ROWAN WOODS: Hey everybody, my name's Rowan Woods. I'm a psychic channeler employed by Farscape.

RICKY MANNING: And I'm Ricky Manning, I'm a typist and executive producer, whatever that means. And the writer of this episode of Farscape, which is entitled "Won't Get Fooled Again".

ROWAN WOODS: This was a beauty, Ricky, I was so ecstatic and nervous about this one, because this script was a beauty on the page, and I was trembling. I just wanted to get it right. Here's where I steal CGI from Andrew Prowse and from the Premier episode. I love stealing CGI. Make mine. I can put this on my reel as CGI and say "Yeah, this is from my episode." It's a good trick.

RICKY MANNING: And all that extra production value of IASA and the helmet and all the wonderful stuff.

ROWAN WOODS: Where the hell are we? From inside John Crichton's mind. [pause] A strange place, John Crichton's mind, especially when he's placed back on what seems to be planet Earth for the second time. It was great continuing on from the first return to Earth episode, "A Human Reaction". And providing a little few connective clues along the way.

RICKY MANNING: As well as the challenges involved in doing an Ep like this, is you have to reference the earlier episode, and the basic premise of the episode is having done this to Crichton once, we couldn't do it again and again and expect that he'd believe it for ten seconds. Which he doesn't. The question is then, okay, it's not Earth, then what is it, and how does he solve it, how does he get out of it, how does he get back home, what's really going on, that became the challenge. [pause] It's a beautiful set from Tim Ferrier, our genius, our director who built a number of beautiful sets for this episode. I didn't notice it had a ceiling on it, I'd forgotten that til the one shot! And normally, in television, you can always tell it's a set 'cause there's not a ceiling on it.

ROWAN WOODS: Yeah, it's great. The best thing about Tim and in fact everyone who worked on this, is that they stayed real, as crazy and as wacky as the script seemed to be. It was important to stay real on everything, from sets to performances and everything in-between. Everyone did a fantastic job. We should get our thank you's out of the way during the credits, cause there's a lot to talk about, here.

RICKY MANNING: This is definately one where the cast, the crew, everybody just improved us a million percent along the way, which most writers in television will say "Well, it's not quite what I envisioned as a writer." And it's always, you know, "Well, they got eighty percent" or "ninety percent of it". This ep, I think we got a hundred and fifty percent out of it, thanks to Rowan and thanks to the cast and thanks to the crew and thanks to just everyone who brought wonderful things to it, and seemed to just get into the spirit of things and make it even better.

ROWAN WOODS: Yeah. It was a privilege. And I can say that, because Ricky said it, and it's so.

RICKY MANNING: [chuckles] [pause] And neither one of us is wearing a hat.

ROWAN WOODS: I love - I love the sort of, the tonal shifts. The subtle tonal shifts during this episode. This is a scene [Aeryn/Bettina & John in the hospital] that actually I was thinking would hit the editing room floor, because it was - it wasn't saying a whole lot, but then when you saw it in the mix, and you started to appreciate what Ben and Claude did with the scene, it's a gem. It's one of my favorite scenes ever, actually. Ben as Crichton is just trying to suss things out. He's not all that concerned. Great beginning point, because he goes from someone who is concerned, but not flustered at all to the very end of the episode, where of course he's psychiatrically mind and only just gets out of it, the great Farscape-ian tradition.

RICKY MANNING: It's also being very cagey and I always tried as a writer to say "Okay, now if I were in that position, given where John Crichton has been and what he's experienced, what would I be thinking? What would I be doing?" Alright, well my first thought, maybe that someone's doing this to me, obviously. Is this really Aeryn? Is she in on the plot? If I whisper in her ear, will she say "Yeah, they're making me try and do this." What could it be? So you just gotta kind of test all the things, some in subtle ways, some in complicated ways. And try to get a line on what's going on.

ROWAN WOODS: What else I love about this episode is how the performance is tracked throughout the episode, especially Crichton, Ben's performance. Everyone starts from a very straight place, all the supporting players. Play it very straight at first. Because it's important to be real. As crazy as it gets. Just stay real.

