Moya attempts starburst travel without enough energy reserves, trapping herself and the crew in a "dimensional schism."

(Originally aired September 10, 1999))

Rygel's Gift for Song

Oh there is no expanse of mind the will cannot traverse, For physically the distance laid across the universe, His blessings many in the stars save one lamented curse, That 16 Rigel -- glory me! -- must travel in reverse!

Crichton: Listen, sunshine, do you want to be part of this crew?    More Stories The SPACE.com Guide to Farscape Farscape - 'Through the Looking Glass' (spoilers) 'A Human Reaction' Disappoints Farscape Alien, But Not Viewers 'Jeremiah Crichton': Twilight of the Farscape Idols    Multimedia Opening credits sequence    Related Links Farscape Sci-Fi Channel Chianna: On your good days . . . Crichton: This *is* one of the good days.

Rygel: That's krodan -- a delicacy even for pagans. Crichton: Yeah? How long was it under your butt getting delicate?

Written by David Kemper
Directed by Ian Watson

The crew argues over dinner. Moya's pregnancy has slowed her down, the search for home isn't going well, and the tension of constant pursuit at their heels is exhausting.

The last thing Moya and Pilot want to do is lose their passengers. Since Moya's determined to prove that she can keep up a better pace, Pilot says they will initiate starburst immediately instead of waiting 50 hours for her batteries to recharge.

One of the mainstays of space-oriented science fiction is the "bottle show" -- that's "bottle" as in "ship in a bottle." There's only so much money to go around in a season, and the more shows you can do using just your regular sets and cast, the more money you can spend on the important episodes.

Fortunately, starships are complicated and space travel is dangerous, so there’s no shortage of cheap ways to menace the crew. You can pack a lot of action into a bottle show, and the lack of guest stars gives the regular cast plenty of scenes to shine in.

On the other hand, the more time the regulars spend running around the ship, the more confined an episode usually seems. Most TV shows don't have many sets -- in a starship show there's usually the bridge set, an engine room, a cabin, maybe a mess hall, and one hallway that gets shot from a lot of different angles.

If the characters mostly stay in one room, it's not that noticeable -- but run about from hallway to hallway and suddenly those "different" hallways start looking an awful lot alike.

"Through the Looking Glass" does a pretty good job of avoiding this trap, even with Crichton constantly running around the ship.

Part of this is plot -- if Moya's been duplicated four times, then of course we're going to see a lot of the same places, and so any sense of deja vu makes sense in the context of the episode.

The rest of it is inspired staging. The different lighting schemes and noises are disorienting, even irritating, and once you add slow motion effects and echoes even the most familiar set becomes almost unrecognizable.

Part of what makes the staging so inspired is that Kemper and Watson know exactly when to pull back. Despite the in-your-face mood, they handle the effects with subtlety and restraint.

The noise and distortion early in the red and blue zone scenes is painful to experience, for the audience as well as the characters. After a few minutes, though, the noise gets muted, the effects toned down.

The other tricky part of this episode is making the weirdness all pay off in the end, preferably by showing us something even weirder. The payoff is provided when Crichton, to continue the Alice metaphor, goes down the rabbit hole and meets the guardian.

There, a white background throws everything into such stark contrast with the ship interiors we've been seeing that it feels very strange. It also obscures the alien Crichton encounters, turning a otherwise typical Muppet into something mysterious and wonderful

.

The episode itself is standard stuff -- the ship gets in a jam, all hell breaks loose, people run around a lot, the ship breaks free, everybody likes each other a little more than they did at the start.

It stands out because of the execution, the willingness to make the weird stuff truly weird and disturbing and the sense to keep from overdoing it.

Chalk "Through the Looking Glass" up as a proof that old stories can still be told well.

Pilot can track anyone in the ship, even after Moya's fragmentation.

Aeryn still has some of Pilot's DNA in her, giving her detailed knowledge of Moya's operations.

Dominars of the House of Rygel never travel in reverse. ("So turn around and pretend you're going forward," suggests Crichton.)

The exact gestation period of a leviathan is unknown.

The fissures seem fairly stable, given there's a set path that Crichton uses throughout the show. So what's with the one-time fissures that swallow up D'Argo, Aeryn and Rygel at the beginning?

Cool effects aside, "dimensional schisms" make no sense as portrayed. The fissuring of the ship is slightly plausible, but there's no reason for this to create the different environments in the separated areas.

It could be argued that what the lights and noise of the three zones is simply a dramatic representation of the cross-dimensional discomfort the characters are undergoing. But if so, why does Aeryn's re-rigging of the flight headsets help?

How can traces of Pilot’s DNA give Aeryn detailed knowledge of how to operate Moya?

Reruns continue. Ferocious bounty hunters interrupt Crichton and Aeryn’s experiment of recreating a wormhole in "Till the Blood Runs Clear".