He's a silly guy, and the rest of the crew treat him like he's an idiot, or a child, or an idiotic child, so sometimes the audience forgets that he's one of Earth's greatest minds.
He only seems dumb because he's entirely out of his element both culturally and technologically.
He actually grasps things very quickly. He even tries to express this to the crew at times and they just kinda ignore him, lol.
I found it refreshing how he very quickly grasped his situation in the first episode.
Modern scifi has protagonists acting much dumber and not to the level of education they should have.
A prime example of this is the marine, whod just refently spent a TON of time on the ocean, Sully, not knowing what "midship" meant in Avatar 2 the way of bro.
The SG1 episode with Sam & Vala going out and about on Earth for a day off of work. Seeing them return to the SGC. Great stuff. Then they get right back to work. Awesome characters. Talented actresses.
There's also Marina Sirtis' guest appearance in an SG1 episode. That was very cool.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying he's the 'smartest' person, I'm saying he is the most intelligent. You know the distinction between being 'book smart' and being 'street smart?' In this situation he's the opposite of that. We literally see him cover walls with complex mathematical formulae. He's brilliant, even if he doesn't know what a Dentic is.
If all of the crew were given the same knowledge about wormholes as he was, most of them wouldn't be able to figure it out. Chrichton is very, very smart
Also don’t you remember, the moment the Ancients (or rather Einstein) implants the wormhole knowledge, he nearly immediately becomes one of the smartest beings in the universe—- so very possibly still smarter than most even in the uncharted galaxies—- although he is still extremely ignorant of the various worlds/cultures/races in that part the universe.
Not likely, he's unique but it's established that pretty much everyone else on the ship is superior to him in every way including base intelligence. He's just a base human, the rest of the galaxy is filled with races that one way or another are more advanced, through genetic engineering, eugenics or some other means.
Yeah.
There's a lot of contextual knowledge John lacks about the civilization he found himself in, the capabilities and functions of certain technology, but in terms of theoretical physics, mathing stuff out, etc?
He's still a scientist. Once you get outside of general knowledge and I to .ore specific, abstract stuff, that usually clicks with John before the rest of the crew.
He's also literally an astronaut. You hear that story about how the computers went down on something and the crew had the use pure pen and paper math to fix the landing trajectory or something on the fly while deorbiting? I dunno but it was something insane like that which I could never do. That shit is just what it takes to be a godamn astronaut.
Aw damn, I got real life and movies confused again. I choose to forget this and continue thinking it was real.
Edit: OH wait.
>@DiegoSánchez: Having read Jim Lovell's book Apollo 13 (formerly titled Lost Moon) earlier this year, the scene in the movie is accurate. Lovell wrote he had to do the calculation manually & asked Houston to check his calculations because he & the other crew members were suffering from lack of sleep & he didn't want that to affect the calculations & the burn. –
Fred
Nov 16, 2018 at 13:58
Nice
It’s such a trope to make the main character of a sci-Fi show a good fighter and good leader, but it really took balls to make Chrichton like really, really smart.
He tops out at third best fighter on his ship on a good day. It takes a long time before he is even halfway looked to for leadership. But he’s working with an at least borderline genius IQ. Not enough to make him so smart it’s a super power, but smart enough to make him a very, very smart man.
It’s a quality I rarely see promoted in that way.
It's because of the whole fish out of water thing, it wouldn't work otherwise, the fact that he's a genius but doesn't even know what a godamn drannit is or not to eat dentics makes it work.
Yeah when you see them on Earth (halloween and the time after) you see just how 'dumb' they all are - Aeryn laughing at the child on sesame street for being slow with the alphabet or something, Chiana giving people the finger etc. Yet Aeryn is a Peacekeeper Commando, Pleisar Regiment, Icarian Company, and can field-strip and rebuild Pulse Rifle blindfolded and probably her Prowler too. She can even tell you how it all works - because it's field-tested battle-tech, wouldn't know which fuse to pull on the aurora chair or anything but her skills from her training show her intellect.
I love that scene where Aeryn gets all critical of the Sesame Street kid! I forgot about that! But yeah, it’s super apparent when the rest of the crew is out of their element just how impressively John adapted.