RICKY MANNING: I think it's also a tribute to Ben's marvelous performance that, of course, you know, this is television, it's all shot out of order, and he really had to sit down and track it all through in his head before he even started, to say "Okay, this scene I'm going to be here, this scene I'm gonna pitch it over here." Because they were all shot completely scrambled. So, to do this, and track it and keep it together even when it's all out of order, it just makes it just that much tougher. And they do it in ten days, which is what this was shot in.

ROWAN WOODS: There's the reference to "A Human Reaction", in the female toilet. Always referring back as we do.

RICKY MANNING: Now this was location, this set, this hallway, was an old hospital. Right, we built the room, but we didn't build this. This we went out for. So, another challenge for the art director to - when this sort of situation happens, to try and build and it matches. It's like, he's not buying it.

ROWAN WOODS: It's great. I mean, Ben carries a certain irony into the Crichton performance in these early scenes, as he's trying to suss things out, and he knows that this world isn't what it's purporting to be.

RICKY MANNING: I like Ben's ad lib there to DK "You made it this time.", reference to the fact that we didn't see DK in the previous Earth episode in "A Human Reaction". That's another thing Ben brings to this. I mean the ad libs are not for "well let's see if I can come up with a cleverer line than what's in the script", although nine times out of ten he can. But, Ben is always looking to see what is the truth of the character, what is the truth of the situation. And, John Crichton in that situation would probably make some offhand reference to the fact that okay, well, this is new. DK wasn't in the last time this happened. So he would - we would - it's good for the audience to see that he picks up on that.

ROWAN WOODS: And part of the reason Ben does that, is because he does an enormous amount of homework. I mean, he's clever like a lot of really good actors, but on top of that, he just - he works really hard. And gets ahead of the scripts in the sense that he reads them early and doesn't just sort of wait til close to shoot time. We have lots of conversations. And we particularly got together a lot on this episode, both before, during and even after, when we're in post, just tracking the Crichton character through, because it's the key to this.

RICKY MANNING: Well, speaking of pose and speaking of performance, as with much of television, especially Farscape, there's a lot of ADR on this. There's a lot of dialogue that had to be re-done afterward, in - as a matter of fact, the very room we're sitting in right now doing this commentary. This is the ADR room. And Ben and the others had to do - really do their performances a second time. And I know Ben was very fastidious taking in. It didn't take like twice the amount of time on the ADR on this one, trying to get it right, trying to really match it, knowing that if it looked like it were looped, it wouldn't work. And part of that is a tribute to Angus Robertson, our genius ADR recordist, who is back there. Say Hi, Angus. Speak up.

ANGUS ROBERTSON: Hey there!

RICKY MANNING: There ya go! There he is, ladies and gentleman, Angus Robertson, he's spent his entire life trying not any sound while he's in his room, but we've just broken that vow of silence.

[brief pause]

ROWAN WOODS: This is great. Zhaan, the psychiatrist. This really points to the fact that it's really going to be about Crichton's mental state. How he can hold himself together in the process of working this world out. A couple of great gags within this scene, too.

RICKY MANNING: I always had a hunch that Virginia would make a very good psychiatrist, as the Zhaan character. If you can see, she has that calm, she has that sort of - I made her a very Rogerian psychiatrist more of like - trying to illicit the subject to say things and not really guide him very much.

ROWAN WOODS: I love the intellectual aspect to Crichton's search for solutions in this scene. He's not particularly perturbed about anything, but he's just trying to piece stuff together. Using the knowledge that he's got in all his time on Moya, I guess this is the first time he's really had to put all of that knowledge together.

RICKY MANNING: And also you had to look back and say "Well, he has been on this series for a year and a half. He's had X, Y and Z enemies and it could be any on of them." So you kind of have to run down the check list and at least have him think about, you know, is it so-n-so, is it so-n-so, cause otherwise the audience is gonna be saying "Oh, it's really gonna be - it's gonna turn out to be Maldis." and "Why are we smarting than the main character? Why doesn't he bring up that possibility?" Which he does. Bring out most of those possibilities to discard them, so that the audience is left as lost as Ben's saying - as lost as Crichton's saying "Well, I don't really know what - who's behind this."

ROWAN WOODS: So we've had Zhaan the psychiatrist and now we have one of our other well-known Moya friends in a different guise. And what sort of guise would be better for D'argo....................he's a funky alternative to Crichton's best friend on Earth. [pause] I love how he replaces DK and DK becomes a scape-out for this episode. It's a - he's a wonderful foil, DK. [brief pause] And this early arrival of D'argo in this guise, allows for all sorts of fun to happen, before things get scarier and darker.

