Farscape / Tropes D to G

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• Dangerous Drowsiness: Early in the fourth season, Crichton is forced to stay aboard Elack, an extremely elderly Leviathan living out the remaining weeks of his life in the Sacred Space. As Pilots share the lifespans of the Leviathans they've been bonded to, Elack's Pilot has also grown old and spends a lot of her time nodding off; initially a simple case of Senior Sleep-Cycle, as Elack draws closer to death, she begins lapsing deeper and deeper into unconsciousness until it's almost impossible to wake her. In the end, she and Elack are able to marshal enough strength to perform a Heroic Sacrifice and save the main characters.
• Dark Lord: Crichton hangs another lampshade when he only half-jokingly uses this phrase to describe Scorpius who was allied with them at the time, by the way. Given Scorpius' reputation and tactics, it's hard to argue the point.
• Darker and Edgier: Season 3 is by far the darkest season of the series. Anyone Can Die is in full effect, and Zhaan, Crais, Talyn, Jack The Ancient, and one of the two copies of Crichton are all Killed Off for Real, and has a melancholy, depressing tone and focuses on the crew slowly drifting apart and going their separate ways, culminating in the downbeat tearjerker that is "Dog With Two Bones". It also features some of the darkest episodes in the series, such as "Incubator", "Self-Inflicted Wounds", "Eat Me", "Thanks For Sharing", "The Choice", and "Infinite Possibilities".
  • To most space-based sci-fi shows at the time. Compared to Star Trek and Babylon 5, Farscape does not hesitate to make its major characters act in questionable, even downright unsympathetic manners. Exemplified by the early Season One episode "DNA Mad Scientist," where titular Mad Scientist NamTar asks for one of Pilot's arms as payment for his services. Any other show, this would be an unthinkable request. On Farscape. . . Smash Cut to Zhann, D'Argo, and Rygel forcibly and violently chopping off one of Pilot's arms (though Zhaan does, at least, try and take Pilot's pain). While the crew later became True Companions, they remained on average Anti-Heroes at best, with the odd dip into Failure Hero. Worth noting is that the series climax (in The Peacekeeper Wars) involves Chrichton finally making the wormhole weapon everyone wanted. . . a geometrically-expanding black hole that will destroy the entire galaxy. And he isn't certain when he turns it on that he'll be able to shut it off. And if the Peacekeepers and Scarrans take too long to come to terms, he won't be able to shut it off.
• Data Crystal: One figures prominently in "DNA Mad Scientist," containing the coordinates for Zhaan, D'Argo, and Rygel to return home. It's rigged, because NamTar has his own agenda, and won't let them leave until he's completed it. First, it's impossible to extract one set of coordinates without destroying the other two, and if the coordinates were downloaded into Moya, her navigation would be scrambled and she'd be unable to leave the planet.
• Dead Guy Junior:
  • D'Argo Sun-Crichton.
  • Talyn is named after Aeryn's late father.
• Dead Guy Puppet: Rygel does this to Durka.
• Deadpan Snarker: Crichton, verging on every scene at times. Also Harvey: Scorpius's personality mixed with John's knowledge and love for pop culture.
  • D'argo can be pretty snarky.
  • Pilot usually goes this route when the rest of the crew starts irritating him.
  Pilot: (After the crew cut off one of his arms to trade) Your navigation crystal appears to be useless. How fortunate you didn't trade anything of real value to get it.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Crichton poses as the late Peacekeeper Captain Larraq (complete with Evil Brit accent) when he infiltrates the Gammak Base to find a tissue sample to save Aeryn's life ("Nerve")
• Deal with the Devil: NamTar offers to examine the Moya crew's collective DNA in order to find their places of origin — their homeworlds — and then hand them a navigation crystal to get them there, risk-free. At this early stage in the series, the characters are still disloyal to one another and thus most vulnerable to NamTar's offer. His asking price? One of Pilot's arms. Hmm, this is a genuine moral quandary. We'd better sit down and discu—Rygel!! You hold him down while I get my qualta blade! In true jerkass fashion, NamTar doesn't deliver on his promise, anyway: the navigation crystal would have erased Moya's memory, ensuring that the crew couldn't leave even if they wanted to.
  • Both John and Crais make the mistake of entering into this type of bargain with Maldis. It was all pretext for pitting them in an Involuntary Battle to the Death (Well, involuntary for Crichton anyway), whereupon the survivor will be deposited back on their ship. Even on this point, Maldis has a screwjob prepared: Crichton succeeds in nearly killing Crais, only for Maldis to spirit him away, leaving Crichton alone and about to have his life-force feasted on by Maldis. See, he didn't say the winner of the battle gets to go home.
  • In "Prayer," Crichton is forced to turn to Scorpius for help in rescuing Aeryn, offering wormhole knowledge in exchange; after a Scarren Blood Vow - a ritual in which the two drink each other's blood to seal the deal - they agree. Against all expectations, Scorpius fulfils his part of the bargain without trying to work any underhanded angles, only for Crichton to abandon him on Katratzi... and then discovers that Scorpius was expecting something like this to happen sooner or later and installed a failsafe in Crichton's brain to make sure that he fulfilled his part of the bargain. Whoops.
• Death by Origin Story: D'Argo and Zhaan's respective mates were killed before the story begins — though, in fairness, Zhaan bumped off her lover herself.
• Death of a Child: "...Different Destinations" ends with the mass murder of an entire nunnery, including the eight-year-old novices.
  • And in "Prayer," a Scarran officer aboard a research vessel disposed of a test subject's unborn child by using his heat-projection to fry it alive inside the womb. And the holographic display also shows the fetus writhing and shrivelling in the heat. However as the mother turns out to be a mole, it's very probable they faked it to scare Aeryn.
  • Played absurdly straight with Aeryn's fetus, which survives getting diced into potpourri (along with his parents), indigested into Rygel's stomachs (yes, plural), reassembled, and re-inserted back into Aeryn's womb. Science!
• Death of the Hypotenuse / Dying Declaration of Love: Gilina at the end of "A Hidden Memory". Though in this case, it was clear that she was in love with Crichton. She merely reaffirmed her love and asked if things had been different, could he have loved her. To which he replies "Yes".
  • The death of one of the twinned Crichtons frees up Aeryn for just one Crichton.
• Deceptive Disciple: In "Rhapsody In Blue", Zhaan is approached by Tahleen, who asks to be taught how to control her darker impulses; when Zhaan agrees, Tahleen quickly reveals that she doesn't have the time to learn the technique through normal meditation, so she simply tears the information out of Zhaan's mind, driving her insane in the process.
• Decided by One Vote: In the aptly-titled "La Bomba", Crichton drops a bomb down a shaft after activating it, knowing it will probably kill them all. John grunts noncommittally; then suddenly remembers the Democracy thing.
  Crichton: Oh. God. ...We should have voted. All in favor — show of hands.
  (He raises his and the others stare at him; then Aeryn and Scorpius raise theirs — a little)
  • And later:
  Rygel: You farhbot! Did you blow up the bomb?! How could you blow up the bomb?!
  Crichton: You missed the vote.
  • It should be mentioned that the bomb in question was nuclear.
• Decoy Damsel: Zig-Zagged between M'Lee and Br'Nee, both of whom are pretty detestable, yet continually point fingers at the other one ("Bone to Be Wild"). In the end, M'Lee comes off looking better, since she was taken against her will to the asteroid by Br'Nee and his botanists to destroy its animal population and then starve to death.
• Deep-Fried Whatever: In the midst of (yet another) food shortage on Moya, Crichton doesn't even have the standard food cubes to eat, so he decides to fry the little alien caterpillars that are used for brushing teeth. When told they aren't edible, Crichton says "You can eat anything if it's fried!" Unfortunately for him, he's wrong.
• Defector from Decadence: A pair of Delvians, Hasko and Lorana, opt out of Tahleen's sect once she shows signs of being Drunk with Power.
  • Three years before the series begins, Tam Velorek (Aeryn's former lover and fellow Peacekeeper) had a plan in the works to hijack Moya and flee into the Uncharted Territories. When Velorek offered to take Aeryn with him, she instead turned him in to Crais, earning herself a fighter pilot assignment.
• Defiant Strip: A two-for-one. When Zhaan offering clothes to a reptilian prisoner, he tries to shake her by opening his robe. She responds by complimenting him on his body, before dropping her own robes entirely and allowing him a long look at her naked body. The prisoner seems equally discomfited and aroused.
