There's No Friday Five This Week, But There's Still Friday Farscape (SPOILERS for episode 4.10, "Coup By Clam")

OK, is it just me or are the titles just getting sillier and sillier?

At any rate this was a really fun episode. Silly, but fun. And so full of only-on-Farscape elements: The "link" between characters (an old idea that's been used before, for example, on ST:TNG) which first manifests itself by linking, not their brains, but their gastro-intestinal systems. The urine... and the urine-drinking. (I kept flashing back to Jool's "They made me drink piss!" in "...Different Destinations.") The way every time the bad guy of the week started in with the exposition they'd tell him, "Shut up, we don't care!" (Which was a highly amusing way to deal with something that honestly would have been painfully boring, otherwise). And let's not even talk about that glimpse at what Noranti gets up to in the lab while she's alone, shall we? Even if it was something of a classic, "Oh, my god, I don't believe they're showing this!" Farscape moment.

The usual random thoughts (which may be even more random than usual):

The solution he comes up with strikes me as mildly implausible, but who cares? Scorpy gets to save the day! Yay, Scorpy! And it seems that they're now letting him roam around freely on the ship... I thought somebody was supposed to be watching him? Well, maybe it's just that they were understandably distracted. Or maybe they've finally come to the conclusion that if he wanted to screw them over, he'd have already done it a zillion times over by now. It seems they're even letting him deal with visitors, which rather surprised me, though it turns out to be a good thing that they did. The vivid reminder that he is quite capable of being a casual killer when the situation calls for it was nice, too. God, but he's a cool character. Wonderfully complex.

Every time I find myself thinking "Wait, why are they referring to that woman as 'he'?" and trying to accept this weirdly feminine-looking person as male, it turns out that "he" actually is a girl, after all. You'd think after The Crying Game, I'd quit allowing myself to be confused by stuff like this and just trust my judgment.

Speaking of the "dude looks like a lady" scenario, I must say, Crichton in drag is very unconvincing. (And why does he feel the need to do that ridiculous British accent every time he's in disguise?) But it did leave me with the thought that, you know, he might look really cute with long hair.

That creepy military guy's threats/advances on Crichton were a lot more disturbing than they would have been, say, last season. After Grayza, threats of sexual assault on Crichton kind of hit something of a nerve for me. Even if, ultimately, he seems to have come out of that experience less truamatized than he has been by a lot of the other stuff he's been through.

When they started cutting fingers off people, my very first thought was, exactly, "Sikozu! Do Sikozu! She can re-attach it!" But it was damned decent of her to volunteer, anyway.

And Rygel once again teaches us a very important lesson: Do Not Frell with the Muppet. Dude has a vindictive streak almost as big as Scorpius', and I think he enjoys it more.

Damn it, I'm finding it hard to stay mad at Noranti. She's like such a little kid. A dirty old woman of a little kid, to be sure, but it's actually kind of cute...

There were no scenes from next week. Given that next week's episode will be the last one before the long hiatus (waaaah!), and given what little I've heard about it (basically just the title and a cryptic one-line description), my paranoid little mind strongly suspects that whatever's going to happen next is so big that they don't even want to give us a hint. I hope so. It's about damned time they followed up on some of these mysteries!