Season 2, Episode 16 – The Locket
In The Locket, the crew of Moya is trapped in a space resin that exists outside of time. To escape the amber mist fossilizing around them, the crew must consider whether it is better to live a safe and secure life or to live the more dangerous and risky life that truly provides them with meaning. In this sense, the locket worn by Aeryn in this episode functions as an extended metaphor about relationships, memory, and regret. The episode pushes the understanding of preserving memories or mementos to explore the affect of that act of preservation on both the person who possesses the locket and the person whose image has been stored away in the locket. To move forward, some in the crew must decide whether they are cherishing memories or simply anchoring themselves to what is familiar and less scary then the unknown of the present.
Caught in what they assume is a stellar mist, John and D’Argo discuss Aeryn’s whereabouts. She has been off ship for one solar day, and they are wondering if she is caught in the mist too. Pretty much as soon as they voice their concerns, Pilot lets them know that Aeryn’s transport pod is about to dock. The crew rushes to her transport pod and find her lying on the ground and … old. Aeryn overcome with emotion touches John’s face with the caress of a long lost love. She warns the crew that they are in danger and must leave the mist immediately. The crew focuses more on her aging and her whereabouts for the past day, ignoring her repeated warnings that she has been gone for 160 cycles. They keep insisting that she has only been gone one solar day. She offers her warning and informs them that she must go back to the nearby planet. The crew’s disbelief about her age and protest towards her leaving again agitates Aeryn. She demands they let her go. Stark (Surprise! Stark’s back) soothes Aeryn with his facelight and she falls asleep. The crew allows her to rest while they try to figure out what has happened. Since none of them believe she naturally aged 160 cycles, they all imagine that something down on the nearby planet must be the cause of her aging.
Aeryn regardless of age has lost none of her guile. When she awakens, she incapacitates Chiana, who was supposed to watch over her, and returns to the planet below. John chases her to the planet where he meets Aeryn’s granddaughter thus confirming Aeryn’s insistence that she has in fact lived 160 cycles in the past day. Aeryn and her granddaughter inform John that they don’t live on this planet but a nearby one and the mist only opens every four arns providing enough of a path to fly to Moya. Aeryn convinces John to immediately fly to Moya and then return in four arns. He attempts it, but the mist closes in on him and he is stuck with Aeryn. When we next see John, 50 cycles have passed and he is an elderly man.
Now, here is where the locket metaphor begins to permeate the episode. While Aeryn and John are down on the planet, Stark approaches Zhaan with a theory about the stellar mist that has entrapped Moya. He believes that the mist is actually a “center halo,” a hypothetical convergence of universal energies where time ceases to exist. Zhaan’s openness to his theorizing or perhaps more accurately flirting leads him to suggest that if they performed union, they might be able to discern whether the mist is actually a center halo (who hasn’t used that line). Initially Zhaan is a bit hesitant due to the Stark’s power, but in the end she is up for it and they give it a go. At the end of a pretty creepy portrayal of union, Zhaan and Stark agree that they are indeed caught in a center halo. They had originally surmised that time moves faster on the nearby planet, but now they recognize the opposite is true. Time is moving normally outside the mist. In other words, they are ensnared in a locket. Eventually the halo will harden and whatever is inside will be trapped, timeless and forever, just like a picture saved inside a locket.
While Zhaan and Stark are getting their union on, surprisingly, D’Argo and Chiana aren’t. Discovering Chiana up to some low level thievery with Rygel, D’Argo scolds her, demanding her to behave and moreover just to do as he says. Obviously, Chiana doesn’t respond well to his commands. A bit later in the episode, D’Argo tells her “you’re one of us now.” Since she is down with the in-crowd, she doesn’t need to hang around with Rygel or indulge in her roguish ways. Chiana tells D’Argo that she isn’t going to change. She will always do what she does, and she voices the fate of their relationship, lamenting that she doesn’t think that they’ll make it. This subplot about D’Argo expectations for Chiana in their relationship illustrates another aspect of the locket metaphor. D’Argo wants a locketed version of Chiana. He wants something static, something always the same. Chiana is not that. She, in the words of Ani Difranco, “has the kind of beauty that moves.”