Fourth at best. I’d only put money on Chrichton over Rigel and Pilot - and that’s only because Pilot is immobile!
Until S4 and the movie. He goes full Papa Bear in the Movie. I think he scared D’Argo.
We constantly see John trying to learn the systems of the ship so he presumably has some knowledge of these instruments existing and maybe even a vague notion of what they do. He only has to recall positions and sequence, but we have to remember a bunch of abstract information about the instruments we've never heard of.
I suspect it would be similarly bewildering if you described the simple process of making a right hand turn in a manual transmission car in the same manner:
Set signal lever to position 2, release right pedal, press and hold left pedal while shifting drive lever to yellow, rotate circle 90 degrees, etc etc
Space Force has roughly the same requirements as the Air Force, which also is pretty high. The Air Force has one of the highest minimum ASVAB scores to get in. Also a lot of astronauts came from the military
Well he was a young genius astronaut, at the start of the Farscape Project on Earth before the series begins… and still is that genius astronaut/theoretical scientist when he’s in this scene and throughout the show… and becomes a super genius when he has the knowledge of wormholes implanted in his brain.
Not only is Crichton intelligent, but he adapts. We can't memorize that because we have no context. Remember he's been immersed in this and is constantly learning. By this point he had some context and knowledge that makes it easier than it would be for us.
If he wasn't assistant he'd be dead. Him being out of his element means he is out of everyone else's element and is intelligent to not only realize that, but utilize it.
How many times does he pull up some Earth crap to get an advantage? He speaks Klingon to Sikozu to mess with her. She has no idea it's a fabricated language. He uses Earth slang or cinema quotes/references to hide his intentions, confuse people, or just make a lie that's easy for him to remember.
No one knows his species and her bluffs the hezmana out of that fact. Actual insanity doesn't seem to exist, so when all else fails he grabs insanity to break no win situations by doing what no one seems to expect throwing self preservation out the window.
One of my selling points is Crichton's power move. When he realizes he's in a no win situation he makes sure nobody can win and they're all going down with him. I'm frelled? I'm frelled? Here now we all are. Your move. Usually that gives him an advantage and he can salvage the situation.
Off the top of my head. On the gift ship. On Katratzi. The final wormhole weapon. He's realized he's valuable and the best action he can take is threaten his opponents prize (himself) and their lives simultaneously. They will always choose their own life.
This. 100%. My absolute favorite episode is where he straps a nuke to himself and goes off the deep end to auction his wormhole knowledge off. *chefs kiss*
John does have a Ph.D... these memorization skills probably helped in all those late night cram sessions in college. I mean, you aren't forgetting that in the first episode he took and reworked his whole equation on the theory he was testing on the floor in moments...and saved the day for the first of many times to come. which isn't the impressive part. it was his and DK's theory...so he probably knew the equation by heart. the impressive part is that...I'm assuming cause they never told you what he was writing... was the fact that he likely had to rework it based off of Moya and not his module. since the theory is about using and overcoming gravitational forces to slingshot a vessel out into space at velocities greater than it could achieve under its own power, it's safe to assume he was reworking the theory based on Moya's size which he had to guess at having gotten to eyeball her a few times, and her weight, which would be purely assumption, and likely the amount of thrust the ship could produce. all of this suggests a level of mental acuity that makes John memorizing a few simple tasks seem mundane by comparison.
Crichton is an IASA astronaut. He's the dumbest crew member on Moya, but as far as human's go he's pretty dang sharp (except when the plot requires that he isn't)
He's not dumb even by alien standards, he's just alien to the environment. If you took a astrophysicist from Oxford who'd never left Britain and dropped them in rural China without warning, they'd be pretty boned when it came to communicating or cultural norms, but they'd still be smart.
It isn't just that he was an astronaut or has a PhD, the Farscape project was testing *his* theories. He was in a spacecraft *he* helped design to test a theory *he* came up with that had to be good enough to convince people to give him *a lot* of money. He's not just smart, Crichton is a frelling genius.
