Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been grinding my way through Farscape Season 2, and came across the inevitable body switching episode. I find it amusing that it’s such a common theme in sci-fi shows (and with several movies where that’s the entire premise), especially considering how it’s a pretty tough plot device to swallow for even the most fantastic of fantasy settings. Of course, it often makes for an amusing exercise where you get to watch the actors try to impersonate each other. It’s often kind of neat for that alone, though the plots of these episodes are often quite… painful.

The Farscape incarnation of this was rather neat. First off, they mixed over the voices for the teaser part to partly make it seem more like the “transferred” character’s voice, and a little more unreal. I’m sure that would have gotten old fast, but it was a little strange that they dropped the effect for the rest of the episode after the opening sequence. What was best, though, was that when the male lead character was put into the female’s body, there wasn’t this dancing around the issue awkwardness of tripping in high heels or not knowing how to put makeup on or any of the other you-have-to-experience-it-to-really-know things. No: he found a corner, unzipped the top, and bounced.

Bounced.