And If I Read It in TV Guide It Must Be True!

OK, so I just got my copy of the latest TV Guide yesterday, and it features their annual look at what to expect from the returning shows in the fall. They only had a tiny blurb on Farscape, since they don't give cable shows the same kind of coverage as network ones, but that blurb had one very interesting nugget of information... I'm almost wishing I hadn't read it, since it seems to constitute a moderately large spoiler, but having read it, I can't resist the urge to discuss it. So. Here's some spoiler space for anyone who might want it:

SPOILER SPACE

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OK, that's probably good enough. So, the tiny little TV Guide blurb basically tells us three things. Thing number one is that apparently the Moya gang are going to be going to Earth. This isn't actually much of a shock, for several reasons. For one thing, John's already ended up there, and since we've already had the characters separated for far too long this season, it's reasonable to expect that the others will (somehow) follow. And not only has the opening narration this season strongly hinted at something like this, but it's quite clear to me that they've been working on setting it up all season. As soon as Sikozu showed up and mentioned that her body couldn't tolerate translator microbes and she'd have to learn English, my first thought was, "Aha! They will be getting to Earth at some point, and the writers wanted to make sure that somebody besides John would be able to communicate." The fact that Aeryn is apparently now also learning English just serves to reinforce that in my mind. Oh, and, of course, if you go to the Sci-Fi Channel's Farscape page, you can see a picture from the next ep. featuring what certainly looks like D'Argo staring down an Earth cop. So, like I said, no huge surprise there.

The second thing is that it seems John has gotten back to Earth before he left. That's not too terribly surprising, either, of course. The alien spent so much time talking about that possibility, and how dangerous it was, and what to do about it if it happened, that I think we could be pretty sure, in any case, that the issue was going to come up. Besides, to the extent that anything is predictable in Farscape, it seems to me that the best way to make predictions is to figure out what particular turn of events will cause the most grief and the biggest headaches for the characters, and put your money on that. (It certainly worked for predicting which John was going to die!) And if anything is capable of causing headaches and confusion in anyone, it's messing about with time travel. (It also occurs to me that time travel could potentially be used to very neatly explain some of the bigger gaps and loose ends and things-that-don't-quite-add-up this season. At the moment, I have an extremely vague half-baked theory about that, but we'll just have to wait and see whether it pans out...)

So, anyway, neither of those things are, in themselves, incredibly spoilerish, at least by my definition. Now, here's the piece of info that does surprise me: According to the blurb, the year they're arriving in is 1985. 1985! I don't know why I find that quite so startling, but I do. Interestingly, my first reaction to reading that was to think, "Oh, poor John! Even the people on Earth won't get all his pop culture references!" And then, for some reason, I started imagining the Moya gang wandering around San Francisco and jumping into whale tanks. (Yes, I know, that particular pop-culture reference is off by a year. Hey, close enough!) Maybe it's due to the way John's taken to calling D'Argo "James T. D'Argo" and doing that bad Scotty impression. Actually, I can see John "inventing" transparent aluminum, but it occurs to me that it's going to take a lot more than a strip of bathrobe to cover up D'Argo's tentacles... Except that would make him Spock. Hmm. I think I'm going to stop now, before I push this comparison too far...

Oh, and: End Spoilers.