"Did That Work For You? I Thought It Worked."

Hey, I finally got the last batch of Farscape Season Two discs in the mail! So I just sat down and watched "A Clockwork Nebari" again. Hadn't seen that one since my first watch-through of the series, having been too stupid at the time to actually tape it. I'd mostly remembered this one as being a so-so filler ep before the big plunge into the season-ending action stuff, but it really holds up remarkably well on second viewing. Lots of fun stuff in there: John's blissed-out stoner-dude impression is pretty darned amusing. There's some great scenes for the oft-neglected Pilot (including what I believe is the one and only time I've ever heard him swear, not to mention the revelation that he's clearly missed his true calling as a designer of 3-D motion rides). Some good interaction between John and Rygel, too, including what is quite possibly my all-time favorite exchange between them:

JOHN: "I'm sick of you selling us out every chance you get!"
RYGEL: "I don't do it every chance!"

Heh. You don't get dialog like that on Star Trek.

There's also some rather significant revelations in here about the characters and the universe they inhabit, specifically the details (or at least, some of the details) about Chiana's backstory, and the alarming discovery of what the Nebari are up to. It seems to me that nearly every element in this episode is ripe for revisiting. No, it's not just ripe for it, it's practically demanding of it. Really, we need to find out what's happened to Chiana's brother. We need to see more of the Nebari and to get a followup on this little time bomb of a plot thread that's been ticking away for the last two years.

It would have been a great storyline to bring up in Season Five, and I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to learn that it was on the writers' agenda. Sob. But as Crichton puts it here, "Since when do people like us get what we want?" (And John, sci-fi geek that he is, definitely counts as "people like us" in this context!)

I will say this, though. I could really have done without the eyeball-extrusion. I gather that when this episode aired in England, the BBC cut all the nasty eyeball-pulling stuff out. They're notorius for doing things like that (from what I hear, the hatchet job they did on "Prayer" is positively criminal), and normally I deeply and heartily disapprove. But in this case, man, I think I almost envy the BBC viewers. I literally cannot watch the eyeball scenes. I sort of tried this time, and the only result was that my own eyes started watering fiercely in sympathy. Urgh. Eyeballs! Why does it have to be eyeballs?