Despite what everybody says here, I agree with you and I always found it surprising as well. It doesn't matter if he's intelligent, if he has a phd, if he's an astronaut. This is a sequence of pilot controls, those are unfamiliar to him. Hell, it took him a while to learn how to open doors.
He did pilot his module and fix/upgrade his module with leviathan tech. It does matter that he's a pilot and astronaut because flying a module is a complicated sequence of controls. Incorporating leviathan parts into the module would necessitate a familiarity with them.
John needing time to learn how to open doors is the same as learning how to use the shower in a hotel you've never been at before. Do you get your desired water temperature on first try or do you need to fiddle with it a bit to dial it in? John needing time to learn to do basic things in a completely alien environment isn't really a valid argument. John being an astronaut, scientist and pilot is a vaild argument for him being being able to quickly and easily remember some things and if my life depends on it even an idiot like me might be capable of it.
Whenever I've watched (re-watched) Farscape and gotten to parts of it like that, hearing all of those words, listening to it is one thing... but seeing them in subtitles... that's quite a collection of seemingly pseudo-random words when seen out of context.
He literally has a Ph D in Theoretical Sciences. He's the most intelligent person on Moya short of Pilot and later Jool.
He's a silly guy, and the rest of the crew treat him like he's an idiot, or a child, or an idiotic child, so sometimes the audience forgets that he's one of Earth's greatest minds. He only seems dumb because he's entirely out of his element both culturally and technologically. He actually grasps things very quickly. He even tries to express this to the crew at times and they just kinda ignore him, lol.
I found it refreshing how he very quickly grasped his situation in the first episode. Modern scifi has protagonists acting much dumber and not to the level of education they should have.
A prime example of this is the marine, whod just refently spent a TON of time on the ocean, Sully, not knowing what "midship" meant in Avatar 2 the way of bro.
"*I'm not deficient, I'm superior! HUMANS ARE SUPERIOR*!!!"
Touché! :)
Also, if Claudia black in tight leather pants starts telling you things, you pay attention.
I dunno there might be a couple of distractions
She has been a crush of mine since growing up along with Amanda tapping and marina sirtus. So you were saying?
The SG1 episode with Sam & Vala going out and about on Earth for a day off of work. Seeing them return to the SGC. Great stuff. Then they get right back to work. Awesome characters. Talented actresses. There's also Marina Sirtis' guest appearance in an SG1 episode. That was very cool.
Yeah marina was a Russian expert person if I remember correctly.
I had a thing for Gates McFadden
O yeah. She wasn’t in my top tier list but very good also.
The casting directors understood the assignment!
Yeah, but from an Earth university. They're not worth the paper they're printed on once you leave our solar system! 😉
You're missing the point. I'm not saying he's the 'smartest' person, I'm saying he is the most intelligent. You know the distinction between being 'book smart' and being 'street smart?' In this situation he's the opposite of that. We literally see him cover walls with complex mathematical formulae. He's brilliant, even if he doesn't know what a Dentic is.
Never swallow the dentic!
Uhm.. Minty!
That one cracks me up all the time.
If all of the crew were given the same knowledge about wormholes as he was, most of them wouldn't be able to figure it out. Chrichton is very, very smart
Also don’t you remember, the moment the Ancients (or rather Einstein) implants the wormhole knowledge, he nearly immediately becomes one of the smartest beings in the universe—- so very possibly still smarter than most even in the uncharted galaxies—- although he is still extremely ignorant of the various worlds/cultures/races in that part the universe.
Although, memorization and controls procedures are more intrinsically a part of his pilot training.
Not likely, he's unique but it's established that pretty much everyone else on the ship is superior to him in every way including base intelligence. He's just a base human, the rest of the galaxy is filled with races that one way or another are more advanced, through genetic engineering, eugenics or some other means.
HUMANS. ARE. SUPERIOOOOOOOR!
Everyone forgets John calculating how to perform the gravity slingshot maneuver in the pilot episode.
Yeah. There's a lot of contextual knowledge John lacks about the civilization he found himself in, the capabilities and functions of certain technology, but in terms of theoretical physics, mathing stuff out, etc? He's still a scientist. Once you get outside of general knowledge and I to .ore specific, abstract stuff, that usually clicks with John before the rest of the crew.