• Delayed Ripple Effect: In "Kansas", Crichton's teenage self is nearly killed when Noranti slips him an overdose of memory-erasing serum. The adult Crichton literally becomes a ghost until his 1980s self is resuscitated.
• Department of Redundancy Department: In "Crichton Kicks", as Rygel is listing Crichton's obsessions:
  "Wormholes. Aeryn. Earth. Aeryn. Scorpius. Aeryn. I'm out of fingers."
• Description Cut: In the DVD extra "What is Farscape?", Ben Browder describes Crichton as a "tough guy"^note  cut to his being beaten up several times, "a one-woman kind of guy"^note  cut to his giving Captain Kirk a run for his money, and "incredibly well-spoken"^note  cut to his tendency as The Nicknamer.
• Despite the Plan: As Aeryn puts it to John, "Your plans never work!!" Eventually he admits this when an unspoken plan actually works as planned, "Yeah, it's a first, isn't it?"
  • There is even an episode subtitled "A Not So Simple Plan".
• Determinator: It's canon that John Crichton's strongest trait is determination.
  • The whole human race is presented this way in "A Constellation of Doubt."
    Noranti (to John's nephew): I like... that you're always striving to reach higher. Hoping for a better tomorrow. It's the quality that first attracted me to your uncle.
    Bobby: That humans dream?
    Noranti: Yes! You're so ignorant, but you never give up. Even in the face of insurmountable odds.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The final moments of the series finale. Unless you find the main characters getting blasted into charcoal briquettes uplifting.
  • David Kemper said that while it may've been possible to re-cut "Bad Timing" to remove the cliffhanger, they ultimately decided not to. Debate still rages as to whether it was a deliberate Take That! to place even more pressure and scrutiny on Sci-Fi to finance a miniseries.
  • The ending of Season 3 is also a good example. John is out with his module, just about to return to Moya, when suddenly a wormhole appears and swallows Moya, leaving him stranded.
• Did They or Didn't They?: Occurs in "A Human Reaction". John and Aeryn kiss, and the scene cuts to them both awake the next morning, never directly acknowledging what happened. Though there was only one bed, Crichton's naked, and Aeryn's wearing oversized men's clothes, so...
  • A conversation in "Mind The Baby" seems to confirm that yes, they did. Meaning the couple managed to maintain Unresolved Sexual Tension even after, well, resolving it...
  • And a "euro scene" not included in the American TV release (but in the European versions and the DVD) makes it much more clear what happened. The commentary for the episode also makes it clear that they did.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: John's meetings with Einstein and the Ancients.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: John kicks Einstein to the ground in a moment of stress. He's incredibly surprised when it works, and actually apologises while helping him up.
  • Once his intangibility has been disabled, Maldis ends up being destroyed by a single punch to the face.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: One of the Crichtons.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: In What Was Lost Part I, the Monks are chanting the theme when Crichton views the past.
• "Die Hard" on an X: "I Shrink, Therefore I Am". Even Lampshaded by Crichton: "I'm gonna take 'em out one at a time, the Die Hard way."
  John: Great, we go from Die Hard to Honey, I Shrunk the Hostages.
• Disability Immunity: In "Crackers Don't Matter", Crichton is the only crewmember who is (mostly) immune to the sanity-depleting pulsar lights. His comparatively-poor human eyesight is precisely the cause. Though Crichton isn't exactly happy with this discovery.
  Crichton: I have great eyes! They're better than 20/20, and they're blue!!
  • In the comics, the reason why the Kalish are immune to the Whae'lan virus - it uses Translator Microbes to propagate, and the Kalish can't tolerate them.
• Disability Superpower: T'raltixx from "Crackers Don't Matter" is blind, but his hearing is so good that he can tell how many fingers Crichton is holding up. He can also shoot lasers from where most species have their eyes.
• Diesel Punk: This is the Peacekeepers' technological aesthetic.
• Diligent Hero, Slothful Villain:
  • The crew of Moya are a desperate gang of fugitives who spend most of their time struggling to stay alive and can only improvise fun when they can find the time to do anything other than work. In particular, series protagonist John Crichton spends most of his off-hours on increasingly dangerous wormhole research. By contrast, early antagonist Maldis is a seemingly all-powerful Emotion Eater who prefers to watch his sadistic games play out rather than get involved, only using his powers in the event that his playthings need some encouragement. In their first encounter, his chosen playthings were already mortal enemies and only needed a bit of a prod to fight to the death, and he got so carried away with the fun that Maldis completely failed to notice that Zhaan was learning how to harness her own powers against him — hence his first defeat.
  • In season four, the crew of Moya are pitted against a new antagonist, Commandant Grayza. Her heppel oil glands give her the power to chemically enslave people, allowing her to accomplish her goals with as little effort as possible... but unfortunately, this power makes her complacent — allowing Crichton to deliver a humiliating defeat when he finds an antidote to the oil. She spends the rest of the season as a strictly hands-off Big Bad, using Captain Braca as her Puppet King while she takes baths or plays head games with her underlings. Even her big plan to trick the Scarran Imperium into a truce involves her taking credit for the wormhole weapon Crichton developed back in season 3 without taking any measures of her own. This bites her hard in the ass when Scarran War Minister Akhna sees through Grayza's bluster and easily defeats her underpowered forces. When Grayza attempts to save face by ordering a Suicide Attack on Katratzi, Braca refuses her orders and has her arrested. For good measure, Scorpius — who has been patiently working away on Moya all season — claims Grayza's command carrier as his own.
• Disguised in Drag:
  • Played for laughs in "Coup By Clam", when Crichton and Rygel dress as women in order to infiltrate an alien brothel. Crichton gets hit on by a government thug who, in an interesting subversion, already knows that he's a man dressed as a woman, as he'd seen Crichton earlier. Also, Rygel doesn't bother to shave his beard (perhaps female Hynerians have facial hair as well) and appear to be wearing a wedding dress
  • Horribly subverted in Different Destinations. Crichton tries to smuggle the captive general of an attacking army out of a besieged monastary this way (in order to arrange a peaceful settlement), but he is spotted and shot by one of the defenders. All the attackers see is their general dressed in the enemy's female clothing and tossed off the walls, causing them to believe he died earlier and the defenders dressed him up to insult him. The result is a massacre.
• Disney Villain Death: Xhalax Sun.
• Distinction Without a Difference: Our cheeky little Nebari and devious Hynerian can't just sit by and allow cargo to be onboard and not search through it. In "A Bug's Life", Chiana heads to the cargo hold to open Larraq's crate, only to find Rygel already poking around it. Chiana says they're both here for the same thing – to "snurch" any valuables. A very pompous Rygel replies that he doesn't "snurch", he "procures".
• Distracted by the Sexy: In "Meltdown," one of Talyn's Leviathan hormones becomes aerosolized. It makes Crichton and Aeryn so horny they can hardly concentrate on saving their own lives.
• Distress Call: Frequently, the plot will be kicked off by Moya picking one up, and the crew deciding whether or not to risk themselves by responding and trying to help (given their average track record with trying to help, it's probably better if they ignore them). Most often, if they do respond, they're either Late to the Tragedy or it's a trap.
• Do-Anything Robot: Moya carries hundreds of little yellow DRDs (Diagnostic Repair Drones) that scamper around, repairing and maintaining its various functions. A single DRD comes with a plasma welding iron, a syringe for injecting translator microbes, and even an adorable little laser-shooting minigun.
  • They also have New Powers as the Plot Demands since they are suddenly able to print pictures of the crew for identification purposes in the "Freaky Friday" Flip episode.
• Do Not Go Gentle: D'Argo in Peacekeeper Wars. The last time we see him, he has been fatally wounded and is holding back a group of solders with two rapid-fire guns while telling them exactly who their daddy is.
  • Three of the final episodes are entitled "We're So Screwed". They don't go gentle, they go awesomely.
• Don't Ask: Crichton's response to Rygel when he inquires about "the wrinkled old woman floating outside the forward portal."
  D'Argo: Noranti is outside?
  Crichton: Yeah. Don't ask.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Played with several times... and played straight just as many times; it was pretty much the Ancients' motto when it comes to wormholes.
• Doom Magnet: Crichton and Aeryn reluctantly concede this in Peacekeeper Wars.
• Doomsday Device: The wormhole weapon. Class X-4.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Deconstructed and inverted. During an alien encounter, John undergoes a "twinning" effect, effectively splitting him into two identical versions of himself. One Crichton goes on Talyn with Aeryn, Rygel, and Stark in order to distract the following Peacekeepers from Moya and the rest of the crew. The Crichton left behind is understandably upset as he suspects his double is off having a relationship with Aeryn (which he is, of course.) As confusing as that is, things really start to go awry when Talyn-Crichton performs a Heroic Sacrifice, causing Aeryn to undergo a Heroic BSoD. When the surviving Crichton is reunited with Aeryn, he receives a chilly reception from her.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Totally subverted — It is not OK, and causes serious anguish.
