the S2 finale opens with an exchange between john and aeryn that is remarkably close to their exchange at the end of the S3 finale.

john: [calmer but still rattled] aeryn - what do you see - in the mirror? what do you see? aeryn: [despairing] there is no mirror. there is no scorpius. look. you must confront your fears with strength.

the structure of this exchange is identical to their exchange at the end of ‘dog with two bones’, with the (sort of) q&a flipped:

aeryn:  [angrily] just make a frelling wormhole and go home. john: there is - no - home! there is no wormhole!  there's only yo - [he cuts himself off] aeryn... anywhere in the universe. you pick the planet.

with these (same) writers, in these two particular seasons, I find it hard to believe the echoes are anything but deliberate.

and then the show introduces the most terrifying plot development of the whole show: john morphing into scorpius. this show features many scary things, including scorpius himself, but I find this transformation to be the absolute most terrifying and I’m going to spill some words on why. it was terrifying the first time I saw it and it’s still pretty scary when you’re expecting it!

first, farscape is telling a story here about trying to save people who don’t want to be saved.

at this point, john has given himself up to scorpius once, and has asked d’argo to kill him. he wants out, he is Done(TM), he has given up hope. for a character whose defining self-identification in this season was “I have hope or I am nothing”, we have come to the point of “I am nothing”. we have come to that point so clearly that john’s whole identity is lost and subsumed into scorpius - he has become literally nothing. that’s deeply sad, but the terrifying part comes after - after john is lost - and the damage begins to be wreaked on all his friends. aeryn pushes everyone to save john in 2x21, understandably, but she has to physically knock him out and have d’argo carry him away in order to save him. john ends the episode literally begging for death. and the consequence of saving him in 2x21 is that aeryn dies in 2x22, and then zhaan dies instead in 3x01, and the space family is never the same again. there is always a price, of course, but saving john didn’t save him. he has to be on board with saving himself, and it’s only aeryn’s death that rattles the neural clone so far to the back of his brain that john willingly hands himself over to be worked on. it’s despair and hopelessness of a different kind, but he chooses to let others help him this time, and that’s where S2 ends.

that raises other questions for me about the show’s choice to make john’s erratic behavior after the aurora chair a function of both his trauma and the neural chip. ben browder was making the acting choice of john being crazy and acting out because of the aurora chair trauma, and it’s natural (and very effective) for the scifi choice of it being that + a scifi element. it remakes the whole season and show, tbh, but the writers didn’t plan this from the start. what if the writers had instead just had john become just as dangerously unwell just from trauma, or even from trauma and some permanent physical impact on his brain from the aurora chair? the neural chip in some ways gives us a saving grace - get the chip out, and you get john back. you get him partly back, at least - he is changed forever, and aeryn dies, and then zhaan dies instead, but we get to keep John Crichton, The Character. what if the price was john instead? that the crew of moya, aeryn included, had to make the choice to destroy john because he was a threat to them? that would have been...oof. it would have been really hard to watch, and it would be a completely different show in the end because they couldn’t have saved the protagonist. they could have gone to space therapy, of course, but as criminals on the run it’s hard to get on a therapist’s schedule (and sometimes john is actually the closest thing to a therapist that you get in the uncharted territories).

which brings me to my second point, which is that scorpy!john is so terrifying because john is someone we care about.

we know john, we care about john, and we’ve seen him fight and fight and then he loses. the neural chip turns him into a warped literally-unrecognizable version of himself, and that’s who aeryn is vulnerable around. no wonder she frelling throws her walls back up in S3 - the last time she let them down she DIED because someone she loved KILLED her (while brain possessed, but details, details). it’s extra scary because we can see who he is now as the audience, but nobody else can. it’s like when your friend starts dating the guy with all the red flags but you’re the only one who can see them D: this show was made for women and it’s TOO REAL sometimes

all of this comes back to john being someone we invested in, who we knew as this kind, patient, caring scientist who didn’t carry a gun and who ends up completely unrecognizable by the end of S2. he doesn’t go through nearly a dramatic a transformation over the course of other seasons, and that’s counting being a) doubled, and b) having his two souls re-merged into a single body (aeryn gets the big emotional steps in S3). if gilina thought john had changed dramatically between 1x07 and 1x19, she wouldn’t recognize him at all at this point. but that’s what trauma can do to a person, neural chip or no neural chip, and the damage extends to the people who care about them most first. all of this is complicated by the fact that john is fighting for control of his body with scorpius, both in the neural cluster and right before he takes off in his shuttle (he specifically warns aeryn not to come after him because he’s not in control - it’s the last thing he tells her and scorpius finishes the sentence), but that’s also not too distant from people struggling with the effects of their trauma and developing or relearning emotional regulation and responsibility. john owns his actions at the end of the finale though, even when the doctor tries to absolve him. he owns the responsibility, and is trying to take steps to make sure nobody else is hurt, even if he is, in a way that will reliably have positive results this time.

other things from this episode

+ I genuinely believe that at the start of the neural cluster scene john is in control, and that he at least thinks he’s spying on crais’ radio traffic instead of setting up a beacon for scorpius. I think he’s right and that staying busy keeps scorpius away, because as soon as he stops working (and stop singing), scorpius gets control again.

