The quest for wormhole technology leads Scorpius to reveal his horrific past to Crichton.
Written by Richard Manning
Directed by Ian Watson
Not knowing that his lead scientist Linfer has already solved the fatal problems of wormhole travel, Scorpius takes the neural chip he had placed in Crichton and now places it in himself to interrogate Crichton’s memories and find the information that has eluded him. But the Memory Crichton is as uncooperative as the real one and as Linfer offers a deal with that real Crichton on Moya, has she really solved as much as she thinks?
Ben Browder doesn’t strike one as an egotistical sort but you have to wonder. As we now have three of him in the show it really is cutting down the screentime that everyone else gets. And yet, just as with the twinned real Crichtons, he made this memory one different: you truly got a sense that this was him before this season’s experiences.
But despite the extra added value Crichton, this was really about the experiences of Scorpius and it walked a line between humanising him and retaining his position as uber-enemy.
Cleverly, the scenes of his earlier life appeared awful and sometimes hard to watch yet we didn’t see anything, it was more suggestion on top of some well-staged moments.
Yet if Scorpius’s past was good, his present on the PK ship wasn’t: his nurse could not act, despite bright blue hair, and too many scenes were packed with both jargon and mad scientist dialogue. If you’d not seen the show before, you wouldn’t have stuck to the end, and so missed a lot of clever stuff and key plot points for the future.
Review by William Gallagher
