Farscape/Recap/S04/E16 Bringing Home the Beacon

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Farscape‎ | Recap‎ | S04


Season 4, Episode 16:

Bringing Home the Beacon

As the men return after their excursion, the women of Moya are still on a trading outpost located on a dead Leviathan husk, attempting to locate sensor distorters that will allow Moya to mimic other kinds of ships on long-range scans. However, they discover that Peacekeepers, led by Grayza and Braca, and Scarrans, led by War Minister Ahkna, have also arrived on the outpost to meet in secret and negotiate for a peace settlement. Rather than simply leave, Aeryn think they should try and expose what's going on, since Grayza is most likely going outside her authority to negotiate with the Scarrans, and if the Peacekeeper High Command found out what was going on, they'd get rid of Grayza and there'd be no one to hunt for Moya.

It transpires that Grayza is planning to seize control of the Peacekeeper High Council. She's willing to give the Luxan Territories to the Scarrans as part of a peace settlement in exchange for the Uncharted Territories, but Ahkna believes that Grayza is stalling because the Peacekeepers couldn't possibly win an all-out war and that their claims of having wormhole weapons -- the Peacekeepers are claiming that the destruction of a Scarran dreadnought using a wormhole weapon was their doing -- is a lie. Aeryn decides that merely exposing Grayza isn't enough: she needs to be killed.

As Aeryn, Sikozu, Chiana and Noranti are preparing their attack, Grayza and Ahkna both sign the treaty -- only for Scarrans to take Grayza hostage a moment later, planning to take her to their Katratzi base and interrogate her on wormhole weapons. The plan changes and the women of Moya wind up rescuing Grayza from the Scarrans, though she and Braca manage to escape. Aeryn is separated from the others for a while, but they all manage to meet up at the transport pod (with the sensor distorter) and return to Moya.

She Starbursts away, but the Scarrans are in pursuit, somehow able to home in on Moya's exact position. It's a mystery as to how, until Crichton asks Aeryn a question about the baby and she doesn't know what he's talking about. Realising what's happened, Crichton shoots "Aeryn", actually a bioloid duplicate, and this deactivates the beacon that the Scarrans were tracking. Scorpius patches the sensor distorter into Moya's systems, Pilot imitates a Scarran ore freighter and Sikozu "helpfully" tells them that a Leviathan went in a completely different direction. Based on what they know about bioloid technology, Scorpius and Sikozu theorise that the Scarrans had intended to copy Grayza and send the duplicate to spy on the Peacekeepers while they tortured the real Grayza for intelligence. They probably plan to question Aeryn about Crichton, meaning that she's still alive, and since they had planned to take Grayza to "Katratzi", that's probably where Aeryn is going. But nobody knows where Katrazi is...