Farscape — 3x02 — Suns and Lovers
Synopsis
Eager to spend the currency acquired from the heist of the Shadow Depository, the crew of Moya head to a Commerce Station. The situation becomes disastrous when the station is damaged by a violent storm, Moya becoming ensnared in the docking cables. As it becomes clear that the storms are not natural phenomena, and the crew looks to escape, D'Argo learns that Chiana has betrayed him with his son.
Filler rating: not filler
Essential character development for D'Argo, Chiana, and Jothee. This is also the episode in which D'Argo acquires the ship protected by the force field, which will become more significant later.
Remarkable scenes
- Rygel spying on Chiana having sex with Jothee.
- John: "Whoa, where do they get these stories? Let's set the facts straight. First off there was no raping, very little pillaging and Frau Blucher popped all the eyeballs."
- D'Argo finding out about Chiana and Jothee.
- John to Chiana and Jothee: "You betrayed the one person on this ship who would have done anything for you. Both of you. He would have died for you."
- John to Borlik: "Hey, fridge magnet!"
- D'Argo trying to get himself killed outside Moya.
- Pilot to John: "I would shut up and stop wasting time, commander!"
- Aeryn: "Frell me dead!"
- D'Argo waking up and assisting John.
- Pilot cackling as he blows Borlik into space.
Review
An episode with a lame to mildly entertaining A plot concerning our alien of the week with a somewhat overwrought but mostly outstanding B plot concerning D'Argo's love triangle. There's little to say about our alien of the week other than she was shallow and annoying. Her whole purpose was to create manufactured danger to give us something to watch other than D'Argo's melodrama. We didn't necessarily need that, though Pilot's cackling scene almost makes it worth it.
D'Argo's melodramatic love triangle is really what makes this episode worth most of its points. I'm glad they didn't drag this out too long and aside from a few scenes where D'Argo's behavior was unnecessarily erratic such as the suicidal tendencies and threatening his son with violence, D'Argo's pain was mostly well played. As such, as the episode slowly shifted focus from the alien of the week to D'Argo's story it got far more enjoyable as it went along.
Unfortunately though with only a single plot thread that was terribly interesting, there's little else in this episode to praise. Maybe it's naive, but with Scorpius and Crais both now being credited as main characters, I'm at a loss to understand why Scorpius and Crais aren't making more regular appearances. Even a non sequitur C plot cutting to Scorpius' command carrier would have brightened up this episode better. Were it not for D'Argo's story this certainly would have been a below average episode.