+ I AM SCREAM-SOBBBING I CANNOT BELIEVE THE FIRST ‘I LOVE YOU’ EXCHANGE WE GET FROM BOTH JOHN AND AERYN IS RUINED BY SCORPIUS AND ENDS WITH SCORPY!JOHN KNOCKING AERYN OUT!!! WHYYY! WE DON’T DESERVE THIS! I also hate how they use this kiss in the S3 opening trailer because it’s tainted and heartbreaking and MEAN

+ sidenote but glad to know john knows about ky. for reasons. fanfic reasons, basically (my priority is 100000% that aeryn always has a nice time).

+ I love every actual!john and aeryn scene in this episode because I Love Suffering(TM) but I really like when they’re just standing in the storage room checking in with each other. this is all hard on aeryn - she’s dealing with emotions, betrayal, and john (more than usual) has little concept of what’s going on, in part because he has no memory of their “I love you” exchange. why. why do the writers hate us.

+ zhaan shared unity with that thing! :( she shared her spirit with scorpius, or at least a version of him. harvey is, at the end of the day, a blend of both john and scorpius because he spent so much time as part of john’s brain.

and this is so much! john goes to the word a lot of us might have expected, especially when thinking about societal expectations for what anything other than a full romantic relationship is like. “empty” he says, but instead aeryn says painful. this is how she describes her relationships plural, not just her relationship with velorek that ended with her betraying him to crais. velorek identifies aeryn as special, and different from other peacekeepers, and knowing the backstory with her mother and father, knowing there was another way, aeryn perhaps struggled too hard to fit into the peacekeeper mold. aeryn herself wanted something more.

I know some folks are irked that velorek tells aeryn “you can be so much more”, which turns john’s “you can be more” in the premiere into an echo of something else, but I like how it develops an internal theme for aeryn. it’s not just that john saw something in her - aeryn can be more, and others have noticed it before. but where aeryn rejected that choice the first time around, the pain that followed - the tears she doesn’t shed as her betrayal is complete - perhaps prompt her to make a different choice the second time around. she chooses to leave, she chooses to be more, and she does thrive. velorek was right, but not because he happened to say it first. she’s the radiant aeryn sun; it shines out. even crais seems to take unwilling notice of her at the end of the flashback; he too seems to glimpse that she is more than she is. aeryn is more than she knows, and that is why she can be more.

velorek himself seems to walk this thin line between being “more” and being “just” a peacekeeper. he (and his scrappy band of resistance techs) thwart crais’ project, but he is unwilling to leave the peacekeepers. he comforts pilot, but tasers him almost immediately after when he sees crais approaching. he soothes pilot through the bonding process, but only tells him after it’s complete that there will be permanent pain. he seems kind in some ways, but tortures moya into accepting her new pilot, which is grotesque. the first time we see velorek and aeryn together it’s framed really sketchily before transitioning to “we were lovers”, but I almost think that visualization sums up velorek. he can be caring, but he is also willing to deceive and use violence to achieve peacekeeper ends. even his vision of him and aeryn staying together involves staying with the peacekeepers - and it is not enough. it is not enough to rattle aeryn out of her status quo, and nothing is enough until the events of the premiere. you cannot live by halves.

because, when we come down to it, john and gilina had one date under life-or-death circumstances! and at the end of that episode, gilina chooses to stay on the zelbinion and wait for crais to come back, trusting in her ability to lie about what happened. she doesn’t consider joining moya, and she doesn’t seem to have a problem with peacekeepers in general.

‘pk tech girl’ is good on many levels, but it also is good on the gilina-aeryn foil level. aeryn has her hand forced in the premiere, but she does choose to leave the peacekeepers and run with moya. she hears john’s “you can be more” and knows it’s true. in ‘pk tech girl’, john makes no such overture to gilina, and she stays, and aeryn can understand that choice too. she answer’s gilina’s plan to lie to crais with “I wish I had been so smart.” aeryn and gilina know that they are not too distant from each other, despite that one is a soldier and the other is a tech. they are shaped not just by their circumstance, but by their choices.

and that’s where we leave gilina, willing to let john & co. fly away. it was a nice date and a weird day and that seems like it.

but then we meet her in ‘nerve’, which is maybe about five months later (in 1.16 ‘a human reaction’, john guesstimates that it’s been about seven months since he left earth and so the ancients go with that timeline, but we don’t really know for sure). either way, it’s been a fair bit of time, about half a cycle, and gilina has been transferred to the gammak base to help develop a new weapon. this actually speaks to her competency - it can’t just be any random techs that they transfer to work on top-secret weapons development, and we already knew she was extremely competent from ‘pk tech girl’. we see more evidence of her skills when she’s able to convincingly fabricate a memory of john giving wormhole technology to crais, good enough that it fools the aurora chair. that means she had to dig around for knowledge of crais in john’s memory (aka ‘that old black magic’) and pk!photoshop a new memory that is triggered by the memory of their kiss that john is protecting. the girl has mad skills.