Returning to John and Aeryn on the planet below, John is now old, cranky and quite southern. Despite the aging Scorpius remains. Oddly enough and not really explored in this episode, John has beat Scorpius. Scorpius was never able to find him, and John could just live out his life on this planet and potentially save the universe. John’s ability to escape Scorpius in this manner doesn’t exactly make sense since supposedly it is only that which is trapped in the mist that is outside of time. The planet John and Aeryn are on, should be in the same time flow as Scorpius. Nonetheless, John has escaped Scorpius. This planet has become a locket harboring John from the Scorpius’ grasp. Yet, John doesn’t celebrate his victory over Scorpius; rather, he bemoans the loss of his dream. Trapped on this planet, he didn’t get to completely live out his dream as an astronaut and space explorer. John was plucked from his own life and his own dreams and stuck in locket, protected from Scorpius but separated from all that made his life meaningful -save Aeryn.
The locket then comes most obviously to the forefront of the episode as an elderly John and Aeryn flirt and argue like an old couple. It isn’t clear though what their relationship actually was for the past 50 something year. As they argue and tease, John asks whose picture is in the actual locket. He suggests it is her first husband from when she traveled through the mist. She allows John to believe that and says only that the image inside it is of her one true love. John, fearful of what he might find, remarks that he doesn’t want to see how ugly her husband was anyways. Here the locket actually embodies the same old fears and conversations that John and Aeryn have struggled with this whole season. Despite their obvious feelings for each other, they both will only open themselves up so far. The discussion of the locket simply reenacts their romantic impasse. The locket is the physical manifestation of their romantic past and present. Neither is willing to open it.
With four hours in the mist and the 50ish years outside the mist having passed, John and Aeryn fly back to Moya through the opening in the mist. The hope for a joyous reunion quickly fades away as Aeryn has finally succumbed age and passed away. John gathers Aeryn in his arms. He begins describing all the the different things that he wanted them to do together and all the places from his childhood he wanted to share with her. He sighs, “Damn baby ah miss you already. Who else ‘m ah gonna tell this crap to?” Finally, he opens Aeryn locket, revealing his picture inside and begins to sob. This scene is the culmination of all insecurity and fear that has tinged Aeryn and John’s relationship. Yes, the locket contained John’s picture, but closed it simply kept their silence and unwillingness; it embodied their struggle to move forward in their relationship. Only when it was too late, did they finally truly open up about their feelings.
John shares his thoughts on how to escape the mist and allows the rest of the crew to weigh the pros and cons of attempting to leave the mist or staying on the planets below. John reminds them that they can live out their lives on the planets below in safety and relative peace, but that life will be devoid of their ability to fulfill their dreams and they will never reach their home planets. The planet then will become a locket. They will be protected and safe for their lives, but they will cut off from much of what actually gives their lives meaning. In the end, the crew decides it is better to die in a starburst than to not live the life they desire.
The reverse starburst is a success, and unbeknownst to the crew, they have been returned to a time right before they entered the mist. Plus, Aeryn is alive. As the crew considers hiding in the stellar mist, the narrative comes full circle. The crew is on the bridge questioning the nature of the mist and wondering if it would be a good place to hide from the Peacekeepers. Calling back to her comment at the beginning of the episode, Chiana lets the crew know she thinks going into the stellar mist is a bad idea. If the crew chooses to enter the stellar mist, they will be stuck in a time loop that for all intents and purposes encapsulates them like a locket. However, Zhaan and Stark due to being in union (get a room) during the reverse starburst maintained the memories of being trapped in the center halo. They warn the crew, Chiana gloats, and Moya pulls a “louie” avoiding the mist and freeing the crew from the time loop.
Despite the crew’s escape from the mist and the time loop, the role of the locket has not yet been concluded. In the finals scene, Aeryn tells John that she found locket that Chiana gave here in the transport pod. It has been fused shut and she has to pry it open. Inside the locket, unbeknownst to this version of John and Aeryn, lie the ashes of John’s picture. The ashes spill into the air and she and John look at each other. While perhaps the cliche is that they are looking at each other with new eyes, they do seem to be looking at each other unshackled from the past and unshackled from their own hesitations and anxieties about their relationship. Just as the crew was freed from a future that would simply re-institute their past when they choose to avoid the mist, John and Aeryn have been released from the past of their romantic relationship. Their look acknowledges that in the long gone past they have already admitted their love for each other, and now there is the possibility of something unfettered, alive, and immediate. For as powerful as a memory and the ritualization of the memory is, when Aeryn first arrives back on Moya, she holds John’s face, and despite carrying his picture for hundreds of years, observes, “I forgot how beautiful you are.”
Unrealized Realities 