• Double Subversion: M'Lee and Br'Nee from "Bone to be Wild" keeps juggling the Villain Ball back and forth. At first, M'Lee seeks refuge on Moya for protection from a hideous monster. Subversion #1: the monster is a well-spoken scientist named Br'Nee who has come to warn them about M'Lee, who murders people and eats their bones. Subversion #2: Br'Nee is responsible for starving M'Lee's people to death, and M'Lee was only motivated by extreme hunger.
• Downer Ending; "..Different Destinations," for one. The crew travels back in time, where a monastery is under siege by an alien horde. Crichton et al try to set history back on course, but it keeps going From Bad to Worse: first the war goes on much longer with more bloodshed, then the entire planet is irradiated, then it CEASES TO EXIST. The crew manages to fix everything, except for one detail: whereas before the horde offered the surviving nuns a ceasefire, now the horde, enraged at losing Crichton, are unable to control their bloodlust and slaughter the remaining nuns, including a young girl
  • "Bad Timing", thanks to the sudden cancellation. Up until Peacekeeper Wars was finally greenlighted, this was possibly one of the cruelest Diabolus ex Machina endings in history.
  • "Die Me, Dichotomy": Scorpius' neural clone takes control of Crichton and kills Aeryn, John finally is able to get the chip removed, but Scorpius interrupts the surgery and leaves him a brain-damaged, incoherent mess on the operating table. To Be Continued next season.
• Dramatic Space Drifting
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: Scarran Dreadnoughts, at least a match for Peacekeeper Command Carriers. Nebari "Host Ships" are even scarier, but are never seen in the series.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Occasionally played straight, but that doesn't guarantee success. John Crichton infiltrates a Peacekeeper base disguised as an officer (a ploy that had worked successfully before) but encounters Big Bad Scorpius for the first time who casually says "That man, he is an imposter. Seize him." It turns out that Scorpius has the ability to see the energy signatures of others, so he could tell Crichton wasn't Sebacean.
  • In the same episode, Chiana slips through Peacekeeper security by posing as a maintenance worker, complete with black wig and Sebecean makeup. She's given away by her Character Tics when she meets an officer who's seen her before.
  • John keeps wearing the Peacekeeper uniform throughout the season, though, partially because he doesn't exactly have a whole lot of changes of clothes with him and partially because it makes him look badass.
  • In "Liars, Guns and Money Part 1," Crichton and Aeryn knock out a couple of guards in the middle of their bank heist, but are ambushed by more guards before they've even finished pulling the clothes off. Crichton flees with a half-hearted "Uh... they went that way!" to the new arrivals.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Jool; DK and his wife.
• Drowning My Sorrows: In the wake of Crichton's death, Aeryn spends the entirety of "The Choice" tipping back bottles.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: You can almost hear Crichton saying it. Even though he saves the main characters' lives twice in the first episode alone, he's constantly referred to as useless just because he knows nothing about anything.
  • By the end of the first season, however, this has changed.
• Dumb Is Good: In "My Three Crichtons," Primitive!Crichton is kind and self-sacrificing, while Advanced!Crichton is a massive bastard. Regular!Crichton falls somewhere in the middle.
• Dutch Angle: Farscapes cameras are very drunk.
• Dying Race: The Ancients. "Jack" shows Crichton the room where most of their kind are kept in suspended animation, awaiting the day that they migrate to a new planet capable of supporting them. We're told they succeed.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: The first season ran into some issues with the studio lighting interacting poorly with the prosthetics worn by the alien characters. Adjustments had to be made to both lighting and make-up to get the characters to look right.
  • D'Argo's skintone is a lot paler and less translucent in Season One. From Season Two onwards, he has a more tanned and natural look to him thanks to the makeup continuing to improve. Behind the scenes, this was half-jokingly handwaved as the result of a "space tan" D'Argo acquired floating in the vacuum of space at the end of "Family Ties".
  • Zhaan's skintones often ended up looking grey and patchy instead of the bright, vivid blue the crew were aiming for. The crew managed to get the issue under control fairly early and by "Rhapsody in Blue" they were able to show multiple Delvian characters without the color issues Zhaan suffered early on.
  • In the first season Scorpius' makeup is more opaque and lacks the shading that would be added in season two. The leather hood is also matte and less textured than the shinier, grittier texture it gained in later seasons.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first few episodes, D'Argo has striking green eyes due to Anthony Simcoe wearing contacts for the role. The contacts were eventually dropped in favour of using Simcoe's natural eye colour, allowing for better emoting under the prosthetic makeup.
  • The cast didn't start using the alien cursewords and slang like "dren" until a few episodes in. "I, E.T.", for example, has Aeryn actually say "crap".
  • In her first few episodes, Chiana alternates between an Australian and an American accent because the producers weren't sure which one they wanted Gigi Edgley to use. She eventually went with the latter.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Pilot in "DNA Mad Scientist" doesn't object much to the crew cutting one of his arms off to trade for information from NamTar, apart from snarking about it later.
  • Subverted in a few other cases. Some things - like Chiana cheating on D'Argo with his son - go unforgiven for more than a year, much like it probably would in real life.
• Easter Bunny: Out of all the surreal moments in Farscape, the final episode takes the cake. (Also a possible lampshading of Harvey's namesake).
  Harvey: [wearing bunny suit] Curious holiday, Easter. A religious leader dies, comes back from the dead, and you end up celebrating like this.
• E = MC Hammer: The Trope Namer comes from a pastiche of E=mc2 that appeared in a scene of The Peacekeeper Wars, in which Harvey (as Albert Einstein) stands before a blackboard that reads "E = MC Hammer", among other nonsense.
• Ejection Seat: Subverted. The ejection seat in Aeryn's prowler works just fine... it's her seatbelt that's the problem. There's also the minor hiccup of there being nothing to land on besides a frozen lake.
• Eldritch Location: The wormhole nexus. Einstein uses it as a meeting ground between representatives of the Ancients (i.e. himself) and anyone knowledgeable enough to pose a threat to them. To Crichton's perception, it resembles an iceberg floating in an ocean of wormholes. Due to Einstein's influence, physics tend to behave quite strangely here, and Crichton often ends up speaking to long-dead individuals from his past and tumbling into Unrealized Realities.
• Eldritch Starship: The green energy sphere from another dimension in "My Three Crichtons," and the Lukythian Protector Ship in "Promises," a small vessel with a huge holographic disguise.
  • The Pathfinders' ship.
• Elephant Graveyard: The Sacred Leviathan Burial Place, a remote corner of space to which Leviathans tow their deceased brethren.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue:
  • The Dream Sequences in "Dog With Two Bones", which examine John's anxieties about bringing Aeryn with him to Earth. Aeryn's accent doesn't sound quite as melodious to humans without translator microbes. Subverted in "Kansas", when her Sebeacan Photographic Memory allows Aeryn to absorb the English dialect simply by watching Sesame Street.
  • While Pilot is reasonably eloquent, his native language is a Starfish Language that is too information-dense for Translator Microbes to keep up with, requiring him to use "simple words" to communicate with his shipmates ("The Way We Weren't").
• Eminently Enigmatic Race: Einstein's people are a total mystery; unlike the Ancients, their significantly-modified representatives in our dimension, their true nature remains completely unknown. The one example of their species we meet never removes his human disguise, is only able to communicate with Crichton via a dimension of his own creation, and implies that meeting on their own turf would be lethal. We have no idea if his powers are inborn or technological in nature, what the species really looks like, or even if Einstein is typical of the species. For good measure, Einstein spends most of his appearances playing his cards very close to his chest and mentions his species exactly once - without actually naming them.
• Emotion Eater: Maldis likes encouraging his prey to excesses of hatred and fear as an appetiser to the main course- their souls. Talikaa, meanwhile, prefers to provoke the dominant emotions of her victims to their logical extremes, and then literally extract those neural impulses as food.
• Emotion Suppression: Crichton spends the first half of season 4 taking drugs which are intended to suppress his love for Aeryn. She's... not happy when she finds out.
