“Dog With Two Bones” (season 3, episode 22; originally aired 4/26/2002)
(Available on Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.)
“Talyn… he, uh… he, he was our protector… Um, our family…” “May I say a few words?” “He, uh, he was a lost soul… searching for… uh…” “Talyn was special. A joy to his mother and a credit to his species. Both of them. With fondness, we lay Talyn, offspring of Moya, to rest in his sacred ground.”
This story can’t go on forever. Television is a medium theoretically designed to allow for stories without end, but almost all of the best shows have self-limiting premises. At the core of nearly every great show is some fundamental goal that drives the actions of the protagonist, with perhaps some more minor but nonetheless compelling objectives that define the secondary characters. Farscape has danced around several such motivations for much of its run. John Crichton wants to return to Earth, John Crichton wants to stop Scorpius, and John Crichton wants to be with Aeryn Sun. (More on that in a moment.) D’Argo wants to reunite with his son Jothee, and D’Argo wants vengeance on Macton, the Peacekeeper that framed him for his wife’s murder. Rygel wants to reclaim the Hynerian throne. Chiana wants to find her brother Nerri and join the Nebari resistance. Aeryn Sun rarely wants anything quite as concrete as the others’ desires, but she generally strives to find a place in the universe, somewhere that she can become the best possible version of herself and that she can be happy.
Look at that list and consider just how many of those goals have been realized over the first three seasons. D’Argo did find Jothee, but that was an abject disaster, one that deeply damaged two of his most important relationships. Aeryn did find her place this season, but it was on Talyn with Crichton, and both of those individuals are now dead, leaving her as lost and closed off as she has ever been. And those are the successes! The shipmates’ remaining goals are so amorphous and faraway that it’s easy to forget that they even exist; Rygel is really the only one who talks any significant amount about his long-term goals, and even he doesn’t have the first semblance of a plan to achieve his aims. The deal with Scorpius has now given him and the others the vital pieces of information they need to move onto the next stage of their lives, and “Dog With Two Bones” reflects on that transition by consider what this supposedly completed stage has comprised. In the coldest possible reading, the last three seasons have never been anything more than simple survival. These were always just a bunch of fugitives thrown together against their will and forced to work together because any other course of action would leave them in Peacekeeper captivity. How Rygel summed things up in “Self-Inflicted Wounds,” basically.
The truth is far better than that. For all their initial misgivings, the Moya shipmates have become friends, even family. Yes, the mounting hopelessness of their situation forced them to place their individual agendas on the backburner, but all of the friendships and romances that we’ve witnessed over the last three seasons weren’t simply the result of their impossible circumstances. Think of it this way: Being stuck together on Moya probably was the only scenario in which D’Argo and John would become friends, but that doesn’t make their friendship any less meaningful, even beautiful. The trouble is that, even if the bonds forged onboard Moya are strong enough to endure even after separation, that doesn’t really mean anything, at least not on an everyday sort of basis.
I mean, it’s a pretty sentiment, and it might even be true—just listen to all the fond goodbyes the others give Crichton in the episode’s closing montage—but it must feel pretty damn hollow when all that one is left with is quite literally the void of space; that’s true even before Moya unexpectedly gets sucked into a wormhole, leaving Crichton more stranded than he has even been before. The nature of living in deep space in the Farscape universe is that other people effectively cease to exist the moment they are out of a ship’s relatively small communications range. Under those circumstances, it may well be utterly selfish for Crichton to want everyone to stay, but it’s equally selfless to let them depart.
Not that Crichton really has much of a choice, what with the climactic coin flip and the fact that he spends a good chunk of this episode fantasizing about impossible futures, possibly because he’s frequently drugged out of his gourd. This is a whole new kind of trippy Farscape episode, in that “Dog With Two Bones” doesn’t even pretend to explain what the frell is going on. I mean, the basics are straightforward enough: Crichton is seeing both the best and worst possible versions of returning to Earth with his friends, and the mysterious old woman is using her incredible herbs to guide him toward truth. But we learn so little of the woman’s motivations—indeed, it’s only midway through the episode that the shipmates realize she’s a stowaway and not someone else’s guest—and the narrative flits so freely between what is real and what is fantasy that it can be difficult to untangle precisely what’s going on. Without precise execution, such storytelling can end up somewhere between baffling and infuriating, but David Kemper’s script strikes just the right balance, give or take the intentionally out-of-nowhere revelation that Aeryn Sun is pregnant. But everything else follows a coherent if dreamlike logic, as the audience watches Crichton try to reconcile the two incompatible parts of his life before finally recognizing that the two can never be made to fit together. In this episode, the hazy narrative simply allows the show to burn away the inessential and get right at the heart of Crichton’s emotional truth.
In that regard, “Dog With Two Bones” feels like a true culmination of the story told throughout the third season. The episode’s eponymous metaphor posits that Crichton is forever torn between his love for Aeryn and his need to return to Earth, a task that would require mastery of wormholes. Broadly speaking, those two desires describe the paths of the Talyn Crichton and the Moya Crichton, respectively. The former got to run away with Aeryn deep into the Uncharted Territories, building their relationship to a place that it could never be in the first two seasons. The other Crichton struggled to find any meaning at all in the absence of Aeryn, but he did throw himself into the search for wormholes, compounding the mistakes he made in “Self-Inflicted Wounds” and driving an ever deeper wedge between him and his friends. As much as Crichton here suggests that Aeryn and Earth carry equal weight in his heart, there’s no question at all which of the two was the consolation prize. And, just to rub salt in the wound, it was the Talyn Crichton who was ultimately given the gift of complete wormhole knowledge. Yes, he died soon thereafter, but not before Aeryn happily, assuredly agreed to return with him to Earth. For those brief few minutes in “Infinite Possibilities,” the dreams of “Dog With Two Bones” sure didn’t look impossible.
But then, it’s what happened next in “Infinite Possibilities” that now puts that happy fantasy out of Crichton’s reach. The death of his twin has placed a seemingly insuperable barrier between Aeryn and John, and Officer Sun is prepared to run off and join a crack Peacekeeper assassination squad instead of deal with her morass of feelings. It’s really only that emotional distance that makes Crichton yearn for Earth at all. Getting home hasn’t truly felt like a priority for John for some time now—I’d be willing to go as far back as “A Human Reaction”—and it’s probably not a coincidence that every time this season he has gotten serious about it has come after Aeryn pushed him away. Officer Sun told him they could not risk romance after her death and resurrection, and then “Self-Inflicted Wounds” happens. Aeryn goes off with one Crichton, and the aimless spare spends his time chasing wormholes. And now, in “Dog With Two Bones,” Crichton almost appears to use Earth as a way to repair his shattered relationship with Aeryn, as though escaping home might allow them to rediscover the true love that a uniquely incomprehensible tragedy has so severely tested. He’s ultimately prepared to throw away any dreams of Earth in favor of convincing Aeryn not to leave him, but it’s not really him who ever needed to find clarity. Crichton hesitates not because he’s unsure of what he wants but because he’s afraid of what Aeryn wants; it’s unlikely Aeryn would have come to any more favorable a decision if Crichton had confronted her at the beginning of the episode than at the end.