Farscape (TV Series) Till the Blood Runs Clear (1999) User Reviews

Looking for a way home

[Tweekums · 8/10 · 9 May 2012]

While taking his module on a test flight near solar flares Crichton opens a wormhole but it turns out to be unstable and the module is damaged. He, along with Aeryn can't get the module back to Moya so land on the planet they were orbiting with the intention of getting it repaired. Here they see a beacon announcing the reward for D'Argo, Rygel and Zhaan. Two bounty hunters turn up and Crichton bluffs them into believing he and Aeryn are also after the bounty... this works well enough until D'Argo comes down to the planet and gets captured; to prove he can be trusted Crichton must join in the torture! The bounty hunters aren't the only problem of course; the price for getting his module repaired will be higher than he expected.

Once again Farscape doesn't disappoint and although at first glance this would appear to be another stand alone episode it does fit in with the plot arc of having Crichton trying to figure out how to find a stable wormhole that might get him back to Earth. The setting has a good 'Mad Max' feel to it; a desert planet with a fairly motley collection of characters. Guest star Magda Szubanski did a good job as the engineer Furlow; I have a feeling that we haven't seen the last of her after her deal with Crichton. People who want to see some action shouldn't be disappointed either as Aeryn gets into a fight and the episode climaxes with an impressive shoot out against the bounty hunters.

Sidetracked

[craybatesedu · 5/10 · 20 April 2019]

Annoying guest characters are saddled with much of the meandering storyline of this episode, where the gang finds themselves in need of repairs on a planet of dusty technical types without much going on. The main thrust of this episode seems to remind us that the Farscape crew is still being pursued by the Peacekeepers, now in the form of breathtakingly incompetent bounty hunters.

The other seemingly lost thread that this episode picks up is that Crichton might actually want to return home at some point. He leads off the episode on the cusp of recreating the accident that brought him into deep space in the first place. Consistent with his almost complete lack of effort to get home so far, he ultimately trades the data away for parts and labor on a ship he has barely used since the series began.

D'Argo's Worf Syndrome just gets worse. He is sold to us as the ship's resident warrior, which means that it is his fate to be constantly (and easily) overpowered just to prove how dangerous the situation is. This is a particularly gratuitous case, with D'Argo captured and tortured by two rat-like bounty hunters who are so transparently stupid it is a wonder how they got this close to the gang in the first place.

Other minor plot threads pick up and fall off as soon as they are found. Sun is offered the chance to surrender, momentarily considers it, and declines, only to herself be savagely beaten by a bounty hunter in a slow-paced fistfight that ends when a badly-acted obese mechanic somehow saves this trained soldier from danger.

All in all this episode relies on an implausible vision of the crew as utterly incapable of defending themselves. Crichton wants to get home - or doesn't. Zhaan spends most of the episode sunbathing, contributing none of what should be her considerable warrior prowess to defending her friends or her ship. Rigel's thirty seconds of screen time are wasted in a very low-tension conversation about Zhaan's body that, like the rest of the episode, accomlishes nothing and does nothing to drive the series forward.