• The Empire: Scattered references are made to multiple, with one of the crew members actually being the deposed ruler of one, though the two most prominent (and powerful) are the Peacekeepers and Scarrans. The Peacekeepers are more of a Hegemonic Empire, using their immense military power to cow and/or force other worlds into obedience, under the stated goal of "peace" (hence their name). Their arch-rivals, the Scarrans, are a much more traditional example, freely invading and conquering other worlds and races, and are ruled by an Emperor.
• Enemy Civil War: Crichton and co. were planning on inciting one between the Scarrans two ally races, the administrative Kalish and the warlike Charrids, in order to serve as a distraction in order to escape with Scorpius. It works, although as always things are more complicated...
• Enemy Mine: Upon investigating the wreckage of the Zelbinion, Crichton and Aeryn are forced to join with a surviving Peacekeeper (Gilina) when scavengers attack the ship. In the end, Gilina agrees not to report their whereabouts to Crais, regardless of her oath.
  • Played straight in the "Liars, Guns, and Money" trilogy, when Moya's crew organize various aliens who have tried to kill them in the past to pull off a heist.
  • Zig-zagged with John and Scorpius, multiple times. John pretends to team up with Scorpius, then John is forced to team up with Scorpius to save Aeryn (twice), then Scorpius seems to have betrayed them but really hasn't, then John betrays Scorpius only to have to go back and save him again. And then they end up teaming up with Scorpius again in the miniseries, against John's better judgment.
  • Harvey saves Crichton from being Mind Raped by Scarrans in "Won't Get Fooled Again" and from Getting Smilies Painted on His Soul in "A Clockwork Nebari," because Scorpius can't risk allowing the wormhole knowledge in Crichton's brain being destroyed or falling into someone else's hands.
• Enemy Within: Crichton, when possessed by Harvey.
• Energy Beings: The Energy Riders, who live in electromagnetic clusters. Sometimes, a diseased rider sneaks away on a passing ship by possessing the body of a crew member. Possession appears to be very, very addictive. Also, Mu-Quillus could change form from energy to matter, and reside within a star.
• Episode of the Dead: The episode "Eat Me" is an Out-of-Genre Experience into outright horror that has Crichton and friends trapped on a diseased, dying Leviathan full of cannibalistic zombie-like beings. It finally mutates into a Slasher Movie when the real villain behind the situation turns up.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Say what you want about the Peacekeepers, they are nothing if not diverse: Mixed-gender battle units (with several female officers depicted on-screen), and a wide variety of skin tones. Contrast with ordinary humans, who — as D'Argo points out — discriminate and make war against members of their own species.
• Erotic Eating: While attempting to convince him to grant her amnesty from Salis, Chiana seductively bites a food cube Crichton sticks though the bars of her cell.
  • Sikozu did a bit of this in "Bad Timing" while sharing a meal with Scorpius, if the amount of time she spent licking the spoon was any evidence.
• Establishing Character Moment: For Crais in the Episode 8 "That Old Black Magic", where he nonchalantly breaks his subordinates neck to keep his secret. He was shown to be a complete asshole before, but this one cements his role as a villain in-universe.
• "Eureka!" Moment: While John racks his brain trying to figure out how to save Earth from the Scarrans in "Bad Timing" (the final episode of the regular series), he laments that there's not enough time. "It's always about time.", Aeryn replies. Because of the way she phrased it, Crichton is hit with an idea on how to collapse the wormhole; he kisses her, tells her to "Never change!", and runs out.
• Even Evil Has Standards: At the end of Peacekeeper Wars, the Peacekeepers and Scarrans are forced to experience the atrocity that is a Wormhole Weapon, enough that Grayza and Staleek are forced to call off the war.
  • On a civilization-sized scale, the Peacekeepers are oppressive bastards who kill by the rules and use entire cultures to their own advantage in a desperate plot to keep order, however they are a lot better than the Scarrans who rape, kill, slaughter, and (this in spades) torture all in an attempt to dominate the galaxy. This is made abundantly clear particularly from Scorpius' perspective when he flashed-back to his past. You know things are bad when Scorpius is so disgusted and sickened by what the Scarrans did that he went on an extensive Magnificent Bastard manipulating spree to gain control of the Peacekeepers JUST TO STOP THEM! Oh, and the more intelligent the Scarrans are, the worse they get (as in, more intelligence = more ambition to gain power + more inventive ways to torture people!)
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: "Through the Looking Glass".
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: The ending to "Different Destinations". What's worse, it's the heroes' fault due to changing history, and just to twist the knife, the "everybody" in question was a monastery full of NURSES. With kids.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Pilot, who is named after his function aboard Moya. This trope even extends to the rest of his species. It is never revealed if he even has a personal name, but presumably his own kind have some way of differentiating each other. It's revealed that Pilot language is so fantastically dense and complex that translator microbes just give up on it until they simplify their sentences. It would thus be nothing for them to address each other with full descriptions that left little doubt who they were talking to, similar to someone saying "I am doing fine, Caucasian male in a charcoal gray suit with thin purple tie who works in my department and is currently standing to the left of the water cooler." and not having it take forever or be awkward.
• Evil Matriarch: Neera, an ambitious priestess who pressures her son to marry Lishala, daughter of the village chief ("Jeremiah Crichton").
• Evil Sorcerer: Maldis.
• Evil Versus Evil: The Peacekeeper-Scarran War.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Namtar, right down to expressing approval for Joseph Mengele.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • During the first season of Farscape, the episodes weren't originally titled. The producers instead inserted "placeholder" titles, such as "PK Tech Girl" or "DNA Mad Scientist", into their shooting schedule. When the fans started clamoring for actual titles, Henson and O'Bannon fell back on their old placeholder names.
  • On Nebari Prime, the establishment is literally called "The Establishment".
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: Several ships had this, especially when they were malfunctioning. One particularly bad-ass sequence that was used in the opening had John and D'Argo walking in slow-motion through a steaming corridor. Near the end of Season 3, an imploding space-ship has steam going off all over, leading to some prime horror, as one strikes an old childhood friend of Aeryn's, who is just about to shoot her, and burns the flesh off her face.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Rygel once had many wives, before he was deposed and ended up with the rest of our refugees.
• Explosion Propulsion
• Explosive Decompression: In "Dream a Little Dream", when Zhaan has a nightmare about Crichton floating in space, his spacesuit visor cracking, and his head going pop, Outland-style. However, the series otherwise averts the trope on repeated occasions when characters are shown exposed to the vacuum of space with no consequences. By the start of Season 4, D'Argo, Rygel, Noranti and Crichton had all been exposed to space, with Crichton actually surviving exposure for a minute-and-a-half wearing nothing more than civvies ("Look at the Princess").
• Explosive Instrumentation: Lampshaded. "Haven't you people ever heard of fuses?!"
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Fresh from his "mental cleansing" at the hands of the Nebari, Durka returns with long hair and an eyepatch, now claiming to be reformed. As Crichton remarks, though, cleansing "doesn't get the tough stains out."; Durka eventually snaps back to his old self, as shown by his immediate (and symbolic) cutting of the hair.
  • Also, by the time we see her again in the Peacekeeper Wars, Sikozu's hair has gone from long and curly to short and spiky, signifying her Face–Heel Turn. And in the comics, it is swiftly returned to its series' version as she once again goes neutral.
  • Jool has blonde hair that turns bright red when she's upset. The first time we see this is when she's holding a pulse rifle and planning to murder Crichton to avenge her cousin.
• Express Delivery: Aeryn goes from barely showing to full-term pregnant in around a week's time in-universe; Hand Waved by Aeryn mention that Sebecean soldiers are genetically designed to come to term in a matter of a week or so and give birth in minutes (not to mention how pregnancy can be in stasis for seven years without growing in size—my, but that military is efficient). In the miniseries, Grayza is shown as fully pregnant when two months earlier she hadn't been at all, for the same reason.
• Extended Disarming: In one of several peace negotiations seen in-series, Aeryn is stopped by security and forced to give up her pulse pistol. They continue to frisk her in the background as the scene continues, and end up with a knee-high pile of guns by the time she is finally let through.
• Eye Scream: "A Clockwork Nebari" had a particular scene. "DNA Mad Scientist" had it in quantity: three successive, close-up shots of eyes getting jabbed by needles. Also, Natira's fascination with eyes - she plucks out one of Rorf's and is a few seconds away from doing the same to Crichton before events conspire to stop her. Then there's Scorpius' revenge against Tauza, in which he blinds her by jamming both halves of his snapped coolant rod into her eyes.
• Faceless Goons: Peacekeeper commandos. The few, the proud, the expendable.
  • Similarly done with the Charrids. Having established that Scarrans are pretty much Immune to Bullets, it was necessary to have them ally with a race that did not share this vulnerability, thus allowing shoot-outs to ensue.
