Look at the Princess Part 2
Teleplay by David Kemper
Directed by Andrew Prowse & Tony Tilse
REVIEW
This episode was necessarily slow (it's really just the first act of a story rather than a complete and resolved episode) but it had interesting ideas and a believable imperative for Crichton.
Endless science fiction stories have involved the hero being required to marry an alien, which does rather overstate the appeal of the (invariably) human male lead. This time it did work and you could see yourself having to make those same choices that Crichton was pushed through.
Still, what marks this part of the series is how highly charged the crew is sexually – definitely a first for television SF (Star Trek: The Next Generation's Naked Now notwithstanding). It's refreshing to see a small, close group under these pressures but it is overtly a human situation. There's nothing remotely alien about D'Argo and Chiana's teenage-like relationship.
There's a potential, too, for the show to become reliant on affairs for its characters' motivations and for that reason it's good to see Crichton buffeted both by jealousy and by a quite reasonable fear.
However the Princess' situation and her attitude to it were disappointingly simplistic: for a show with many good woman characters, hers was rather reliant on her mother and her lover.
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