Farscape (TV Series) Thank God It's Friday, Again (1999) User Reviews

Tomorrow is a day off... but tomorrow never comes

[Tweekums · 7/10 · 3 May 2012]

When D'Argo goes into a state of hyper rage and threatens to kill Crichton the latter wisely goes into hiding... for three days! When he emerges he learns that D'Argo has gone down to the planet they are orbiting. The crew head down and find D'Argo is a strangely euphoric state; much like the rest of the population; he states that he is content working there and has no intention of returning to Moya. After an apparent attack on Rygel; Aeryn takes him back to the ship leaving Crichton and Zhaan to try to persuade D'Argo to return. It turns out Rygel hadn't been attacked; something in the food he ate on the planet caused his bodily fluids to become explosive! The same food apparently has a different effect on most people; with a few exceptions the entire population, D'Argo and now Zhaan are left in a euphoric and highly suggestible state; Crichton is only immune because some of the naturally immune locals insert a strange worm into him hoping to get him to help the population free of the chemically induced slavery. We later learn that the crop is being grown for the Peace Keepers to use in their weapons with that knowledge it might be possible to get D'Argo and Zhaan to realise that they only behaving the way they are because of the food.

Like most of the early episodes this tells a complete story so doesn't really needed to be viewed in order; as with other stand alone stories I felt the basic plot could have come from an episode of 'Star Trek: TNG' however the execution is very different; I certainly wouldn't expect scenes like those where Crichton wakes up to find Zhaan's hand on his groin or where Rygel publicly urinates an explosive in TNG!! Farscape has a more tongue in cheek attitude which I really like. The story itself wasn't too deep but it was entertaining enough and gave rise to some tense moments and some good laughs even though there wasn't too much in the way of action. Away from the planet there was some nice character development between Pilot and Aeryn as she learns he isn't a natural scientist and also that she can do things other than fight. Overall this is a decent episode even if it isn't a classic.

Farscape's First Complete Miss

[BSHBen · 2/10 · 17 August 2007]

Farscape had a very good start overall, with solid episodes like "Back and Back and Back to the Future" and "Throne for a Loss", but "Thank God It's Friday, Again" is the first episode that really fails. "I, E.T." was fatally simple and unambitious, but still amusing and consistently watchable. Bits and pieces of "Thank God It's Friday, Again" work, but for the most part the execution is poor and the story just isn't intriguing.

The story begins with the crew following D'Argo to a planet inhabited by the Sykaran. After arriving, they are surprised to find D'Argo to be more than satisfied with his "new life" on the planet as a farmer. Volmae, clearly some sort of queen, greets the crew kindly, telling to stay as long as they desire. Soon after, Rygel claims to have been attacked with an explosive, leading him and Aeryn to return to Moya. D'Argo brings Zhaan and Crichton to his house to spend the night. The next day, D'Argo brings Crichton and Zhaan with him to a farming area where the Sykaran happily grow tannot roots. Then, in a very alarming incident, a group of Sykaran grab Crichton and, well, inject a worm into his stomach.

There is something very sinister going on on the planet, as Crichton soon finds out. The small group of Sykarans tell Crichton that a toxin in the tannot root makes everybody on the planet happy and stupid. Injection of the worm prevents the tannot root from having its effect. Besides this group of Sykarans, nobody else on the planet besides the queen is unaffected. The whole population basically works as slaves of the queen, always believing that tomorrow is a rest day (hence the episode's title).

More secrets about the tannot root and its involvement with the Peacekeepers are revealed later on, but by that point I had lost all interest in the episode. The chief problem is with the main storyline. There's never any action, romance, adventure, or anything else to keep the story interesting. "Thank God It's Friday, Again" fails to give the audience anything to care about. The premise simply is not strong enough to make the episode interesting. The production values and make-up are OK but nothing special. Angie Milliken, who plays Volmae, also gives a poor performance, placing random pauses between the words in her lines. I'm not sure what director Rowan Woods was going for with her character, but whatever it was, it doesn't work.

The idea of an entire planet's population being brainwashed into believing that the next day is always a rest day is silly, but skillful execution could have redeemed it. "Thank God It's Friday, Again", however, trudges along at a slow pace and spends way to much time on the main storyline. The only segments of the episode worth seeing take place between Aeryn and Pilot, in which Pilot reveals that he doesn't understand everything about science. Aeryn also gets to use her scientific knowledge, in an unusual change of character.

The episode's climax, involving a very unexpected stunt by Rygel, is at least not as mundane as the rest of the episode, but it still fails to create any level of interest. Farscape had a very good start overall, and "Thank God It's Friday, Again" is one of its few truly bad episodes. Still, it does have a couple of good moments, but it never amounts to anything interesting. 1.5/4

The Other Side of Paradise

[craybatesedu · 4/10 · 18 April 2019]

When Star Trek tried a planet of drug-pacified hippies, it failed on account of sheer ridiculousness. Farside's take on the same setup fails on a lesser scale, but the plot is still a mess held together by badly-paced conversations and an unwatchable alien princess who talks the way a snail would crawl through syrup.

An ultimately unexplained setup finds D'Argo mysteriously happy on a planet of alien dirt-farmers who are, as is obvious before act one is over but as is needlessly re-explained a half dozen times throughout the episode, turned to brainwashed slaves by a narcotic food. For some reason this same food is also a crucial ingredient in peacekeeper weapons, is highly explosive in Rigel's bodily waste, is the favorite food of a native worm that just happens to counteract the effects of the food when inhabiting an alien body, and such a worm just happens to be in the possession of a family of drug-resistant slaves who just happen to run into Crichton when he comes to rescue D'Argo.

This is approximately as serious as the episode gets.

Sun is given the chance to save the day with science, but she only gets as far as identifying the problem. This helps her save the day by turning Rigel's privates into a flamethrower, which somehow convinces the alien princess to defy the peacekeepers who somehow turned the planet on to the hypnotizing drug. It kind of saves the day, or maybe it doesn't. The ending doesn't clarify if the alien princess chooses to rebel or chooses to carry on.

D'Argo's reason for traveling to this planet is never explained. Perhaps the hope was that we would forget why when we were busy trying to figure out the rest of the episode. Nothing works particularly well this episode, and for once even the alien makeup is unconvincing and lazy. So far we have been spoiled with immaculate full-body alien costumes and Boston Dynamics-grade Henson Studios animatronics, so it is almost startling to see human actors turned barely alien with white contact lenses and too much rouge.

Between Zhaan and Chrichton touching each others' private parts for no reason and Rigel saving the day with flammable urine, this episode accomplishes truly nothing at all. If anything, we have learned only that when in peril the crew is eager to abandon each other, as most of Sun and Crichtons' dialog with each other is spent inexplicably trying to talk the other out of simply abandoning D'Argo and Zhaan to their fates. With an unexplained setup, a baffling conclusion, and a wasteland of boring fluff in between, this is an altogether highly skippable episode.