Farscape’s Darkest Episode Is A Terrifying Horror Movie
You’re forgiven for thinking that Farscape is a light-hearted space romp through the galaxy, given that part of the cast is puppets, and the other involves humanoid aliens in colorful designs. Throughout the series, there’s a lingering air of danger and darkness, but in one episode, the crew of the Moya find themselves living in a slasher movie. “Eat Me” involves body horror, cloning, murder, and more brain-sucking than you’d think, making it easily the darkest episode of the entire series.
A Bottle Episode
The Season 3 Episode 6 episode “Eat Me” is a bottle episode, which is an episode set entirely in one location with a limited cast, and typically, those don’t make for great television, but as usual, Farscape over-delivered. John Crichton, D’Argo, Chiana, and Jool are trapped in a damaged transport when they find a Leviathan, and quickly realize it isn’t their own ship, Moya, but are forced to dock anyways and potentially face the wrath of the Peacekeepers on board.
Instead, while searching for parts to repair the transport, they discover that the Leviathan is disturbingly empty.
Eaten Alive
While searching, Crichton comes across the ship’s one-armed pilot, who disturbingly asks the human to kill him. That’s when this Farscape episode takes a turn, as Chirchton realizes the scavengers onboard the ship have been eating the pilot’s arms each time they grow back. D’argo is then assaulted by a strange man while trying to help Chiana from being eaten, ending with the Luxan getting his brains sucked out.
That’s right, Farscape has a main character who watches themselves die. It gets worse.
Twinning
Jool, left behind and on her own with the wrecked transport, has a pistol and is about to use it on herself when Chiana comes in, causing the shot to miss. The two then leave together to rescue Crichton from Kaarvok, who, it turns out, cloned D’argo and kept the “real” one prisoner. In the ensuing fight, Crichton is unknowingly doubled by Kaarvok’s “Twinner,” and as the scavengers descend on the trapped criminal to eat him alive, the crew retreats to the transport and flees to the safety of their ship.
With one problem: there are now two Crichtons on board the transport. The Farscape writers decided to close the already dark episode out with a funny and horrifying scene, depending on how you look at it.
From Existential Crisis To A Story Arc
Back on Moya, the two Crichtons are playing Rock, Paper, Scissors against one another with a gun on the table between them. The episode closes out with a reminder that Kaarvok explained the “Twinner” as creating a new original, with no differences between the “first” original and the “second” original. A lesser series would end it right there, leaving viewers wondering if the next episode of Farscape will star the actual Crichton or the one that was twinned, but this is not a lesser sci-fi series.
Instead, what starts here is a story arc involving two Crichtons, “John-Black” and “John-Green,” who both go off with half the crew on their own adventures for part of Farscape Season 3. It’s not until Episode 15, nine episodes after “Eat Me,” that there’s only one Crichton.
Farscape Pushed The Envelope
“Eat Me” was one of the first times that the Farscape writers decided to push the envelope when The Sci-Fi Channel (later named SyFy) wasn’t looking and see what they could get away with. The result is a dark, disturbing episode with multiple main character deaths, and while they didn’t stick, the trauma lingered for the rest of the show, and what could be a one-off joke became an important plot development.
No show took the storytelling risks of Farscape, and today, an episode like “Eat Me” would still be shocking and horrifying, but back in 2001, before Battlestar Galactica took mainstream sci-fi dark, the small budget Australian show with puppets was boldly going where no franchise had gone before.
You can watch “Eat Me” for free on YouTube.
