Well, the Title Says It All (WARNING: Spoilers for Farscape Episode 4.22: "Bad Timing")

Well, this was it. Barring a last-minute phone call from the governor, we've just seen the last-ever episode of Farscape. Sigh.

In order to talk coherently about this one, I guess I have to come at it on several different levels. First of all, as an individual episode, I enjoyed it quite a bit. If it has one flaw, it's the common Farscape one of trying to cram too much into a single episode, in terms of action, and character stuff, and plot. But the fact that, when it errs, it errs on the side of doing too much rather than too little is one of the things that I've always loved about the show (especially by contrast to, say, Enterprise, where nine tenths of an episode have sometimes been known to go by without anything interesting happening). In any case, whether it's attempting too much or not, the things that it's doing are interesting. There's a number of wonderful, very memorable moments here. I especially liked the reappearance of John's tape recorder as he dicatates the opening monolog, and the site of John walking in his father's footsteps on the moon (even if my knowledge of space history makes it hard for me to suspend disbelief and pretend somebody named Jack Crichton really did walk on the moon).

As a season-ender, it was perhaps a bit less satisfying. There were a zillion loose ends I was hoping would be tied up by this point, and a vast number of little things that I was hoping, even expecting, would come together to form a coherent whole by the end of the season. (And that would have been true, by and large, even if we were still fully expecting a fifth season.) No such luck, though, which means that I'm left with rather mixed feelings about the fourth season's story arc as a whole. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'll probably post my thoughts on the subject in considerable depth; it's not really something I have the time to get into just at the moment.

As the final episode of the series... Well, it could have been worse. As expected, we did get a cliffhanger, but it was rather less painful that I had feared. The fact that it's sort of tacked on at the end of the episode, rather than arising out of some intrinsic, ongoing plot arc helped a lot with that. If we had to go out on an unresolved cliffhanger, at least this one seems to me to be less frustrating than any of the previous seasons' would have been. There also is a certain sense of closure to a lot of things in this episode. We get John's all-too-appropriate emotional farewell to his father, for instance. It should have served as John's farewell to his old existence, his first step on the next phase of his journey. Instead, it takes on a kind of poignant resonance that I'm sure the writers could never have imagined when they wrote the dialog, but there's something oddly comforting about it. At least John isn't going off on us without some kind of a goodbye. All that isn't to say that seeing the series ending here isn't immensely frustrating, though. For my part, the worst thing about it is that they'd finally brought back my two all-time favorite characters, Stark and Harvey, only to run out of time to do anything with them. I find this particularly annoying in Stark's case, since I'm still deeply curious as to what he's been up to for the last year, as well as because I would have been very, very interested to see where he would have developed as a character from here. And, needless to say, there are still lots and lots of other questions that have been raised in this and previous episodes that it now looks like we'll never be able to get the answers to. Grrrrr.

I'm not going to ramble on with the usual random thoughts about specific things in this episode... Somehow, just at the moment, it feels kind of pointless. I will say, though, that I loved the "previously on..." segment, where essentially the whole series briefly flashes before our eyes. How anybody could look at that and think that this was a series that was ready to be taken out behind the barn and shot, I can't imagine.

By the way, I did get to see the Save Farscape commercial on my mother's satellite service. Very cool, and I for one do still hold out a small amount of hope that enough fan uproar might just stand a chance of making a difference for the future of the show. The Sci-Fi Channel's little "thank you" message, on the other hand, only served to piss me off even more. Don't fucking thank us after bending us over and screwing us, guys. It just adds insult to injury. If you're really grateful, show a little class, stick by your word, and renew the god-damned show. Bloody hypocrites.