A wormhole leads Crichton back to Earth – but the welcome home is not what he expects.

Tell It Like It Is, Earther!

Crichton (to Aeryn): If it wasn't for me, you'd still be the happy little Peacekeeper dominating the lesser races.

Written by Justin Monjo
Directed by Rowan Woods

Pilot interrupts him and summons him to the bridge. There, Crichton stares in amazement at a wormhole much like the one that brought him to Moya.

While any excuse to see Kent McCord is a good one, the test his alien race has constructed may not be entirely fair to humanity.

Sure, there’s no shortage of Wilsons and Cobbs out there, ready to dissect ET. But the aliens’ test merely establishes a hostile reaction as plausible, and "plausible" doesn’t mean "certain" or even necessarily "probable."

Most cultures are hostile to the idea of alien immigrants. In America, there have always been cries that the newly arriving Irish, Italians, Jews, Japanese or Vietnamese will bring about the fall of society.

More often than not, though, the newcomers settle down, make lives for themselves, and melt into the pot after a generation or two.

It’s a little ironic that "A Human Reaction" suggests that prospective alien immigrants should give up the hope of acceptance. After all, series creator Rockne O’Bannon’s first big science fiction hit was the movie Alien Nation, which took exactly the opposite point of view.

The translator microbes prove to be a particularly elegant story device in this episode.

The "language problem" has always been a pitfall for SF drama. Realistically, understanding a totally different form of life should be difficult, but it’s not much fun watching a show about aliens if you can’t understand a word they’re saying.

Star Trek has regularly bungled the language problem. With a few exceptions, we’re expected to believe that the proud members of Starfleet can casually chat with any alien they run across – even if they’ve lost all of the equipment that might plausibly be providing some form of translation.

Babylon 5 did better. When aliens used translators, you could usually hear what the alien is saying along with the translation, and the language barrier was always accounted for one way or another.

Farscape takes a slightly different approach. Where B5 quietly pointed out the practical difficulties, Farscape presents a technology that removes the difficulty while remaining self-consistent.

Anyone who has translator microbes hears everything in their own language. It’s not that anyone is actually speaking anyone else’s language – untranslated, Moya must be a Babel of six or seven different tongues, all spoken at once – it’s just that they can understand each other.

Translator microbes require accepting one whopper of a premise – that tiny microbes can figure out an underlying structure to almost any language – but once you’ve done that, you never have to wonder "How are these characters communicating?" again.

Of course, Earth doesn't have translator microbes yet. It would be interesting to find out what they would do to human culture and our own willingness to accept an alien presence.

Two of the Uncharted Territories’ many cultural deficiencies are a lack of both chocolate and beer, although there is a drink called "fellip nectar" that's a bit like beer. It comes out of an animal.

As of this episode, Crichton has been away from Earth for seven months.

Aeryn has apparently never encountered rain before.

Reruns continue. Moya, like Gaul, gets split into three parts in a rerun of the first season episode "Through the Looking Glass".