More Farscape Wibblings

Well, I did just watch "...Different Destinations" again. Man, I do like that episode. It gets me thinking about quite a number of things, but one of them is the fact that one of the truly refreshing things about Farscape is the way it so often uses characterization in exactly the places where where something like Star Trek would use technobabble. If Trek -- or Next Gen-era or later Trek, at least -- were going to do this story, you know for sure it would start off with a lot of tricorder readings and discussions about "temporal distortion effects" and "chroniton particles" and it would probably be some strange encounter with a Spacetime Anomaly of the Week that'd cause the whole time travel thing to happen. How does Farscape achieve the same effect? Take one attempt to console a distraught and grieving character, add in a gadget whose exact workings are never explained because frankly nobody really cares, add a dash of previously-established mystical funkiness, mix well, and serve. No long-winded explanations or chroniton particles needed.

The first season's "Through the Looking Glass" does very much the same thing, too. The freaky interdimensional schism the crew are forced to deal with isn't caused by, oh, wandering into an area of space with a high density of particle-of-the-week-ons which react on the quantum level with the harmonics of the warp drive to cause dimensional fractures in space (which you know is exactly how TNG would set it up). Instead, it's caused by Moya being (justifiably) afraid that the others are going to abandon her and starbursting before she's ready in an attempt to prove herself to them. Once again, characterization taking the place of technobabble.

Now, I don't know which of those two approaches is the more plausible, really, but I do know which one is far and away the more interesting...