[Pause for scene. DK complains about the fact that Gary almost ran them over.]

RICKY MANNING: Almost ran him down in a convertible with a left-hand drive, which is not an easy thing to find in Syndey, Australia, where the episode was shot. Everything in this, is of course, trying to at least make it reasonably convincing to Crichton that he's in Cape Canaveral, Florida. So, there was a fair amount of dancing that had to be done to not use right hand drive cars and other things like that, and I thought that production did a excellent job of that. Here's a beautiful bar set that Tim Ferrier built that has the one - one of the few errors that's actually in the episode but you can't see it. The bar taps say "Fosters" and I can't imagine an American bar that would say that. But you can't see it, so they get away with it.

ROWAN WOODS: Look at Crichton, he's starting to sweat. We don't know what that means yet, but things are getting hotter.

RICKY MANNING: Oh, there's ceiling fans in there too, there's a - the fan motif is carried - I - this is - I'm seeing things I've never noticed, even. There's fans in almost every room in this picture.

ROWAN WOODS: Oh, Ricky. Those textures and-

RICKY MANNING: You are so good, you minx.

ROWAN WOODS: Tiny details that, you know. Even takes the writer fifteen viewings to pick up. Look at those shots in the background. Oh, was that an alien I saw playing the drums back there? Hang on. Always staying in Crichton's head. I think that's the trick for me, in this episode. It's all with Crichton. You can never get too far ahead of him. In fact, you can't get ahead of him at all, otherwise you're dead. Doctor Fairchild arrives again. Things get weirder and weirder every time we see new characters again. Things shift. They surprise us with something each time they arrive. It's all about not making Crichton easy and safe. [pause] It's one of the reasons why the story is so tense for the audience. You just can't quite work it out, and sort of struggling and trying to cope like Crichton is, and it just gets worse. [pause] This is where things start to get weird for John. And of course, Wayne Pygram is an accomplished drummer, so it was easy to put him up behind the drum kit. [long pause] Wayne had a lot of fun with this, playing two Scorpius'. One is the straight Scorpy that we know, the other one is sort of drummer in a southern band, with a different accent and a different demeanor. [pause] [laughs, seemingly at Bettina and Gary's actions towards each other]

[pause for scene. John stops and his whole body tenses]

RICKY MANNING: Our first hint that there is actually something external going on. But what it means, it's far too soon to find out.

ROWAN WOODS: But it's definitely got something to do with that character there [Scorpius]. Or the other version of that character there. It's sort of Ground Hog day, isn't it? We come back to the psychiatrist or the hospital.

RICKY MANNING: Oh probably that's writing for television. You have "x" many sets and you better some mileage out of them. You can't build a set and use it for half page and build another set and use it for half page. But it made sense that he'd come back to Zhaan and there is a line that he has in here about "You're not Zhaan and you're not a psychiatrist, but you're the closest I'll get to either one."

ROWAN WOODS: And this is one of those scenes, Ricky, where we were thinking "Will it sustain itself in the cut?". It's one of those scenes you look at on paper and you think "Wow, if everything else is building screen time, this will go." But then we realized, I guess, later in the piece, what was beautiful and poignant about it, and that's Crichton, for the first time shows - demonstrates a sense - a melancholy sense of missing his friends. You know? That Moya has become important in his life. It's something that comes out of this scene that's sort of rather beautiful.

RICKY MANNING: Which was not something we explored, I think, in "Human Reaction". The first time he reputedly went back to Earth, he wasn't then saying "I need to get back to Moya, I need to get back to my friends." It was more "Is this really in my home? What's going on?" Actually, he was taking it quite seriously for most of the episode. And this is a different thing, he knows he's not on Earth and he now starts to surprisingly in his head, realize that Earth is not a hundred percent home. Moya is also home to him, now.

ROWAN WOODS: Well, it's just a beautiful twist on being home sick, isn't it? You know, normally being home sick, in a show like this, is Crichton missing Earth. Here, he is on a facsimile of Earth and he's missing Moya. That's the Homebush Olympic Stadium, in the background, with a few CGI additions. Was wonderful having that next to our studio facility here at Homebush. We plundered it big time in this particular episode, and I think it works beautifully.

