Another shopping expedition goes horribly wrong when Chiana brings home a portrait that’s out to kill the crew.

Alien Fashion Tips

Chiana: I don't care much for room decorations - I prefer to decorate myself. Rygel [speaking of Chiana]: She was quite a lot like me, you know. She had spirit, ambition, large appetites - she would have made an excellent Hynerian.

Crichton: Haven't you read the supervillains' handbook? This is where you're supposed to twirl your mustache and gloat. Maldis: Johnny-O, your mind to me is an open book, full of big print and lots of pictures!

Maldis: "These are a few of my favorite things."    More Stories The SPACE.com Guide to Farscape Farscape - 'Picture If You Will' (spoilers) Farscape's Pilot and Aeryn Play 'The Way We Weren't' 'Crackers Don't Matter' on Farscape, or Do They?    Multimedia Opening credits sequence    Related Links Farscape Sci-Fi Channel Crichton: Oh. Could you do that "Farewell, Goodbye" song the kids sing? It's one of my favorites. Maldis: I don't do requests!

Written by Peter Neale
Directed by Andrew Prowse

Chris Haywood - Maldis and Kyvan

She wanders around the shop, but returns to stare at the portrait. The woman inside the abstract pattern resembles her.

Farscape is better than most science fiction series at handling "bottle shows" – budget-minded episodes that feature few guest stars and a minimum of new sets and effects.

Life aboard a starship should be pretty dull most of the time. You eat, you sleep, you wait to get wherever you’re going -- if something interesting is to happen, something has to go wrong.

In the Star Trek universe, which pretends – however unconvincingly – to scientific accuracy, that usually means introducing yet another spatial anomaly to fry the warp drive, set the holodeck on "kill" or turn the crew into Sea Monkeys.

Farscape gives itself more license, maybe because it’s fundamentally a fantasy show.

Need a sorcerer for the week? No problem. The range of plot possibilities isn’t much greater than that of a Star Trek show – pretty much anything goes in both universes – but Farscape doesn’t have to waste time explaining things.

As Chiana recommends, viewers can just sit back and enjoy the happy ending.

Is this a good thing?

Even though Farscape surrenders the hard-science high ground, it refuses to suffer much as a series.

By ignoring the boundaries between SF and fantasy, the show keeps the focus on the misadventures of Crichton and his friends instead of the technological problem of the week.

In that, Farscape is more akin to the original Star Trek than The Next Generation or the other sequel series.

And after years of tortured technobabble and trying to keep track of an increasingly dense alphabet soup of made-up particles, it’s refreshing to just get on with the story.

Thanks to the trouble that Rygel and Chiana cause, Aeryn is sometimes inclined to throw both of them off the ship.

Crichton is losing patience with Aeryn’s standoffish nature.

Where is Chiana and D’argo’s relationship going? How about Crichton’s and Aeryn’s?

We return to season one for a couple months of reruns. Crichton gets marooned in paradise, only to become part of a love triangle in "Jeremiah Crichton".

New episodes will return with "Home of the Remains" on Friday, June 16.