Crackers Don't Matter

"Crackers Don't Matter"
Farscape episode
Crichton acting paranoid
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 4
Directed by	Ian Watson
Written by	Justin Monjo
Original air date	April 7, 2000
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List of Farscape episodes

"Crackers Don't Matter" is an episode from the second season of the Australian-American television series Farscape, written by Justin Monjo and directed by Ian Watson.

The crew of Moya take on board a blind engineer named T'raltixx, whom they have hired to create cloaking technology for Moya. Though John is suspicious of T'raltixx's motives, the viability of the engineer's technology is proved when he is able to make John's module partially disappear in a demonstration. He claims, however, that in order to do the same for a ship as large as Moya, she must be moved to the ship yards on his home planet, which the crew reluctantly agree to do. Together they travel through an area rich in pulsars to his planet to obtain the device. He warns them that in some "lesser species," the intense light exhibited by the pulsars can cause some irrational behavior. Quickly, that proves to be true as Aeryn, Chiana, Rygel, John, and D'Argo begin accusing each other and hunting each other throughout the ship. As they become increasingly paranoid and irrational, even Pilot is affected, becoming angry and hostile towards Moya's passengers. Zhaan, meanwhile, has retired to a room to experience the "photogasms" caused by the pulsars. As the situation degenerates, the disagreements turn violent. John appears to be the least affected, though he does hallucinate Scorpius in a Hawaiian shirt, who encourages him to kill Aeryn and then eat pizza and drink margaritas. Ultimately John captures the rest of the crew and explains to them that it's not the pulsars causing them to act so strangely, but rather T'raltixx, who is sucking all the power out of Moya to create intensely bright light. He intends for the rest of the crew to kill each other off so that he and the rest of his species can use the ship and its light to rise from their dormant state, and spread through the galaxy. The crew finally band together to create a protective outfit for John against the intense radiation. He then battles T'raltixx and defeats him. The episode ends with the crew awkwardly apologizing to one another for their behavior.

Writer Justin Monjo had to pen the episode in an extremely short time because delays in the completion of "Picture if You Will" forced the rapid production of a shipbound story.

Ian Watson described the episode as "the Shining retold" (Ben Browder referenced the film by ad libbing "Heeeere's Johnny" at one point). Watson stated he intentionally made odd production choices, such as ending John and Aeryn's shoot-out with them both running out of bullets, and the use of martial music in a romantic scene: "I was trying to do the unexpected. Trying to push the style and push everything we did into new places. Rather than saying this is safe science fiction, we were trying to work with opposites, trying to make a likeable character unlikeable...We were trying to do inappropriate things to shake the drama up. I think the music followed that through."