said in the ep and in the Journey Log, my reconstruction of what actualy happened goes something like this: Game designer Yoti (whoever the frell he is) was interested in creating a VR game based on the adventures of John Crichton. Hey, given Crichton's rep in the UTs, I have no trouble believing that at all. Yoti somehow encountered Stark, realized that Stark had actually known Crichton (indeed, known the Talyn-John version of him in a particularly intimate way possible only for Stark), and arranged to scan his memories for use in the game. Why Stark would have agreed to this, I don't know. Maybe he just needed the money. (It's kind of ironic, though -- or maybe just odd -- when you consider how strenuously he resisted Scorpius poking through his memories for years.) Somehow, possibly by sheer coincidence, Chiana got a hold of a copy of this game. When she took John into it, VR Stark realized who they were and the game reacted by going a little ga-ga.

VR-Stark himself is an interesting entity. He (VR-Zhaan refers to him as "this Stark") does appear to blame Crichton, but that's not a problem, I don't think, because he isn't the real Stark, rather some sort of distorted recreation of him. Perhaps there is a small part of the real Stark that does blame Crichton -- it'd be hard to hold it against him, really -- and that part simply got blown out of proportion in the game-version. The main upshot: the opinions of VR-Stark should not be taken as representative of the opinions of Real Stark. So I can accept that.

It had also occured to me to wonder why anybody would want to market a game full of weird, psychedelic Earth-based references that nobody could possibly understand. On second viewing, the answer seems to be that nobody did. The game itself was probably meant to be a simple adventure-type game, and, indeed, it goes seem to start out that way in the Gammak Base (which is, after all, a perfectly reasonable place to start an adventure game based on the exploits of John Crichton, especially if you're relying on Stark's memories to create it). When John and Chi end up in Super Mario World or whatever the hell it was, VR-Stark tells them that they're in a portion of the game that probably shouldn't even exist. You know what I think it is? I think it's a bunch of extraneous stuff that just wasn't deleted properly. It seems, after all, to consist of a bunch of random images from Talyn-John's mind, held together by odd bits of Stark's psyche. (Yow! How scary is that?) In other words, it's garbage, random stuff Yoti presumably picked up from Stark. Given the bizarre jumble that exists inside Stark's mind, I'm not actually at all surprised if he got some unexpected side effects from poking around in the man's brain.

It also seemed to me initially that there was a huge contradition in this episode, that the scenes that happened on Moya could not possibly have come from either Stark or Talyn-John, but only from John himself, despite the fact that it's made quite clear that the game cannot read his mind. After the second viewing, I have to take that back. When John raises just this point, VR-Stark says "It was crap that you gave me along the way. You talked so much." And you know what? He did. It was John who said -- out loud, inside the game, and repeatedly -- that Scorpius was on Moya. It was John who asked whether Scorpius had escaped -- a clear indication that they'd been holding him prisoner on Moya and that John was worried about him getting loose on the ship. From that point, the nightmare scenario involving Scorpy taking over everybody on the ship was an obvious one, easy to think up. The fact that it hit way too close to John's current fears was simply coincidental (though not a very unlikely coincidence at all). There really was nothing in the VR-Moya scenes that VR-Stark could not have gotten or extrapolated from what John had said. So it wasn't a contradiction at all, just a very, very clever piece of misdirection.

There's just one plot point that I'm still having a problem with, but it's a big one. OK, we know that Stark retains something from each of the souls he helps to "cross over." And he specifically says that he got this stuff from the dead Talyn-John. But we've seen absolutely no indication that Stark actually retains memories from dead people, let alone memories at that level of detail. Whether from the psychic connection or from T-John talking on his deathbed, it seems ridiculously unlikely to me that Stark would now have an in-depth knowledge of Earth fairy tales, Monty Python, and Max Headroom, of all things. I've invented and discarded a number of increasingly whacked-out theories to try and account for this, but it's not exactly easy. At the moment, the best I can come up with is the thought that perhaps the real Stark doesn't have conscious access to this stuff, but that perhaps some subconscious portion of him does, due either to T-John having left it in his mind while passing through (er, over), or via some lingering mystical connection to the soul of T-John, wherever it now is. And the computer game was able to pick some of it up from him. Somehow.

I'm hoping the real Stark will show up again at some point and maybe explain some of this. In the meantime... Part of me is kinda frustrated at how much work I'm having to put into this show just to manage a basic understanding of what's going on. But part of me really, really likes the challenge of having to figure stuff like this out. And another part of me just thinks I'm stupid for not understanding it the first time, but, hey, I try not to listen to that part...