    • Lampshaded when, as part of a ploy to start a riot between the Charrids and Kalish, John says that a couple of Charrids were responsible for he and Aeryn accessing an off-limits part of the base. When asked to identify which Charrids, Aeryn and John point out that they do, in fact, all look alike.
• Face Palm: In "Liars, Guns and Money", the mercenary Bekhesh performs a face(plate)palm when Stark explains that his plan to attack the Shadow Depository relies on a silent count—in the middle of a shootout with the guards.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Going home; double-subverted twice near the end of the series.
• Fake First Kiss: Twice in the first season, in the episodes, The Flax and A Human Reaction. In both situations, John and Aeryn thought they were about to be killed.
• Fake Guest Star: Jool, Noranti, and Sikozu on Farscape. Actresses Melissa Jaffer and Raelee Hill, who played Noranti and Sikozu respectively, were credited as guest stars even in the small handful of Season 4 episodes they didn't appear in.
  • Not to mention Jonathan Hardy, though this is somewhat justified in that he's a voice actor. Still, he appeared in every single episode of the show.
    • Same for Lani Tupu, who was only credited as a regular during Crais' run in Season 3, despite providing the voice of Pilot in nearly every episode.
• Faking the Dead: Even the humongous D'Argo isn't above playing dead in order to ambush a clueless Peacekeeper.
  • Durka faked his death for real, placing a dead crewmember in the Zelbinion's command chair before abandoning his ship. To the outside observer, it appeared that Durka shot himself during the Nebari siege.
  • In "Won't Get Fooled Again", Harvey helps Crichton escape his Scarran captor by temporarily stopping his heart. Once the torturer is convinced that his subject has died, Crichton then sets his pulse pistol to overload; when the Scarran comes over to inspect the noise, Crichton jams the muzzle into his mouth, blowing his head off.
  • "A Clockwork Nebari" reveals that Nery faked his death, presumably to protect Chiana.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: Skreeth gets a faceful of this trope. (Subverted when he shrugs it off.)
• Famed In-Story: By the end of the second season, the group's reputation has grown so much that people recognise them by sight. Although the viewers know Moya's crew only survive by the seat of their pants, everyone they meet is quite impressed that a ragtag bunch of ex-cons have seemingly managed to piss off every government in the sector. As a result, word has gotten around about their exploits, though the stories are a bit... exaggerated, in some respects.
  • First, in "Suns and Lovers":
  Borlik: You know, I heard he destroyed a Peacekeeper Gammak Base, murdered an entire Nebari battalion, even laid waste to a Shadow Depository. The guy was a devil: he raped and pillaged, he popped eyeballs—
  Crichton: Whoa-whoa! Where do they get these stories? Let's set the facts straight. First off, there was no raping, very little pillaging, and Frau Blücher popped all the eyeballs.
  • And again in "Scratch and Sniff":
  D'Argo: (hesitantly) You... have heard of us?
  Raxil: Yeah, I've heard stories. But obviously they aren't worth a bucket of dren!
  • Towards the end of the series, it's revealed that the reputation of Moya's crew has been a major impediment to Peacekeeper diplomacy, as planets under Peacekeeper control have started losing respect for a military dictatorship that can't stop one tiny ship
  • This works IN the crew's favor by the end of the comic books, as they and their views on Peacekeepers and Scarrans are now widely-known throughout the Uncharted Territories.
• Fanservice: The first episode after John gets taken on board the Leviathan he is put into one of the cells (it's a prison ship, after all) and is stripped of his clothing. Like, all his clothing. Probably also gets into Mr. Fanservice.
  • Jool and Chiana's dance routine in "Scratch 'n' Sniff".
  • Fan Disservice: From "Won't Get Fooled Again", Two words: Rygel, gimpsuit.
• Fantastic Arousal: The Hynerian earbrow is very sensitive.
  • Zhaan's "photogasms". As Pilot put it "She's a plant. Put her in the light and watch her smile."
• Fantastic Drug: The Tavleks each wear a projectile-firing gauntlet which automatically attaches to your arm via a locking brace and giant needles. These inject the host with a stimulant which imbues them with super-strength, but also makes them aggressive and immune to logic. It's addictive too, so good luck convincing a friend to remove the gauntlet voluntarily.
  • Freslin, a recreational drug used throughout "Scratch n' Sniff"; can be used as an aphrodisiac, or to disguise people with pheromones. Unfortunately, it's milked from a particular gland in the bodies of sentient beings. As a result, Jool and Chiana end up on the receiving end of a local drug-dealer's harvest.
• Fantastic Racism: Sebaceans are taught at an early age that interspecies marriages are wrong and that "the blood lines must remain pure" - meaning that any children from those unions are evil. Said hybrid children are ostracized (at best) and restricted from Peacekeeper service. (Scorpius' service is explicitly stated to be a very rare instance.)
  • And yet, high-ranking officers have no qualms about, say, taking a Nebari woman as a concubine. Peacekeeper regulations are flexible, I guess. Just like Counselor Troi.
    • Or that's just down to Screw the Rules, I Make Them!. Scorpius of course is due to Pragmatic Villainy; he's pretty much the only edge the Peacekeepers have over the Scaarans.
  • Also, while researching wormholes Scorpius employed at least 2 obviously non-Sebaceans. This was probably because at this point Peacekeeper High Command lets Scorpius have leeway to do what he wants.
  • It is revealed that Charrids and Hynerians have a mutual loathing for each other, because of a genocidal war between them that happened a few hundred cycles in the past.
  • Also, there is tension between the Charrids and the Kalish, which the Moya crew is able to take advantage of during the "We're So Screwed" trilogy.
  • Everyone seems to think Luxans are dumb beasts. Admittedly, they're Proud Warrior Race Guys, but they're shown to have a complex culture and Lo'laa (presumably a Luxan ship, as its default language was Ancient Luxan) is easily the most technologically advanced ship we see in the series.
    • Even more explicit in "The Peacekeeper Wars" when Jothee rescues D'Argo and Chiana while they're floating in space after War Minister Akhna has Lo'La destroyed. As he explains, Luxan cloaking technology is so much more advanced than that of Scarrans that they could park right next to the Scarran ship and no one would notice.
  • Lampshaded in "Won't Get Fooled Again", when nobody but Crichton sees the aliens as...well, aliens.
  Crichton: On Earth, psychiatrists don't come in blue.
  Zhaan: Do you have a problem with people of color?
  Crichton: Stop. You're an alien.
  Zhaan: Yes, that's true. But I do have a green card.
  • Sometimes, the colour of a character's skin is used as an insult against them, such as Rygel referring to Zhaan as a "blue-arsed bitch" and Jool referring to Chiana as a "monochromatic little bitch".
• Fantastic Rank System: The Peacekeepers use naval ranks to some degree, but also include Officer and Superior Officer as actual ranks. Luxons have a rank called Kleeva, which other than a leadership role also boils down to being The Smart Guy who comes up with all the plans.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Peacekeepers have a serious early Soviet vibe going on, including prominent use of the color red, Cyrillic letters used on PK displays, their logo being straight-up based on a revolutionary painting, and Crais's backstory of being conscripted from a farming commune. Their actual ideology, however, belies this, as a military way of life and genetic purity requirements are more in character for Those Wacky Nazis.
• Fartillery:
  • While exploring a mental video game created from Crichton's memories in the episode John Quixote, Crichton and Chiana bump into a simulation of Rygel (the "Black Knight") who barks "None shall pass!". Though Crichton is amused at first, the situation turns serious when he and Chiana try to walk around the small knight. Unlike Rygel's typical helium farts, this version farts gigantic flames.
  • Rygel's gastronomic tract is laden with chemicals that, should he ingest a tannot root (the source of Chakran Oil, which is used as ammo), cause his bodily secretions to ignite. All of them. You haven't lived until you've watched a Muppet laying siege to a horde of cultists by PEEING NITRO at them.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel:
  • "Hetch Drive" is dirt cheap and available to everyone, "Starburst" is available to Leviathans, but wormholes - which act as a metadimensional Portal Network - can only be utilized with the assistance of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, which they don't give lightly for really good reasons... All three types, present and accounted for.
