Wayne Interview "i luv this dude" In a blokie way

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NUMBER FIVE ~ SCORPIUS
04/02, TV Zone Special, #44 Villians
Gareth Wigmore

”Revenge is a dish best served cold, and you like revenge, don’t you?”

In the first title narration of Farscape, John Crichton claimed that he was being hunted by ’an insane military commander’. He was referring to Bialar Crais, a Peacekeeper captain whose brother had been killed in a collision with Crichton’s module, newly come through the wormhole. Crais obsessively blamed the confused astronaut, but somehow he never quite lived up to the ’insane’ tag. An ’irate military commander’ might have been closer to the mark. Sure, he single-mindedly pursued Crichton and co into the uncharted territories, and was happy enough to kill his subordinates with his bare hands when they stood in his way, but on a grand, dramatic scale, Crais’s sanity seemed present, if not necessarily correct.

Scorpius, on the other hand...

It’s unlikely that the producers of Farscape would deliberately have tried to use a red herring on the audience for the whole of the new show’s first season, and then produce the real villain from under everyone’s noses. So we can imagine that they liked having Lani Tupu, who played Crais and also supplied the voice of Pilot, around but felt that he couldn’t quite deliver the degree of villainy that the show really required. Thinking on their feet, the producers must have devised a new, less clear-cut role for Crais, banishing him from the Peacekeepers and having him as a sometime ally of the crew of Moya. Questions about Crais’s continued presence on the show - such as whether he could he be trusted or not - fitted in well with the moral ambiguity that viewers had come to expect from Farscape.

But the change in Crais’s status left a big hole to be filled. One of the driving forces of the show was simply that the Moya crew were always on the run from Crais, whose crazy pursuit forced them further and further into unknown Space. Almost by necessity, a replacement villain would have to be ’an insane military commander’ who wanted to hunt Moya and her crew down. And if there really were perceived problems with the mildness of Lani Tupu’s performance as Crais, the brief for the new character must have been obvious: to make him a monster.

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And from the first moment we see Scorpius in Nerve, it’s obvious that that’s exactly what he is. His body’s entirely encased in black leather that’s crossed and scratched, so that it’s almost like snake or crocodile skin. Little of even his face is visible, as the leather continues like a hood, stopping just above the eyes. It carries on down his nose, and then spreads out into two straps over his cheeks, with a third attached to his chin. The straps almost seem as though they’re holding his face in - that without them, he’d come apart at the seams.

His skin is deathly white and with markings that make it clear he’s not Human (or Sebacean, like the other Peacekeepers), his cheeks are hollow, his lips black, his teeth irregular and sharp. Red lights flash in each temple of his skullcap, hinting at machinery inside his head. And his leather suit is not without decoration: a long, triangular tailpiece flaps between his legs almost down to his feet, making the viewer simultaneously think both of lizards and of the urbanity of morning suits and frock coats. It’s almost as though he’s a snake who’s squeezed himself into an outfit that tries to make him seem respectable, but only emphasizes the fact that he is not like us at all - and that he is extremely frightening.

When one imagines the voice of a powerful and sinister character, one tends to think of booming bass voices like that of Valentine Dyall as the Man in Black, or his Black Guardian from Doctor Who. The actor who plays Scorpius, Wayne Pygram, says that before the audition he made the pivotal decision to play the character with a light, airy voice, so that his speech seemed almost mannered. But, just as the costume’s trappings of respectability hint at something lurking inside, Scorpius’s voice sounds as though it could break into anger at any moment. It sometimes does, too: he bares his sharp teeth like fangs, and his voice transforms for a few seconds into words that are barely distinguishable among hisses and growls.

What Farscape has achieved with Scorpius is remarkable in terms of the audience’s familiarity with many aspects of the character. The trouble with most recurring villains on television is that we see them deviously preparing a snare for the heroes and grinning evilly while they wait for their plan to take effect. Then we see them cursing their misfortune at having been outwitted once again. And that’s it until they pop up the next week, or the week after. We see those aspects of Scorpius, it’s true, but there’s much more to him than that.

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Crichton and his comrades meet Scorpius for the first time in an arc that covers the final four episodes of Farscape’s first season. For a period, Crichton is tortured by Scorpius, who quickly becomes fascinated by the Human’s knowledge of wormholes. Although Crichton escapes, it becomes clear early in Season Two that Scorpius has done him some permanent damage. In fact, he’s left a chip that creates a ,neural clone’ of himself inside Crichton’s mind, to try to get the wormhole information out of him even after he’s escaped. What this basically means is that, by half way through the season, Scorpius is almost a regular member of the cast, popping up in Crichton’s mind every now and again to bait, bother and sometimes even help him. It’s as though he’s Crichton’s imaginary fiend, someone that he can talk to but none of the other characters can see or hear. This allows the audience to see Scorpy, as Crichton refers to him, in a variety of situations where we wouldn’t normally find him, and means we get to know him doing something other than cackling maniacally at the brilliance of his latest piece of villainy.

The ’neural clone’ plot device also means that Scorpius is an ever-present threat throughout Season Two, with Crichton becoming more and more affected by it, and ultimately driven to madness. By the end of the season, he has literally become Scorpius. The clone somehow pushes Crichton to the back of his own mind and comes to the fore. The Farscape producers struck on a brilliant way of depicting this change in personality by showing us Ben Browder, who plays Crichton, in the unmistakable Scorpius suit and make-up, with pale skin and hollow cheeks. It’s a fantastic visual trick to pull on the viewer, adding to the brilliance of the final episodes of Season Two. Aeryn’s ’death’ at the climax of the season was shocking because she was killed by her lover at a moment when control of his mind and body had been wrested away from him by the neural clone of Scorpius - and we see both Crichton and Scorpius do the deed, the show’s hero transformed into the show’s villain and murdering the woman he loves. It’s the kind of television that makes you gasp.