[pause for scene. John asks Jack if Douglas Logan looks like Scorpius]

ROWAN WOODS: Now that Crichton is really starting to pursue things in an active sort of way, he's not taking a backward step, he's moving forward and seeking answers. [pause] And having a good time, until later on. The bubble will burst for him and things will get upsetting. But, at this stage, he's still having a good time. He's getting a free cigar, and...[trails off]

RICKY MANNING: Well he's also in this part of the picture - and again, I didn't consciously design this way, maybe it was in the back of my head rattling around someplace - that every time he sees a new arrival, he's pleased. He's like "Oh, there's Rygel" and he's gonna be pleased when Chiana shows up and so forth. So it's almost like, okay, instead of being disconcerting, there almost again, touches of home. It's like "Okay, there's - here are people that I know, although this isn't really them and they're not really here - I'm not really here - but none-the-less it's gratifying to see them, even if they're in strange garb like this."

ROWAN WOODS: And some great sight gags from Ben along the way. I mean, it's something that he would never do at home [laughs] with the head of IASA, is flick his business cards at him. But Crichton is sort of just testing, see what happens. He wants to sort it out.

RICKY MANNING: Also, in addition, throwing the cards, which I thought was marvelous, and Logan saying "Quit it with the cards", that it was just hysterical. One of the many additions.

ROWAN WOODS: And here comes another addition, which is the beginning of the Wizard of Oz motif, which has several sight gags and references, that will continue along the way. That segways into wormholes in a very interesting and twisted fashion. Because Crichton at this stage, obviously assumes that Scorpius is behind the scenes, trying to get information about wormholes.

[pause for scene. John tells Rygel that he's not real.]

ROWAN WOODS: [laughs] Kent plays it beautifully straight. Now he's really, really convinced that he can push this reality to - in a physical way, coming out of that scene in the office, he now is intent on raising the stakes.

RICKY MANNING: He's almost insulted at this point. It's like "How could you people think this is working?"

ROWAN WOODS: Absolutely!

RICKY MANNING: "You've mucked it up so badly, how could you possibly imagine that I'm buying any of this? I'm going to show you how much of this I'm not buying."

[pause for scene. John swings "D. Logan" around, before dropping him off the building]

ROWAN WOODS: Even some of the hoakiest CGI that we've ever done seems to work well with this episode, Ricky.

Both laugh.

ROWAN WOODS: It sort of, in itself seems to reference the fact that Crichton thinks this whole thing is phony and he's about to sort it out what it's about and who's behind the scenes and how he's gonna get out of it. Look at this, it's great stuff from Kent. Just so straight. And real. He's bored. What a great movement forward for Crichton, cause now he's bored. He's gonna-

RICKY MANNING: [cuts in] At the same time disappointed. It's like, you know, "Since you people are pulled out of my memories, you're acting the way I'd expect you to." Which in both cases, is not very good, which is kinda fun. There was an interesting fan reaction - there was a lot of fan reaction after this episode aired, and some fans really took it that this was - that part of the gag was that these were all fantasies of Crichton's in some way, shape or form, and that they were offended therefore, that Crichton would have such wicked and evil fantasies. As if this were one of the constructs where - you've seen this in science fiction many times - where, okay, we're gonna let you create a dream world that is one that you want. Which I don't think is the case at all. I mean, I think this is a case of just the Scarran is there rooting in the back drawers of the mind, pulling out things and hitting him with them and seeing if he'll react. He might not even know what they are, or why they're working. He's just looking for things that'll work.

ROWAN WOODS: That's-

RICKY MANNING: [cuts in] So I don't think you can hold any of these fantasies against Crichton, particularly. But, then again, maybe you can. The subconscious is a deep and murky place. There's a road sign on the left. Oops. Oh well.

ROWAN WOODS: But I think that's a good confusion that fans should think they're in that sort of episode, rather than a puzzle that Crichton's trying to get out of. It's just one of those sort of rich extra layers that confuses and strategically gets the audience a little bit off track before they have to get back on the track with Crichton in discovering what the hell's going on. [pause] Of course, this is the Scorpy in Crichton's head, making another appearance and Crichton hasn't worked out that Scorpius is someone to be listened to at this stage, he just thinks that - he's reacting as if he's the real Scorpy and needs to be eliminated. Of course, he's testing the reality, here.

