SCIFI.COM | Farscape: Journey Logs

Even before Talyn got swallowed by the Budong, I was having a rotten day. I was pissed at our dear Captain Bialar Crais, and between DRDs stalking me and Winona going AWOL, I had reason to be. Turned out most of it wasn't Crais' fault. But I'm fast-forwarding.

Rewind to the part where Talyn got swallowed by a Budong.

I was expressing my frustration to Crais — okay, I was yelling — when I saw the Budong approaching. It was big, like super-sized Moby Dick big. Before we could react, the thing's mouth snapped shut with us inside.

Once inside, we were basically doomed, as Budongs are basically gargantuan, unstoppable eating machines, and little is known about them because no one ever survives an encounter with a Budong.

While we were having our Discovery Channel moment, our living ship was losing its cool and sliding fast down this creature's throat. To stop our descent, I went EVA and tethered iridium alloy cables to the mooring points on Talyn's skin. Aeryn and I hooked the other end of the cables onto some Tak-Five torpedoes and launched them into the Budong. This stopped our express descent, and we were temporarily safe somewhere in the digestive tract, above the stomach.

I figured my day couldn't get much worse. Then, when I went looking for Crais in his quarters, I discovered a home movie of his. Lately, I'd noticed him and Aeryn swapping some weird looks. And he'd thrown me the skunk eye more than once since I came on board. Still, I wasn't prepared for what I saw on that vid chip....

A short while later, I found Aeryn and Crais together on the bridge. They had a plan: escape the Budong by navigating through its digestive tract to its ... "terminal point." To add some extra unpleasant zing, Aeryn was going to accept a neural transponder from Talyn. She and Crais insisted this was necessary for the success of the escape. But it it also meant she'd link into a mental relationship with the gunship — and with Crais, who, of course, already had a transponder himself.

Maybe it's me, but I'm not a fan of metallic objects stabbing into people's brains. Aeryn and I had a disagreement — okay, we yelled at each other. A lot. Then she went ahead and did it anyway.

Aeryn's new connection with Talyn allowed her to re-establish contact with Rygel and Stark, who had returned from their recon mission in the Transport Pod and were hiding outside. Stark (surprise) freaked when he learned where we were. He insisted that Talyn couldn't survive the monster's digestive tract. Hearing this, Talyn panicked. Meanwhile, Crais was falling apart, suffering what he called cybernetic bleed-back. The stress of keeping his own emotions and desires separate from Talyn's was almost overwhelming him. Great; what would this mean for Aeryn?

The gunship, through the bleed-back, forced Crais to start manually disconnecting the mooring cables. I stopped Crais, but Talyn was so berserk that Aeryn had to knock the Leviathan cold by tearing out a whole bunch of really important connections.

Then Stark called in with his Big Plan.

He would tempt the Budong into eating ice from the planet's rings. Meanwhile, we'd jettison cesium fuel and set off one of the Tak-Five torpedoes. Ignition source plus cesium plus water equals explosion. Meaning we'd surf out the Budong's mouth on a wave of fiery puke. (Only we would devise a plan like this.)

My role in this comedy of errors was to go EVA again and set the torpedo that was lodged in the Budong's gullet for a time-delayed explosion. I was out there, doing my job, when Talyn took off. Leaving me stranded in the Budong's gut. Just like Jonah.

Except that Jonah's whale wasn't about to explode.