Scorpy’s neural clone in Crichton’s head means that the audience perceives an inextricable link between the two characters, and it has led to a real feeling that Scorpius is the hero’s nemesis. Every good hero needs a arch-villain, and Crais just wasn’t up to snuff. But Scorpy certainly is. The neural clone has also meant that we’ve been able to see Scorpius as a figure of fun, too. The viewers have learned that Crichton’s mind is not the most rational place in the world to be, and we’ve seen Scorpy - always in his nightmarish leather hood and mask in evening dress, at the funfair, in a red jumpsuit and even, to his great disgust, transformed into a cartoon.

As with all the best villains in the realms of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Scorpy now has his own back-story, a ’supervillain origin’ that explains where he came from and why he is the way he is. We found out early on that he was halfSebacean and 61f-Skarran, and it was implied that he was one of a kind. We didn’t know why Scorpius had joined the Peacekeepers - the Sebacean military - rather than stayed with the mysterious and feared Skarrans, a monstrous and aggressive reptilian race. But Season Three’s Incubator gave us a much clearer idea of who Scorpius was and why he was so obsessed with getting the information about wormhole technology from Crichton’s head. The episode reversed the norm of Crichton seeing visions of a neural clone of Scorpius, and instead showed Scorpius talking to a neural clone of Crichton inside Scorpius’s own mind, and showing him some of the less pleasant memories from his childhood.

Incubator is typical Farscape, in that it’s fantastically tough, amoral and cruel. Scorpy shows Crichton the rape of his Sebacean mother by his Skarran father, as part of a Skarran research programme to see whether Sebaceans would be any use as breeding stock. The programme was deemed a failure, with Scorpius the only survivor of 90 matings. The sole Skarran female who educated him through his first 12 cycles told him that his birth had been difficult, and that it had killed his mother, although the rape had already shattered her sanity.

The young half-breed spends his days in agony aboard a Skarran dreadnought. Like full Sebaceans, his body copes badly with heat and he is constantly incapacitated by terrible thirst. His skin hangs loosely off his face and malformed hands. The Skarran tutor beats and abuses him and denies him water, which teaches him to develop great stamina, as well as utter hatred for the Skarrans and the necessary deviousness to catch her off guard and escape. The next time we see him, he has joined the Peacekeepers and wears a rudimentary version of his familiar leather suit, complete with a device on the back that presumably regulates his body temperature. As we know, by the time we meet Scorpius he will have swapped this for the device that screws cooling rods into his own skull. Scorpius visits the planet from which his mother disappeared, and removes a flower from it to keep in his quarters to help keep her in mind.

He shows the neural clone of Crichton all this not to evoke his pity, but to explain why he wants the wormhole technology that Crichton possesses so badly. It is not for love of power, but for the sake of revenge. The Skarrans will wipe out the Sebaceans and other races including Humans, once they find Earth - unless new technology can be harnessed as a weapon against them. Scorpius is desperate to turn the wormhole information into a weapon whereby he can wipe the Skarrans out. Of course, what makes all this information all the more interesting for the viewer is that we know it, but the real Crichton does not. He will continue to think of Scorpius as obsessed with power for its own sake.

Although Incubator doesn’t answer all our questions about Scorpius - for example, why that name? When he tells a Peacekeeper that he’s chosen to call himself Scorpius, the chap merely replies, ’Interesting choice!’ - it makes an already fascinating character all the more multi-layered. We don’t exactly sympathize with Scorpius, because we’ve already seen him put characters that we like through hell, but we understand him more and perhaps regard him as a lesser evil than the Skarrans. One is tempted to suggest that Crichton himself will come to see things that way in time, and there’ll be an uneasy truce in which he and Scorpius have to fight side by side. That’s hardly stretching credibility, given the adjustments we’ve had to make to characters such as Crais.

Scorpius has all the qualities of a great villain. Creepy voice? Check. Scary black costume? Check. Personal nemesis of hero? Check. Comes between hero and woman he loves? Check. Handy driving a dodgem car? Check.

Dodgems? Well, this is Farscape, after all.

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******Crichton and Harvey*******

People tend to be very protective of their privacy, but poor John Crichton no longer has this luxury. Since arriving in another region of Space entirely, he’s made enemies left, right and centre, but none more ill-advised than Scorpius. Once this hybrid creature with a horrific past discovered that Crichton held knowledge within his mind of how to create wormholes, Scorpius determined to discover and make use out of it.

To this end, he left an implant in Crichton’s brain, a neural clone of himself, designed to chip away at Crichton’s consciousness, subtly at first, then more obviously as the information started to reveal itself. Nicknamed Harvey by John himself, this Scorpius is in some ways different to the real-life version. At first there is little difference between the two, but when the clone begins to exert unwanted Influence over Crichton’s mind, he seems even more vicious than his creator.

When the chip is removed from Crichton, the clone lives on In the astronaut’s head, a residue that It was impossible to remove thanks to Scorpius’s ’tendrils’seeping throughout Johifs brain. It is here that he changes. Trapped, forgotten and alone, Scorpius is at least partially kept under control by Crichton, but he pops up to offer advice from time to time in various scenarios, from a funfair to a World War 11 battle. He is almost happy, as If an a field trip, until his safrty is threatened. Every time John attempts to have him removed, he fights tooth and nail for survival. While a duplicate Crichton managed to delete the interloper, the remaining one still has his unwelcome house guest, who may become strong enough to affect the world outside John’s head once more...

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