so she’s on the gammak base, but still a tech. she’s had a taste of danger, and the sense of drudgery. she’s had months to think about ‘what if’ she’d gone with john and moya, and not much to distract her from it. and then, she sees john in the officer’s lounge.

gilina knows a few things immediately: 1) he’s definitely not supposed to be there, 2) he’s in a pk uniform so he’s trying to pass as an officer, and 3) he’s going to get busted by the genetic ident system. she probably doesn’t have time to warn him, or thinks she might not have the time, and so instead gets into a position to override the system on her end when he goes through. she’s back into the adrenaline risky danger she associates with john, and the serotonin is flowing!

and then - then they meet again, and it’s a shock for both of them. in fact, as soon as he sees her, john points a gun at her.

john? is pointing a gun? at her? this is the first episode john is carrying a gun on a mission, but gilina doesn’t know that. john is on a knife’s edge, knowing there’s no way he should have gotten through that scan and sick with worry over aeryn - ben does a great job of communicating this through his body language the entire time they’re trying to get the tissue sample. he’s tensed, and primed for an attack. but he points a gun at her, and he doesn’t lower it when he recognizes her. and the look on gilina’s face is just pure bewilderment!!! this is john, after all, the scientist!

the interaction makes a lot of sense from either’s perspective, and the scene does a good job taking its time letting the tensions breathe. from john’s pov, gilina is a peacekeeper and he doesn’t understand why she’s helping him considering they went on one date. since that date, he’s been through A Lot, but he’s also spent nearly every day with aeryn, and from the kiss in ‘the flax’ to the first time they have sex in ‘a human reaction’, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since gilina. john may not know where he and aeryn stand, but there is something. he’s also not prepared to see gilina, let alone in this context, and with these stakes, or with this unsteady history.

meanwhile, from gilina’s pov, she was clearly expecting john to be relieved to see her, even happy! perhaps even interested in picking up where they left off! and instead, he’s pointing a weapon at her and keeps it there until she assures him she’s there to help him. it takes half a minute for him to do so, which feels like a long time in this interaction. it’s a clear shock. gilina reveals a lot of her motives, even without saying she loves john, in that first exchange - and chiana clocks all of this in mere moments.

this is where the twist comes. gilina goes from seeing a - let’s be generous here - friendly ex in danger, and so she helps him before she knows anything else. she saves his life. and while john won’t reject her in words, he’s there for aeryn. it’s so obvious and so overpowering that gilina asks chiana about it near the end of ‘nerve’:

chiana: I don't understand it. why wouldn't crichton try and save himself? chiana? does aeryn mean that much to him? chiana: no...aeryn's just a... just a shipmate. crichton is in love with you. why do you think he's staying?

I love the commentary on this scene, which is that chiana lies. chiana has no compunctions about lying, and she needs to get off the base and get back to moya. she senses a risk that if gilina doesn’t think john loves her, or is in love with someone else, she might stop helping them - and chiana can’t have that. so she lies. she weaponizes the familiarity she sees between john and gilina in those first few moments, and the what-might-have-been, for her own ends. and I don’t think john ever learns that she did this.

but! very relevantly, gilina never says she loves john before this lie! and I genuinely think that chiana misread gilina at least in her willingness to help them. I think gilina would have helped chiana because she also cares about aeryn, and she doesn’t need john’s love to care about aeryn. but it’s chiana’s lie that john loves gilina that pushes gilina into ever-more dangerous waters over the course of the two episodes, taking more and more risks, including tampering with the aurora chair.

gilina never actually says that she loves john until the end of ‘the hidden memory’, when she’s dying on moya. when john tries to tell her she’s going to be okay, she tells him “no more lies”, and then gives the reason why she came back: she believed aeryn, that the peacekeepers would figure out what she had done: “aeryn was right. if I'd stayed there, they would've found out about me. found out that I... I love you.”

but this is the only time she says this. she asks john if he wants to be with aeryn, and later asks aeryn if john loves her, aeryn (which seems to be left-field news to aeryn, bless her). and when she can’t get a straight answer out of either them, she decides to stay on the base. she won’t go with them if john loves aeryn. taking a step back from the story, this makes a ton of sense. why would gilina abandon her entire life and everyone she knows on the promise of john loving her if he doesn’t actually love her? if she had internal motives, like wanting to leave the peacekeepers, it would be different - and that’s eventually why she does come back, i.e. the belief that her life is forfeit if she stays. she becomes aeryn, but too late. she arrives only in time to be shot by scorpius.

and so gilina does leave the peacekeepers, but carried away as she dies. she tells john that she loves him, as she’s dying, and asks for one last kiss, which john reluctantly gives. it really - this show is too damn smart sometimes - puts me in mind of the (EPIC MOST BEAUTIFUL!!!) exchange from S4′s ‘john quixote’: 

video game!zhaan: have you wasted my death, and the deaths of so many others? john: [despondent] I don’t know. video game!zhaan: then I suggest you find out, before anyone else dies for the love of you.