  • Hetch Drive and Starburst are both more like Warp Drive than Teleporters and Transporters. Hetch Drive is never explained, but fans frequently assume that it involves accelerating to faster-than-light speeds, and contextual clues in some episodes support this (the Peacekeepers are able to catch up with Moya, but we never see a Command Carrier exiting hyperspace or anything so dramatic, they just cruise along); Starburst involves a Leviathan ripping a hole in space-time and entering another dimension, where it rides an energy wave until the wave dissipates and the Leviathan re-emerges into normal space-time. Starburst is also fairly inaccurate as FTL travel goes, thus being more useful for getting away from trouble (in keeping with Leviathans' peaceful nature) and covering large distances quickly than in getting anywhere specific. Wormholes have much more potential than just space travel. One can use them to travel through time or "sideways" into alternate realities, and with enough knowledge wormholes can also be turned into superweapons capable of destroying... pretty much anything. Or everything.
  • Another weird faster-than-light-related moment is in "Dog With Two Bones" when Crichton, in his module, watches Aeryn fly away... except that rather than just flying away, or having her Proweler enter some kind of warp/hyperspace portal, her ship just sort of fades away into a mist, like a more subtle, organic, slower starburst. The show never made it clear whether this was some kind of Peacekeeper FTL technology, a never-before-seen-on-screen effect of hetch drive, or an abstract way of depicting the emotion John felt.
• Fate Worse than Death: Season 2 finale, for John. He got better, of course.
  • Chiana would "rather be dead" than undergo Nebari mental cleansing ("Durka Returns").
  • The whole crew takes a high probability of death over a certainty of being trapped in the mist and obliged to garden (long story) in "The Locket."
  • In "Mental as Anything," Macton wants to mentally trap D'Argo within his rage while forcing him to constantly relive the death of his wife (under the implicit belief that it was instead his fault all along). This works very briefly, but D'Argo is able to overcome it, reveal that Macton really did murder her and trap him instead.
  • Maldis was dispersed by Zhaan and left as a disembodied mind trying to pull his body back together again. He describes the experience as "Less than pleasant."
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: In "Liars, Guns, And Money Part 1", Stark begins to panic once he realizes that his carefully planned Shadow Depository heist is spiralling out of control - especially since it means that Scorpius is now hot on the crew's collective tails - resulting in his Mission Control beginning to deteriorate. This comes to ahead when Zhaan and Chiana find themselves trapped at a doorway with guards closing in, whereupon Stark freaks out and smashes the console he was using to help the others, forcing D'Argo to knock him out, then put the whole console together again from scratch in record time.
• Femme Fatale: Grayza, Matala and Jenavian in the series; the miniseries reveals Sikozu as one.
• Fictional Counterpart: The International Aeronautics and Science Administration! (IASA)
  • Which is especially funny when Moya et al get to Earth and it's made clear that IASA is a solely American institution, given that they refuse to share alien tech with anyone else
• Fiery Redhead: Jool (although her hair is usually blonde, it turns red when she's angry and/or nervous) and Sikozu.
• Find the Cure!: After being stabbed by a Peacekeeper's knife, Aeryn later learns her wound is more serious than she thought: she requires a tissue transplant to replace the nerve, or she'll die. The crew determines that the only transplant donor to be had is deep within a Peacekeeper base.
• Fingore: When Grunchlk shows reluctance to tell Scorpius what he knows, Scorpius uses a mind-control device to force him to bite off the tip of his own finger.
  • One of the demonstrations of application of Sikozu's ability to reattach her lost extremities.
• Fire-Forged Friends: John Crichton and Ka D'Argo. In the first season, D'argo tries to kill Crichton several times, and in "Till the Blood Runs Clear", Crichton even says, "We're never going to be friends... We can be allies." After fighting side by side for a couple seasons, they end up being closer than brothers. To a lesser extent, this rings true for the rest of the crew on Moya over the years. Literally forced together through circumstance and picking up strays along the way, the group started out barely tolerating one another and seeking to advance themselves at the cost of the others. By the end, with the things they had suffered through together, even the most selfish like Rygel had gone through fire and blood for their friends.
• First Contact: Inverted a few times — "I, E.T." and "Jeremiah Crichton" from the first season — where the characters land on planets that don't know about other aliens. Played straight in the last season.
  • The people in "Jeremiah Crichton" were aware of aliens as they themselves weren't native to the planet they lived on, having been trapped there for a few generations. However, they were not that aware - at one point mistaking D'Argo for a "man-creature" conjured up by Crichton.
• First Gray Hair: Crichton finds one in "A Human Reaction". Not that the rest of the episode actually grants him the time to ponder the significance.
• Fish out of Water: John is initially completely lost in his new alien surroundings. Zhaan is at least patient enough to advise him and offer consolation when he doesn't understand something. The rest of the cast mostly just think he's an idiot. He does eventually learn how to handle his new environment and by the time he finds a way back to Earth he discovers he no longer fits in there.
• Fish People: The wormhole-researching Pathfinders in the Farscape two-part episode "Self-Inflicted Wounds".
  • Oo-Nii in another two-parter, "What Was Lost".
  • Not to mention Rygel's people, Hynerians, who are specifically stated to be aquatic.
• Five-Finger Discount:
  • Eager to see what's in the Peacekeepers' locked crate, Chiana pockets the key from Thorn while flirting with him, then moulds a duplicate ("A Bug's Life"). In the same episode, she also steals a PK captain's identchip. In "Liars, Guns and Money, Part II," she wants to take "just enough that no one notices" from their bank haul; in "The Locket," she searches Aeryn's pod for hidden treasure and is revealed to have given her a stolen locket... to make up for, ahem, borrowing Aeryn's prowler and smashing it; and in "A Human Reaction," Zhaan is accusing her of stealing something from Zhaan's quarters (which Chi eventually admits).
  • Chiana's got some competition from Rygel over the Peacekeeper crate and bank money. He also tries to take a tape recorder from John in the pilot, steals a vital component of Moya in "Throne for a Loss," and nearly gets killed looting some rebels' supplies in "Lava's a Many Splendored Thing."
• Flanderization: Actually invoked and then inverted, in-universe, in "Twice Shy." A Giant Spider injects the crew with a toxin that exaggerates their defining traits (D'Argo's anger, Chiana's sex drive, etc.) and then removes them entirely in order to feed on them later, leaving Aeryn an emotional wreck and Crichton a pessimistic, hopeless lump.
• Flashback with the Other Darrin: Borderline example: D'Argo's appearance changed dramatically between the finale of Season 1 and the opening of Season 2, but his prosthetics clash with the original look of the flashbacks in Season 4. There were plans to return D'Argo to his Season 1 makeup purely for the flashbacks, but there wasn't enough time.
• Flying Cutlery Spaceship:
  • The jet-black Peacekeeper Prowlers look like a cross between a dart and vicious black hornet, though the most often seen example of one in the series is a stolen fighter operated by the heroes.
  • Also from Farscape, from "The Peacekeeper Wars," the horseshoe crab-like Scarran fighters, Strykers, and especially the Scarran Emperor's flagship, the sleek, silver Decimator, which actually carried multiple nuclear warhead launchers in its forward spines.
• Force Feeding: In "Crackers Don't Matter," D'Argo forcefeeds Rygel an entire box of crackers in a fit of rage after catching him sneaking a few as a snack. This is an early warning that the crew is not themselves.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Occurs during the death scene of one of the John Crichtons.
• Foreign Queasine: Rygel loves to eat various disgusting-looking foods that he proclaims to be delicious. To be fair, Rygel will eat anything, including a man’s nose. The only thing he draws the line at is fungus and mold.
• Foreshadowing: Delvians being a race of sentient plants is foreshadowed with Zhaan's "photogasms", her blood resembling sap and a throwaway mention of fibres, rather than bones, in her body.
  • Crichton's flashes of a wacky version of Scorpius in "Crackers Don't Matter" is treated as a hallucination brought on by T'raltixx's influence. Several episodes later, it turns out that Scorpius implanted a neural clone of his personality (Harvey) into Crichton's brain.
  • In a similar vein to the above, Crichton's reactions to things around him following his interrogations in the Aurora Chair are slightly... off. This is due to Harvey's presence, and he finally completely loses it towards the end of Season 2, as well as having Harvey take over his body.
  • In yet another similar vein, Scorpius is seen playing with a metal ball in "Mind the Baby". A ball that looks exactly the same is being played with by Crichton in "Beware of Dog".
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: In "Terra Firma", an assassin tortures and kills Crichton's childhood friend DK and his wife, and it's literally never mentioned again except a throwaway reference at the end of "Constellation of Doubt".
  • Likewise, Crais is rarely acknowledged after his and Talyn's Heroic Sacrifice, aside from a throwaway reference in "Dog With Two Bones".