RICKY MANNING: Everybody brought wonderful things to it. Like for instance, this little thing that you and Claude brought to this scene. [Rowan laughs] Which she calls the wine rack.

ROWAN WOODS: Things just get crazier and crazier every time he returns to the hospital, having tested the reality further and further. Well, those rollers aren't to be taken too seriously. Of course, every - those rollers were really about something in Doctor Fairchild that sort of moves the fantasy along a little further. We just sort of searched for ways in which to push the bounds of reality a little bit further and further at each return. And of course, this is something else, again, the arrival of mom on the scene. Here's something we haven't seen. It's not about....[trails off]

RICKY MANNING: Something we've never seen in the series, as a matter of fact.

ROWAN WOODS: That's right.

RICKY MANNING: And almost never, if not never, referenced in the series.

ROWAN WOODS: Well it's not about whacking Crichton out anymore, it's not about, you know, freaking him out about the known Moya-esk landscape of characters and events. Now it's about something real that is about planet Earth and where he came from. Something that we'd never known before. The back story of mom, how she died.

RICKY MANNING: Yeah, there was something that Ben brought up, he says his character has never, almost never talked about his mother. And there should probably be a reason for that. There must be some unfinished business there, some emotion, some trauma that's there, that is a reason he hasn't. He's talked about father many times, but not about mom.

ROWAN WOODS: And look, Ben is vulnerable to it. Sorry, Crichton is vulnerable to it. He's such a good actor that I've called him Ben in character. This is fantastic, because he's vulnerable at this particular moment but he's at the same time, still able to test what she's saying and work out if she's real. I mean, he wants her to be real.

RICKY MANNING: Well, interestingly enough, she tags him on the fact that he's changed, which he rightfully tags her on, to something that she couldn't possibly know about. And in a sense, that makes her the most realistic character of all the guests in this. That she has found something that really does get to him. Although she's the least likely person to be able to do that. Which just adds to the emotional pressure on him.

ROWAN WOODS: Of course, hearing that contradiction from mom, gives him the strength to walk away and say goodbye, for now.

RICKY MANNING: I believe in the script, we had a scene between that scene and this scene [bar] with D'argo showing up in the hospital with a fish or something like that. We had a little more wackiness to go and when the episode needed to be trimmed down to the right length, I think that was one that we looked at and said "You know what, it's more -" that was one too many ups and downs. Coming off that mood and staying smooth was probably better.

ROWAN WOODS: Yeah, the mother/son theme was just sort of too important and serious to not go on with.

RICKY MANNING: Cause we're about to hit you with the second punch.

ROWAN WOODS: Now, Ben here, to come up with, to conjure a place that he'd never been to, we're about to hear about the mother's death and the fact that Crichton wasn't there for her. And so given the - that's starting to play out. This is big. And Ben went to a place here that was, that he'd never been to before.

[pause for scene. Ben begs the specter of his mother to leave him alone.]

ROWAN WOODS: Out of respect, Ricky and I shut up during that.

RICKY MANNING: It would be sacrilege to interrupt that.

ROWAN WOODS: [chuckles] He's exhausted physically and emotionally drenched.

RICKY MANNING: And if we've done our work correctly, so is the audience, so it's time for a little bit of lightness, a little bit of change in the mood. Not much, but a little bit. So here comes Lani.

ROWAN WOODS: This is lovely from Lani. And once again, you know, we seen an example of actors playing crazy, wacky characters dead straight. Playing them for real and I think that's why it's so funny and dark and scary at the same time. You know, it's interesting, this moment here, physically going at the policeman. Could have been played, you know, completely the other way. But, you know, we decided to go the nasty, vicious route because Crichton at this stage, really is quite desperate. And he's staring to sweat, as you can see.

RICY MANNING: I love the tableau here. All of them gathered nicely and repeated up there.

[pause for scene. The two doctors warn John about his chosen path of craziness.]

