Sunday, May 22, 2011

Classics: Farscape 2:6 - Picture If You Will

Overall: 7.2

Though there really isn't much of a point to this episode, it is just freaky-deaky enough to end up on the high end of the par range.

Plot Synopsis:

Farscape World has a summary here.

The Skinny:

Raise your hand if you were a middle-grader in the early 90's. Now keep your hands up if you read R.L. Stine's classic Goosebumps series. Okay, now how many of you read Say Cheese and Die? Well, this episode is kind of like that. There's no camera, but there is a picture that apparently tells the future, and the future it tells is always exceedingly bad for our major players.

Most of the fandom - and I include myself here - seems to be in agreement that Maldis was not a character who rated a second appearance. He was and is too over-the-top evil to really fit in with the general ethos of the series. But because this episode reminds me of something that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, I'm inclined to be generous. Really, the only way this episode could've been improved upon (assuming, of course, that we keep Maldis in the storyline) is if the writers had decided to include living shadows which attack and eat you in the middle of the night. That was the scariest childhood horror story ever.

Writing: 7.5

Again, I'm not sure why the writers decided to bring back Maldis, but there are parts of this episode that are genuinely creepy.

Acting: 8.0

This is a Maldis episode, but surprisingly enough, the melodrama is not as bad as it could have been.

Message: 6.0

There's no message here that I can see. Just sit back and enjoy the fun-house mirror effects and the aforementioned creep factor.

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