  • Averted with Zhaan, who is referenced several times after her death.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: Zhaan is capable of camouflaging herself like a chameleon, but only uses this ability in two episodes: "Til the Blood Runs Clear", against desert sand, and against a forest backdrop in "Bone to Be Wild". She is also seen moving her hands in super-speed in "Premiere", another handy skill that she would never use again.
  • D'Argo's super-long tongue and tranquilizer saliva gets forgotten every fifth episode or so. His arms and legs are bound, while his captor gloats nearby without a helmet. Whatever shall he do? The funniest example is when John asks him to knock him out in "A Prefect Murder", and D'Argo Pistol Whips him. And it doesn't work. John asks him to hit him again harder. Then again, knowing that this is Farscape, it's equally likely that D'Argo did remember and just wanted to hit John.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In "Kansas", after the crew accidentally lands in 1985 Earth. They use the fortuitous happenstance of arriving a few hours before Halloween to disguise their alien features. Needless to say, the heroes find a way to bungle even this up.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Ancients; most notably "Einstein" and "Jack" (a facsimile of Crichton's father).
• Framing the Guilty Party: Gilina manages to sabotage the Aurora Chair minutes before Crichton is placed back into it, thereby manipulating the images gleaned from Crichton's mind. As Scorpius looks on, Crais is shown on the viewscreen secretly conspiring with Crichton in order to keep the wormhole information for himself. Crais sputters, realizing the memories are fake, and tries throttling the truth out of Crichton. Grinning, Crichton persists in the lie, telling Crais that the game's up. Scorpius says there is only one way to find out the truth, and that is to put Crais in the Chair.
  • Also in the episode "Dream A Little Dream": when Zhaan is framed for a murder on Litigara, a planet where the majority of people are involved in the legal profession, Rygel and Chiana manage to frame the actual murderer (who had all but confessed it to Chiana in a threatening meeting at his law firm) by using a long-unused but traditional Litigaran device called "the light of truth", a torchlike rod that can supposedly detect lying by lighting up at one end (but the concept is considered an archaic parable). Pilot and Moya assist by beaming a narrow beam of light to that exact spot from orbit while Chiana grills the murderer on the stand as a witness, convincing the court that this "witness" was lying in evading a line of questioning that pointed toward his guilt.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: In "Out of Their Minds"
  • This episode was a somewhat atypical example of the trope, in that they actually mentioned (and showed) the characters taking the totally logical step of getting acquainted with their new equipment. Oh momma! This episode is also notable for their solution to the problem of remembering who is in what body — printing name tags with their real faces and wearing them around their necks. After the second body-switch happens, there's a few moments of them trading nametags.
    • Especially notable for the acting. The actors, even the puppeteers and voice actors, nailed each other's vocal inflections and body movements impressively, all the more impressive considering that some characters (notably, Pilot and Rygel) aren't shaped at all like the other characters played by human actors.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: While Crichton and Aeryn are caught in the Flax, believed to be dead, D'Argo embarks with Staanz on a mission to salvage a Luxan Piercer ship which might contain maps that can point him to Jothee's whereabouts. However, when they finally get there, D'Argo remembers that the transport pod the two were on has a reserve oxygen tank; with the Piercer next in line for smelting and the reserve tank not due to last very long, D'Argo has to choose between the two. Eventually, he opts to rescue Crichton and Aeryn, stating that if he ever does find his son, he wants to be able to look him in the eye.
• Friends with Benefits: Aeryn tries to have one of these with John, but he turns her down because he's in love with her.
  John: You know what? I got two hands, I can alternate, I can release all the tension I want. I don't need your charity.
  Aeryn: And I don't need your emotions.
  • This is typical practice among Peacekeepers, with those in charge even encouraging it as a way for troops to take care of their physical needs.
• Frog Men:
  • The toad-like Hynerians, who also happen to be amphibious.
  • The Sheyang look like giant anthropomorphic toads
• From Bad to Worse: With literally only one or two exceptions, pretty much the entirety of season 3 is one long bout of this. Producer David Kemper even joked about the season 3 premiere "Season of Death", saying that they used that phrase as a reminder when plotting the rest of the episodes.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: As his name suggests, NamTar was actually a lab specimen whose intelligence was increased by his Mad Scientist captor Kornata. NamTar eventually learned to use the laboratory machines to increase his size, and took over the lab for himself. After Kornata rebels and injects him with a serum that reverses his numerous augmentations, NamTar reverts back to his original (and tiny) self.
  • Scorpius, who started out as yet another horribly mistreated hybrid, before escaping, wandering the galaxy for several years, joining the Peacekeepers as a scientist, and eventually ascending to the rank of fleet commander.
  • John Crichton definitely qualifies as far as Scorpius, Crais and the Peacekeepers are concerned.
• FTL Test Blunder: opens with one of humanity's first FTL tests Going Horribly Right. The test craft opens a wormhole and is thrown into a distant sector of space, but test pilot John Crichton is unable to reproduce the results and return home.
• Future Me Scares Me: After being absorbed and ejected by an unknown alien sphere, John is confronted by two clones of himself: "Futuro", an evolved human with a visible brain and green skin, and the self-explanatory "Neandro". Futuro's higher intellect, however, also gives him looser morals. After determining that he will never be accepted on Moya with Crichton still around, Futuro tries to murder his counterpart, but is beaten back by Neandro. The 'past' version of Crichton sacrifices himself by reentering the sphere whilst carrying Futuro, ironically showing himself to be the most 'evolved' one between them.
• Future Slang: Though it's not the future, is frelling full of this type of dren. Chiana's such a tralk, but everyone thinks with their mivonks around her. Isn't it the draddest? It does get a little fahrbot sometimes, and sometimes you wonder what the yotz people are talking about, but you'll get over it after an arn or two.
  • Technically justified, as it's not future slang, but slang from other cultures. Even on earth, not every cuss or slang term is the same or universally recognized, so why should cultures that have never had contact with the Sol System use our various sayings? Heck, a running gag is that nobody understands Chrichton sometimes because his sayings are so bizarre to them.
  Crichton: Slicker then snot.
  Aeryn: My microbes had to have translated that wrong.
• Gambit Pileup: The "Look at the Princess" trilogy. The Empress (wants Katralla on the throne) vs. the Scarrans (want Clavor on the throne) vs. the Peacekeeper Special Directorate (want anyone but Clavor on the throne) vs. Scorpius (doesn't give a good frell who's on the throne, as long as he gets Crichton).
• Gas Chamber: "Staleek, this is very unoriginal!" — used in the second season Look at the Princess trilogy, too.
• Gaslighting: "Won't Get Fooled Again." Crichton suspects it from the start and even tells Zhaan "Someone's gaslighting me!" At one point, he's lying handcuffed to an earth medical table, and Crais walks in wearing a police uniform. Accessorized by red high-heels and carrying a dog he calls "Toto":
  Officer Crais: Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in?
  Crichton: ...Yeah, do you?
  Officer Crais: I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer, theft of police property, illegal possession of a firearm, five counts of attempted murder, that comes to... twenty-nine dollars and forty cents. Cash? Check? Or credit card?
• Gender-Separated Ensemble Episode: The gender subplots are separated into two different episodes: "Mental as Anything" for the guys and "Bringing Home the Beacon" for the girls.
• General Ripper: Selto Durka.
• Genetic Memory: Kaarvok had a wrist-mounted device that "twinned" his target, creating a duplicate that was perfect in every way. Exactly how it worked isn't precise — it had been a subatomic-particle-by-particle reconstruction rather than genetic memory—but the memory and personality were identical. It's just that kind of show.
  • For some reason, the Scarrans believe that they can extract wormhole knowledge from an embryo in Aeryn's womb. The kid doesn't even have a brain yet. Give it a break.
• Genius Bruiser: Crichton can handle himself in a fight, and despite the crew's harping on his human shortcomings, he's actually one of the smarter characters on the show, considering he designed his own test module as well as the experiment it's used in at the beginning of the series. He's hapless, but not at all stupid. Their thinking he's dumb seems to stem from his being confused by their technology - when in all likelihood he wouldn't be confused if someone would just spend five minutes explaining the different terms to him.
• Genre Savvy: Crichton has seen it all in science fiction — to the point that there was a site dedicated to all the pop-culture references.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: everyone does this to Stark at one time or another. At the start they usually had to knock him unconscious to get him to stop, but by the end he's... a little more stable.
• Get Back to the Future: The plot of "...Different Destinations" combines this with Set Right What Once Went Wrong. It doesn't work.