RICKY MANNING: "Cognitive dislocation" is a phrase I think I've worked in just about every series I've been on, some form or another. It's a very handy phrase. I think I'm cognitively dislocated, that's one of the reasons. [pause] Now even there, they're feeding him the Scorpius thing. Are they part of the plot? Are they interrogating him? Are they trying to sneak some information out of him? Which, in retrospect, now that the episode is over, maybe that's true. Maybe the Scarran is - maybe the Scarran was goosing the characters to - "Well just ask him about Scorpius. Just kinda give him that nudge." We left it deliberately wide open as to how much the Scarran is actually presenting specific fantasies, how much does he know what's going on. We didn't get into any of that, we just covered it with one blanket. He's driving you nuts to interrogate you, period. And let the show itself show you the details.

ROWAN WOODS: This is one of those sequences that in our CGI plan, meant the spending of a lot more money, but we didn't actually do bullets travelling through bodies. We decided to spend our chips in other ways. And Ground Hog day. Back to the hospital. This time, he's tied to the chair. More Wizard of Oz. With the inclusion of Toto.

RICKY MANNING: Back on Timmy's wonderful stage twenty nine, with the beautiful green walls that really match that ugly hospital color that you see. At the same time, our lovely DP, Russell Bacon, has lit it beautifully. This is a nice little side light coming in on Crichton. [whispers] Ah! It's just marvelous work all around!

ROWAN WOODS: I love that scene, because that's where funny meets dark with that last scene with Lani, the policeman before this big scene begins. [pause] This was a scene, I was slightly nervous about the length of, Ricky. It was three and half, four minutes of big exposition, which he explains a lot. You weren't so worried.

RICKY MANNING: I wasn't so worried cause I knew - I think Ben and Wayne could read the phone book to each other and it would be compelling. And I thought about this time in the movie, after all the weird stuff been going on, I think the audience welcomed the chance to just sit back, catch their breath, and not have this visual assault going on their retinas for a little while. Plus, this is where you start to hear something - I thought by now, we're going to be crying for some actual information. Okay, quit messing with me and tell me what's really going on.

ROWAN WOODS: And they're so good, these guys. Even in this scene, they really take their time and any knowledge that Crichton is gonna get from Scorpius is - he's gonna make - it's gonna make Scorpius work hard. We're not gonna believe anything he says first up.

RICKY MANNING: Well it's also interesting that in the script, because we'd kind of worried that you couldn't go this long without tipping off what was going on, the audience wouldn't stay with us as long, originally at the second act break, which is right after Crichton's mother shows up, we had flashed to a shot of Crichton being interrogated by the Scarran. Which in this version, we will not see until the very end of the show. It was just a blatant give-it-away, here's what's going on, so that people would stick with us, because we feared that it might not hold. But, Ro' and everyone did such a beautiful job with setting up the emotions with Crichton and his mother, we thought, I think you'll tune in after the act break, given that strong emotional out. And it was better not to reveal the Scarran yet, because now, the audience still knows no more than Crichton does and is wondering as he is - is any of this for real.

ROWAN WOODS: Wonderful thing coming off this scene to Ricky, is the fact that we end up with Crichton knowing sort of what's behind the scenes and from this point on, it becomes a sort of survival excersize and the tension and the conflict from this point on, is can Crichton survive this psychiatric torture, as it gets worse.

RICKY MANNING: Right. We've laid all the cards out on the table, that is if you believe what this Scorpius is telling us, which you might not. But if you believe it, or at least believe it's a way to react, then, now in act four, we can just open the bag, we can just throw the entire contents of Crichton's mind at him and just do everything we can to top what we've done in the first three acts and see if he will indeed crack under the strain of it.

ROWAN WOODS: And there's some wonderful clues that are inserted in the back end of this scene in regards to solutions, from Scorpius, given to Crichton. We don't necessarily believe all of them, but we take them in and we take them into the end of the episode, where Crichton has to work out a way of dealing with the Scarran. [pause] I love the X-ray slide machine and it's uses, here.

RICKY MANNING: A little "X" mark, that's very nice.

ROWAN WOODS: I ran a lot of takes on this, but - with tight and wide and....[trails off]

RICKY MANNING: And I'm sorry, this is the first time we see the Scarran in all of his actual beauty. Again, we're not quite sure if it's a hundred percent or not. But at least we know someone is behind the scenes, manipulating him. And so we do get the strong feeling that now it's a case of survival. And, things get crazier and crazier as somebody is turning up the knob. We assume it's the Scarran, if we want to believe Scorpius. This is where the BBC went crazy on their censorship cut, Ricky. I didn't recognize their particular version of this.

