My Side, Your Side, Inside, Outside, Break on Through to the Other Side...

So, like I've said, I've been watching (albeit rather slowly) through the latest set of Farscape DVDs. Today's featured episode was "Meltdown" (for which beware spoilers!). For various reasons, I've actually ended up watching that one several times over the past few months, to the point where this time out I found myself reciting huge chunks of dialog right along with the characters. Ah, yes, yet another sign that you've watched far too much of a given show...

Anyway. I've always had rather interestingly mixed feelings about this particular episode. The hormone-soaked John/Aeryn bits, complete with crappy porno-movie soundtrack, annoy me so badly I have to keep fighting the urge to reach for the fast-forward button. On the other hand, seeing Crais running around in full-fledged, whacked-out, Trigger-Happy Control Freak Mode is highly entertaining. And I completely adore the Stark stuff.

I've always found Stark a fascinating character (as well as being a deeply sympathetic and strangely likeable one), possibly because there are so many mysteries in his background and contradictions in his nature. And it seems to me that "Meltdown," whatever its other good and bad points, is an interesting episode for gaining some insight into this particular character. (Which I am now going to proceed to natter on about at great length, because psychoanalyzing fictional characters is one of my all-time favorite hobbies.)

The first and most obvious question to ask about Stark has got to be "Just how crazy is this guy, anyway?" And it's not a very easy question to answer... It's clear from "The Hidden Memory" that he's not nearly as much of a headcase as he at first appears to be, that he's been acting crazy in order to keep the Peacekeepers off his back, and that he's quite capable of being pefectly calm and lucid once he's called on it. Later on, though, it becomes equally clear that the guy does have some major mental and emotional instabilities, and one can't help but wonder exactly to what extent he was only pretending to be pretending to be crazy. So to speak.

He's certainly acting like a complete lunatic in "Meltdown," at least from the others' perspectives, anyway. Holding conversations with empty air, suddenly seizing control of the ship, babbling incoherently, flying them back into the star after they'd made their escape... But here's the interesting thing. When you look at it from Stark's perspective, I don't think anything he does is actually crazy at all. Some of it surely represents a triumph of emotion and noble impulse over common sense and self-preservation, true, but that's nothing you couldn't say about, oh, any number of wacky things John's done.

No, the reason Stark comes across as dangerously insane -- and I think this is where we start getting to the crux of the character -- is that he has access to information and perceptions the others don't have, and he's very, very bad at realizing that he has to communicate those things to others if he wants them to understand him. E.g., he starts babbling about having to help Sierjna without stopping to explain to anybody just who Sierjna is, let alone why she needs helping and how flying Talyn back into danger is going to accomplish that. You see something rather similar (albeit on a much smaller scale), I think, in "Green-Eyed Monster," where he opens communications from the transport pod by shouting "Vomit, vomit!" and provokes a highly amusing "What the hell is he talking about?" sort of look between the folks on Talyn. In that case, of course, once he calms down enough to explain, it turns out that what he's talking about is a perfectly sane and highly intelligent plan.

Part of Stark's problem is obviously just that when he gets excited he has trouble forming coherent sentences. But I suspect there's something a bit more psychologically complex going on there, as well. My personal theory is that Stark occasionally has great difficulty remaining clear on the boundary between himself and others, that he has difficulty keeping in mind (at least in moments of stress and excitement) that just because he's perfectly clear in his own mind what he's talking about that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else has the necessary background to understand it, too.

It's really not at all difficult to see how it is that Stark might have developed a degree of confusion between "self" and "other." To begin with, we know that he's got pieces of other people's memories in his mind, possibly even bits of their personalities, and that has to do strange things to one's sense of self. Two years of repeated mental violations -- or at least attempted violations -- in the Aurora Chair can't have done him very much good, either. Then there's the fact that he does have access to certain perceptions that other people don't; even for someone much saner than Stark, it must be a bit difficult to keep in mind that other people can't see the ghost who's standing right in front of you, as real and solid as anybody else in the room. Also, he does seem to have some degree of telepathic or empathic receptivity (he says in "Meltdown" that he can feel Talyn's pain), meaning that the boundaries between himself and others may normally be quite porous for him, if only in one direction. Finally, it's impossible not to notice that his instabilities grew much, much more pronounced after his dispersal in "The Ugly Truth." Well, it's hard to imagine anything more likely to exacerbate problems with boundary issues than being quite literally stripped of one's phsyical boundaries and left to exist as free-floating energy.

What I find particularly interesting is that, if you assume that many of Stark's difficulties stem from this "boundary" problem, his signature "my side, your side" rant is suddenly transformed from mere random nonsense into something deeply psychologically meaningful. It is, after all, all about defining boundaries: you're over there, I'm over here. And what's really interesting is that this is the rant Stark goes into precisely when he wants to play up his own insanity. Which would seem to indicate that, consciously or subconsciously, Stark is actually aware that it's this issue of boundaries that lies at the heart of his own mental confusion. Which I find quite fascinating, indeed.

Yeah, I know, I know. I should have been a lit major. It's a pity I don't get this interested in Shakespeare.

By the way, it occurs to me that I've just fufilled a promise I made way back in the earliest days of this blog. Back then, I wrote a similar analysis of that other Farscapian crazy guy, Bialar Crais, and at some point not too long afterward I remember referring back to it and saying, "Hey, you should see me do Stark." Well, now you've seen me do Stark. Maybe in another year or so, I'll analyze Rygel or someone...