• Getting Hot in Here: The Drak Monarch decides to lay eggs and hatch its young in Moya, simultaneously increasing the heat to incubate the eggs properly. Aeryn ends up going into heat delirium (a potentially fatal condition her species is susceptible to); she does her best to lower her body temperature by removing some clothing, followed by taking a cold shower. Since heat delirium is apparently an unpleasant way to go, this is not played for fanservice.
  • Much.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Chiana's people do this routinely as part of their "cleansing" process. One means of doing it involves pulling out the eyeball and installing a chip on the optic nerve. This is shown in graphic detail.
• Ghost Ship: The Zelbinion. Also Rovhu (shudders).
• Gilded Cage: Crichton refers to it by name when describing the luxurious house provided for him and the crew of Moya by the [[United States]] government in "Terra Firma".
• Gilligan Cut: In "Look at the Princess, part 2", Novia tells Rygel that she trusts her servant ro-NA with her life. The scene immediately cuts to ro-NA selling out Crichton to Scorpius.
• Girl of the Week: Many of the regulars occasionally achieve this. Particularly notable examples:
  • For D'Argo, Matala in "Back and Back and Back to the Future" and Nilaam in "Vitas Mortis".
  • "Look at the Princess" has both Jenavian for John and Drogyn for Aeryn.
  • Chiana has Molnon in "Taking the Stone" and Hubero in "Fractures".
  • "Fractures" also has Naj Gil for Jool and Orrhn for Rygel.
  • Sikozu has a somewhat-OOC relationship with Gerbat in "A Prefect Murder".
• Girl on Girl Is Hot / Guy on Guy Is Hot: a phenomenon of John's hallucinations, in both gender variants. In the slash-parody scene in "Won't Get Fooled Again", with D'Argo coming on to John, there's a reference to Chiana "wanting to watch". The other version happens in "John Quixote", where the evil VR version of Stark gets creepily enthusiastic about the idea of Chiana kissing the "princess".
  • A meta version of the girl-on-girl variant in "Twice Shy" when Chiana and Talika get...close. DEFINITELY Fanservice.
  • Kabaah in "Scratch n' Sniff" strays a bit long when re-playing Chiana and Jool dancing semi-erotically together in the bar when replaying the events of the previous night for Crichton, D'Argo, and Raxil. Raxil chides him for this and insists that he skip to later.
• Glitch Episode: "They've Got A Secret" features Moya suffering a cascade of glitches after D'Argo breaks one of her internal components: the freezer breaks down, chemical levels start going haywire, environment control fritzes out, Pilot faints, the DRDs turn violent, and Moya gives every impression that she's trying to kill the crew. As a result, Crichton comes to the conclusion that Moya has been infected by some kind of virus left by the Peacekeepers. In reality, it's because Moya is pregnant, courtesy of D'Argo breaking a contraceptive shield; the malfunctions were due to Moya diverting power to her baby, and the aggressive behaviour was prompted by the crew unwittingly threatening the child's safety.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: Three of them.
  • In "A Human Reaction", Crichton realizes that he never returned to Earth, and is inside a simulation based on his own memories. The Ancients can only recreate people and environments that John Crichton has seen before. Once he realizes this, a trip to the ladies' room brings the illusion crashing down.
  • "Won't Get Fooled Again": This time, Crichton has wised up, but the ladies' bathroom trick won't work. One thing he notices is that Harvey, Scorpius's neural clone, isn't part of the illusion. Harvey alerts him to the fact that he is a prisoner of the Scarrans, whose intense body heat John can sense through the hallucinations.
  • In "John Quixote", Crichton makes the mistake of playing a buggy VR game based on his own memories; once he leaves, he finds that Scorpius has taken over Moya and is brainwashing the crew against him. However, he realises that he's still playing the game when he finds a hint voucher in his pocket; plus, because the memories were copied over a year ago, Sikozu and Noranti are nowhere to be seen, and nobody knows anything about Aeryn's pregnancy.
• The Glomp: Chiana does a really spectacular one in "Mind the Baby", leaping about ten feet in the air before landing on her target.
  • Repeated in the first part of the Peacekeeper Wars movie.
• God Guise: In "Jeremiah Crichton", Crichton is marooned on a planet which turns out to have religious iconography drawn from contact with the Rygel's race, the Hynerians. Surprisingly for the shallow ex-monarch, while Rygel expects to be treated like royalty, he is actually profoundly offended that his ancestors would allow themselves to be taken for divinity. He's even more shocked when he discovers that the ancient Hynerians actually intended this: the natives of the planet were the loyal subjects of one of Rygel's ancestors, marooned on the planet with no way of escaping, advancing technologically, or even contacting other cultures — all so they could act as eternal worshipers of the Hynerian empire.
• Godzilla Threshold: In Peacekeeper Wars, John's finally had enough. Sick and tired of trying to reason and figure things out with the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans - holds the entire galaxy to ransom with the wormhole weapon.
• Gollum Made Me Do It: Harvey gradually encroaches into Crichton's mind, ultimately turning him into a Manchurian Agent with no "off" switch.
• Gone Horribly Right: Namtar was originally a lab animal that was part of an experiment in intelligence increase. He eventually got so smart he was able to take over the lab, build himself a better body, and turn the researchers into Igors.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: D'Argo has a prominent one which stretches from his right upper brow to his 'beak'-nose. Durka, in contrast, has a giant scar surrounding the right side of his face and eye. Also, the left side of Xhalax's head is very badly scarred (possibly as a result of being burned) and she is missing her left ear. D'Argo's son, Jothee, also has a scar on his nose, the result of self-mutilation due to his hatred of his Luxan heritage.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Furlow is perpetually-seen puffing on cigars.
  • Harvey also keeps injecting cigarettes into his communiques with John later in the series.
  John: What have I told you about smoking inside my head?!
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Sikozu has the ability to reattach lost extremities. Given her tendency to have her arms, legs, and fingers chopped off quite frequently, it's a useful trait.
  • Pilot once has this trope forced upon him by the rest of the crew, because NamTar had demanded one of his limbs in exchange for assistance.
• Go Out with a Smile: Beautifully done in "Icarus Abides": After absorbing a lethal amount of radiation, Crichton (one of them) delivers one of the most heartbreaking lines in the series: "Don't worry about me, I've never felt better."
• Gorgeous Gorgon: Invoked Scorpius' old friend/lover/mentor, a blue crustacean "shadow banker" by the name of Natira who specializes in storing stolen goods and eye-popping torture. Crichton even calls her "Medusa," as her head is wreathed in spiky claws she can deploy at will.
• Gorn: Pops up a few times in "Home on the Remains", most notably when B'Sogg's arm starts to melt, complete with a shot of his flesh wetly hitting the floor. It was this, along with two headbutts, that caused the BBFC to give the episode an 18 rating.
• Graceful in Their Element: Rygel underwater.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: One for every color in the rainbow, with two of them included in the core cast.
• Grilling the Newbie: Jool and Sikozu get this treatment as newcomers. Neither of them are particularly forthcoming. Crais gets it when he deserts, too.
• The Grotesque: Subverted with Kornata, who is first presented as NamTar's Igor-like assistant. In truth, she is a brilliant scientist who was subjugated by her own lab rat.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "Back and Back and Back to the Future".
• Grow Old with Me: Crichton and Aeryn gets this trope foisted on them in "The Locket". After being stranded in a time-displacing "mist", the pair spend fifty years together as a rural couple. Although neither of them can manage to spit it out and Aeryn has already been married in this timeline, the inside of her locket has Crichton's picture in it.
• Guile Hero: Egads, the examples. John Crichton himself is a great example. How many times did he walk into a base basically unarmed and through a series of godawful plans that should not have worked, destroy that said base? At one point, he straps on a nuclear bomb, proceeds to start a civil war and when that doessn't work, he drops said bomb down an elevator shaft and kills everyone chasing them so they can escape, while simultaneously destroying a flower that gets him out of a horrible deal with Scorpius.
• Guns Akimbo
• Gunboat Diplomacy: Utilized very subtly by Salis in Season 1 ("Durka Returns").
  D'Argo: You defeated a Peacekeeper Command Carrier? How many warships did it take?
  Salis: We have no warships. One of our standard host vessels engaged the Zelbinion, much like the one coming for us.
• Gunship Rescue: After Skreeth party-crashes the Crichton family's Christmas Eve party, the brawl comes to its festive finale when D'Argo lands his gunship on the front lawn and fires its cannons through the window.
  • Talyn often played this role in earlier episodes, such as "Thanks for Sharing" and the "Liars, Guns and Money" Trilogy.
    • Jothee and his ship come to the rescue in Peacekeeper Wars.

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