RICKY MANNING: Yeah, the BBC's aired version of this episode ran at a full two minutes shorter [chuckles] than the episode length. That's fairly drastic. I think we truly offended somebody over there, and therefore they started just going at this episode with a chainsaw and cutting out things that they'd let us get away with in previous episodes. Whereas Sci Phi's only comment was, when you blow up the Scarran's head, try not to have his brains running down the wall too severely. Which that - okay, fine, we'll do that.

ROWAN WOODS: This is also where Ben Browder shows another side of his talents as a camera operator. Had to put the camera between his legs and operate himself. There you go. Things are getting weird for Crichton, now. And he just has to survive it. We know that the psychiatric scale has been wound up. I love this moment when - that blood on the lens.

RICKY MANNING: You couldn't have possibly have planned that, could you?

ROWAN WOODS: Yeah, but we used it. [laughs]

RICKY MANNING: It was very serendipitous. When you get lucky, you take it.

ROWAN WOODS: And of course, mom and dad.

RICKY MANNING: The suburban couple.

ROWAN WOODS: Sort of Leave it to Beaver mode. Gone whacked. [pause] And of course, every time we return to these characters, we have to sort of go to another place that we haven't been to before. And the Wizard of Oz gets another shot.

[pause for scene. Officer Gordon gives John a very strange version of the Miranda Rights.]

RICKY MANNING: Lani was having an awful lot of fun there, wasn't he?

Rowan laughs.

RICKY MANNING: Well they all were, that was the great part of it. And a little Spielberg shot there, with the shooting star.

ROWAN WOODS: And then of course, D'argo's really got nowhere to go, except um...

RICKY MANNING: Over the edge.

Rowan laughs.

RICKY MANNING: Totally over the cliff.

BOTH: And he went for it.

RICKY MANNING: Anthony went for it.

ROWAN WOODS: He went for it. But, you know, as well as making us laugh, he's got a very, very scary dark tonal voice at the end which I just love.

RICKY MANNING: Which again, was not scripted. But it so works. It so works, it's amazing.

ROWAN WOODS: It's fabulous. And then he changes. [pause] Which is important, because as it shifts into the next scene, we go to a darker, weirder place. Probably a place that even Ben never expected the script to go to, and he was slightly nervous about, given the fact that, you know, mothers are very important to southern boys. But not like this. They're not important in this way. You know, Ricky and Freud become entwined in this scene.

RICKY MANNING: Now we're just really good friends. This is where a lot of fans clocked out, actually. This scene struck a nerve for quite a few viewers.

ROWAN WOODS: You know, I love clocking out fans, Ricky. It's one of the only shows I worked on, where I - and David in fact said to you and then to me afterwards, that you know, he really wanted to push the boundaries here and really test fans.

RICKY MANNING: The great fun of Farscape is the whole - to me and I'm sure to many of us, to many that watch it, is that it is not a safe show. It isn't a comfortable Star Trek kind of show, where everybody's noble and things are resolved, all wrapped up nicely. It's a very messy show. We get into the subconscious, we get into unconscious and we just root around and - because we're not the first science fiction show on the air, we're specially tasked in our minds with trying to push it, try to push it further, try to push it where no science fiction series has ever gone before.

ROWAN WOODS: And also to lead the situations like this scene, where really, suddenly, we think that it's all gonna open up and we're going to come to some sort of understanding about the strange world that Crichton's been inhabiting, thus far. We're leading ourselves into a comfortable zone, a tense ending of sorts.

RICKY MANNING: Which I even tried to help with a bit of Star Trek kind of talk about you're in a holographic chamber and I've destroyed the projector, otherwise why would she shoot a disco ball. Well, because that's the Froonium powered gizmut that's making this whole thing work. So it's trying to go for a little bit of techobabble, there.

ROWAN WOODS: Absolutely.

RICKY MANNING: To try and make Crichton think, okay, well that's sort of semi-reasonable. But of course...

