Phone Home
Episode 17 — Feb 14, 2003
“A Constellation of Doubt”
Phone HomeNow, there are some issues with this episode, so let’s get those out of the way, so we can move on.
This episode is almost entirely about Crichton watching a TV show made about his visit to Earth, showing how ambivalent and fearful the people of Earth are about the concept of alien visitation. Which is a fairly clever concept, except that it’s a whole hour of watching the main characters watch television, so whatever. That’s number one. Then there’s the issue of getting tapes of Earth television programs through the wormhole so Crichton can watch them, which seems amazingly casual to me. Wasn’t it, like, three minutes ago that Crichton was a million miles away from Earth and was never going to get back, and now he’s getting care packages from home? That’s number two, but I admit that’s nitpicky, so I’m over it already.
Issue number three — and this one is a little more substantial, for me — is that Crichton spends the whole episode shaking his head and clucking his tongue about the fact that everybody on Earth is a little put off by the idea of fantastically powerful aliens coming over and slaughtering / enslaving everyone. He keeps saying things like “You’re not ready,” and making like humans are being such babies about everything, but every time a human asks if there’s any reason to be scared, all the aliens say, oh, yeah, we’re a zillion times more advanced than you, and we could probably kill every person on the planet if we felt like it. Then everybody gets quite reasonably concerned about that, and the aliens say, oh, don’t worry, though. We don’t feel like it.
So what, precisely, is the response Crichton was hoping for? Did he want the entire population of Earth to just paint a big bullseye on the White House and wait for our new Scarran conquerors to arrive? (Note to myself: That’s actually not a bad idea. Bring that up at the next Earth staff meeting.)
I mean, even the other aliens don’t like the aliens on this show. I can’t think of a single planet we’ve seen so far that wasn’t full of people trying to kill the main characters. All the humans did was make a pretentious TV show about them, which seems like the most civilized response possible. Hey, who says those aliens are more advanced than us, anyway? Jeez.
But that’s not the thing I really want to talk about. The thing I want to talk about — all that other stuff aside — is that this was actually one of my favorite episodes that I’ve seen all season, and the other one was the other present-day Earth episode. In those two episodes, they managed to do something that they haven’t been able to do in any other episode this season — which is to make me care about a planet and the people who live there.
For all that everybody talks about the Scarrans on this show, we’ve only seen about two of them this whole season, and they were both tiresome and bitchy. I couldn’t care less about the big-haired barbarian people, or the guy who runs the mental arts training camp, or the space weed, or the neural-energy eating spider, or any of that. There hasn’t been a single alien character in any of the episodes this season that I would even walk across the street to visit. They’re all just selfish and violent and unpleasant, all the way down the line. Besides the regulars, I can’t think of a single alien character this whole season who’s been nice, or funny, or endearing in any way.
But I care about Crichton, who in my opinion is one of the Great TV Show Characters Of Our Time. He’s funny and sexy, he’s unpredictable, and he’s always watchable in every scene he’s in. I care about Aeryn, and I care about D’argo, and Chiana, and Rygel, and Noranti. And that’s about it. Those are the characters I like watching, and those are the people I’ll miss when the season’s over.
And — in the these two present-day episodes — I care about the Earth.
I like watching John’s sister and father, trying to do the right thing, and finding themselves caught between John and the rest of the world. I like nephew Bobby, who might be trying to defend the aliens, and might be a little weasel selling their secrets for cash. I like the idea of an investigation into the various alien murders on Earth, and I like watching Earth society picking over the little scraps of information they have and trying to figure out what to do about it all.
Now, maybe that would get old, but I wish they’d just stayed on Earth, and done the whole second half of the season there. Bring the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers to Earth for a while, and see what happens. Show me the religious iconography that springs up around Noranti, and show me Chiana on the cover of Tiger Beat. For me, at least, that beats tedious aliens with illogical political structures any day of the week.
I think it’s pretty clear that eventually all of this is heading towards a big battle over Earth — either the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans using Earth as a battleground, or joining together to conquer Earth and use it as leverage to get Crichton’s wormhole knowledge. Or something like that. Unfortunately, that was probably the plan for next season, so we’ll never see it.
That’s really frustrating for me, because it feels like all the messing around they’ve done on other planets has just been killing time, running out the clock until the season finale, so they can do The Big Thing next year.
Which would be fine, except there’s not going to be a next year. John Crichton, come home! We need you down here.
by Danny Horn
