TV

Couch Avocados: TV Discussion Thread – Farscape February 12, 2026

Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Subvision’s opening title theme from Farscape’s first two seasons.

Subvision, “Theme from Farscape” (2:08)

Farscape February at the Couch Avocados column continues with a few paragraphs about a fan-favorite episode that’s one of my favorite standalone stories the serialized Farscape did and an episode that received its own thread here at The Avocado in 2021.

Submitted to Farscape by future Z Nation writer Michael Cassutt, a freelancer who received sole credit for the episode, but heavily rewritten by an uncredited Justin Monjo, 2000’s “Out of Their Minds” is not just a great body swap episode. It’s also a clever bottle episode in which Jim Henson’s Creature Shop reused a couple of Skeksis frames from The Dark Crystal to create the Halosians, the guest aliens of the week, and the limitations of the bottle episode were compensated by the sight of everyone in the cast entertainingly doing impressions of each other—except Virginia Hey. (She was strangely isolated from the rest of the cast in her own B-story, which—when I watched for the purposes of this blog post “Out of Their Minds” for the first time since the mid-2000s—made me initially think, “Wow, they threw Hey under the bus.” But then this B-story where Zhaan is a hostage who outsmarts her two captors by turning the ship’s female Halosian subordinate against her less bright male commander ended up being not all that bad.)

Trapped in Aeryn’s body, Crichton has to instruct Rygel on how to use his body when nature calls in “Out of Their Minds.” (Posted by @syfysource on Tumblr.)

The first body swap episode I ever stumbled into when I was a little kid was Gilligan’s Island’s “The Friendly Physician.” After a mad scientist switched around the castaways’ minds, Russell Johnson dubbed Mary Ann while the Professor’s mind was in her body, and Dawn Wells dubbed Johnson’s character while Mary Ann’s mind was in his body, and so on.

“Out of Their Minds” wasn’t lazy like “The Friendly Physician” was. When the Halosian warriors’ weapon transferred the mind of Rygel, one of the show’s two puppeteered main characters, into Crichton’s body, Ben Browder became Jonathan Hardy as Rygel. He completely changed his voice and committed to Hardy’s Kiwi/British accent. And then when the weapon was fired at Moya again and Rygel’s mind wound up in Aeryn’s body, Claudia Black became the Rygel puppet. In addition to recreating Hardy’s voice, she perfectly imitated the puppet’s fidgety fingers and gruff expressions.

Farscape was known for not simplifying things for viewers. However, in a rare instance where Farscape tried to make things easier for viewers, the body-swapped characters wore signs to keep each other from getting confused over who was whom, as well as for the sake of the audience. (Posted by @sci-fi-gifs on Tumblr.)

“Other shows have two characters switch bodies,” said Farscape staff writer Ricky Manning to Cinescape magazine in 2002. “We took six characters and swapped bodies, and then did it again. That was one that scared us. It scared [writer] Justin Monjo. It scared the director, Ian Watson. It frightened the actors. Are we going to be able to make this work? Is anybody going to have any idea what’s going on, or is it going to be total confusion? Or is it going to be completely stupid? I think it worked, thanks to Justin’s great writing, and Ian Watson’s great directing, and our amazing cast, who just all sunk their teeth into it.”

Black was especially fearless during the farcical scene where she portrayed Crichton in Aeryn’s body and Crichton reverts to a 13-year-old because he now has bigger breasts. And remember the scene in Batman Returns where Catwoman flirts with the Penguin and proposes an alliance? The scene where Chiana seduces Rygel is like that scene, except Catwoman is Anthony Simcoe as Chiana in D’Argo’s body, and the Penguin is Browder as Rygel in Crichton’s body.

“Out of Their Minds” (44:17), posted in its entirety by Farscape’s official YouTube channel

Body swap episodes are usually comedic for all of their runtime. “Out of Their Minds” is a rare body swap episode that’s hilarious one moment and dramatic the next.

The Halosian ship-induced body swaps are nearly fatal for Pilot, who can’t survive in a body that’s not physically bonded to Moya. Gigi Edgley was terrific as Pilot (a role otherwise voiced by Samoan Kiwi actor Lani John Tupu, who also played ex-Peacekeeper Bialar Crais) when he was trapped in Chiana’s body. (Edgley’s scenes as Pilot allowed her to speak in her natural Aussie accent instead of the American accent she went with for the Nebari thief.) Because D’Argo is stuck in Pilot’s body (so that meant Simcoe temporarily provided the Pilot puppet’s voice), the serene Pilot has to guide the temperamental Luxan warrior on how to communicate with Moya, and we get an insight into how Pilot concentrates while multitasking, as well as an insight into Pilot’s loneliness.

Another way that “Out of Their Minds” helped to clarify things for viewers was the temporary reddening of Pilot’s eye color when D’Argo was trapped in Pilot’s body. (Posted by @sci-fi-gifs.)

The insight into the 30-cycle-old-plus alien being’s loneliness is one of many reasons why “Out of Their Minds” is my favorite body swap episode. Edgley’s effective performance as an alien who finds a body swap to be constraining and terrifying instead of liberating (like how Jodie Foster’s character found it to be when she got the chance to take over her mom’s body in Freaky Friday) made me take more seriously a giant Henson’s Creature Shop puppet as if he were an angsty character from The Wire or a Sidney Lumet police corruption movie.

Today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite body swap episode? If so, what is it? Wikipedia lists 511 body swap episodes that aren’t from anime. American Dad!, which is about to begin its new season on February 22 on Fox, did two of them.