ROWAN WOODS: And of course, it's very reasonable, because Aeryn is Aeryn for once. In fact, it's the first time he's seen an old friend in their regular wardrobe. But it's beautiful what Ben and Claudia do here, because Claude plays it absolutely convincingly. And Ben just susses out in the middle of the scene, just around here, that something is astray and the explanation that she gives.

RICKY MANNING: Because, again, as in so many instances in this picture, he wants to believe it. He would desperately love to believe that it's all over with and they're gonna walk out on the sunset, right now.

ROWAN WOODS: He doesn't wanna believe what Aeryn Sun-Claudia Black is about to do with her tongue, once he's confirmed that she's an alien.

[pause for scene. Aeryn rolls her tongue]

ROWAN WOODS: Claudia...

RICKY MANNING: Not CGI.

ROWAN WOODS: ...said she was going to give me something to say she was an alien, but I didn't quite expect that. Beautiful move. So, we're out of the false ending, now and back into whatever place we were in.

RICKY MANNING: There goes - the working title for this actually, way back in the conceptual stages, was Disco D'argo, just because that's one of the crazy images that David Kemper had in his head. He had an image of Pilot and Scorpius playing in a band. And he had an image of D'argo dancing, and sometimes on a show, the very - back in the idea stage, we start with just a visual or two. A crazy notion, then we start to say "How can we possibly make that into something?"

ROWAN WOODS: From the false ending, we come to the real ending. And all is revealed.

[pause for scene. In the Scarran's interrogation room.]

ROWAN WOODS: It's an even scarier Scarran than we've seen before. David and the team did a beautiful job.

RICKY MANNING: Yeah, Elsie and Covney are never really quite satisfied. Every time we bring back something, they look at it as a chance to make it look even better, make it look even scarier, refine it a little more to add a little something to it.

ROWAN WOODS: This is where that information that you got in the middle scene with Scorpius and Crichton, comes into play. Mind you, the wacky stuff we've had in the interim is probably wiped it from people's brains, but I like that. I like how it's - we're with Crichton. Always with Crichton, even when he sol- even when he remembers what's been said to him.

RICKY MANNING: I think it's good to play fair with an audience, too. I know as a viewer, I don't like it when the hero gets himself out of a jam by doing something that has never been established. It's going, well let's - I like to think I could have solved the mystery if I were in his shoes at that point. We very carefully concocted it so Scorpius gives him a hint, but not the full story, so the hero has something to do. It isn't oh, just do this and you'll get out. He's got to think of it and execute it both.

ROWAN WOODS: Of course this was the only censorship concern that Sci Fi channel had. [pause] They didn't want to see too many pieces of sausage on the wall.

RICKY MANNING: And I don't think the picture suffers from their absence, really.

ROWAN WOODS: And here's the continuation of the scene before, which originally was the climax of the fourth act, but we decided that it should become the Tag in itself.

RICKY MANNING: Because the Tag I wrote was terrible.

ROWAN WOODS: No!

RICKY MANNING: That's what he's trying not to say.

Rowan laughs.

RICKY MANNING: No, it was. It was a simple wrap up, Crichton's back on Moya and telling everybody, "Well, I got.." sort of, and filling in things we already know - we the audience already knew. We thought it might be useful to see him back at home, back surrounded by his friends and go for a slightly warm moment of "there's no place like home". As a matter of fact, I think that was the tag line. He says "there's no place like-" but he can't quite bring himself to say "home". He hasn't quite - he isn't quite that comfortable with his - as of yet and it just didn't work. It was much more effective to leave him here in a sort of a limbo and to go out on the much more chilling idea of Scorpius saying "I'll always be with you, keeping you safe."

ROWAN WOODS: It's funny that the good eps, Ricky, quite often take this course where the climax of the piece becomes the Tag. I mean, we have sublime Tags, of course, that say a whole lot more than what we've had in the main part of the story. But, quite often when stories are really working brilliantly you wanna take the climax in those beats just after the climax into the Tag and this being one of my favorite eps and me being totally biased of course, [Ricky chuckles] this is one such ep.

RICKY MANNING: Well, there's good reasons to go to a Tag when there's things you have yet to say. But this episode, we'd pretty much said everything, so there was no reason to do it.

ROWAN WOODS: It was a pleasure. Thanks, Ricky.

RICKY MANNING: Thank you, Ro'.

END OF COMMENTARY.