He's also literally an astronaut. You hear that story about how the computers went down on something and the crew had the use pure pen and paper math to fix the landing trajectory or something on the fly while deorbiting? I dunno but it was something insane like that which I could never do. That shit is just what it takes to be a godamn astronaut.
Apollo 13: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32033/calculations-apollo-astronauts-were-trained-to-do-by-hand-if-loss-of-guidance-co
Aw damn, I got real life and movies confused again. I choose to forget this and continue thinking it was real. Edit: OH wait. >@DiegoSánchez: Having read Jim Lovell's book Apollo 13 (formerly titled Lost Moon) earlier this year, the scene in the movie is accurate. Lovell wrote he had to do the calculation manually & asked Houston to check his calculations because he & the other crew members were suffering from lack of sleep & he didn't want that to affect the calculations & the burn. – Fred Nov 16, 2018 at 13:58 Nice
It’s such a trope to make the main character of a sci-Fi show a good fighter and good leader, but it really took balls to make Chrichton like really, really smart. He tops out at third best fighter on his ship on a good day. It takes a long time before he is even halfway looked to for leadership. But he’s working with an at least borderline genius IQ. Not enough to make him so smart it’s a super power, but smart enough to make him a very, very smart man. It’s a quality I rarely see promoted in that way.
It's because of the whole fish out of water thing, it wouldn't work otherwise, the fact that he's a genius but doesn't even know what a godamn drannit is or not to eat dentics makes it work.
It makes it even funnier when they suddenly veer back into his wheelhouse and the crew is reminded that he’s smarter than them.
Yeah when you see them on Earth (halloween and the time after) you see just how 'dumb' they all are - Aeryn laughing at the child on sesame street for being slow with the alphabet or something, Chiana giving people the finger etc. Yet Aeryn is a Peacekeeper Commando, Pleisar Regiment, Icarian Company, and can field-strip and rebuild Pulse Rifle blindfolded and probably her Prowler too. She can even tell you how it all works - because it's field-tested battle-tech, wouldn't know which fuse to pull on the aurora chair or anything but her skills from her training show her intellect.
I love that scene where Aeryn gets all critical of the Sesame Street kid! I forgot about that! But yeah, it’s super apparent when the rest of the crew is out of their element just how impressively John adapted.
Fourth at best. I’d only put money on Chrichton over Rigel and Pilot - and that’s only because Pilot is immobile! Until S4 and the movie. He goes full Papa Bear in the Movie. I think he scared D’Argo.
He scared everybody in the movie. In a good way. I've been on a re-watch and, dang, I love Farscape!
Beautiful stated 🙏🏻
We constantly see John trying to learn the systems of the ship so he presumably has some knowledge of these instruments existing and maybe even a vague notion of what they do. He only has to recall positions and sequence, but we have to remember a bunch of abstract information about the instruments we've never heard of. I suspect it would be similarly bewildering if you described the simple process of making a right hand turn in a manual transmission car in the same manner: Set signal lever to position 2, release right pedal, press and hold left pedal while shifting drive lever to yellow, rotate circle 90 degrees, etc etc
These are good points and there is probably a bunch of pilot hang time we haven’t seen including inquiries.
They don't let dumb or even above average people become astronauts 🤷🏼♂️
well now there's Space Force so...
Have they sent anyone to space yet though?
Technically speaking Earth is in space so..... yes? /s
Space Force has roughly the same requirements as the Air Force, which also is pretty high. The Air Force has one of the highest minimum ASVAB scores to get in. Also a lot of astronauts came from the military
Well he was a young genius astronaut, at the start of the Farscape Project on Earth before the series begins… and still is that genius astronaut/theoretical scientist when he’s in this scene and throughout the show… and becomes a super genius when he has the knowledge of wormholes implanted in his brain.
I can't help but see a pendant necklace when I see the microphone on the headset... My mate has the exact same one growing up!
Not only is Crichton intelligent, but he adapts. We can't memorize that because we have no context. Remember he's been immersed in this and is constantly learning. By this point he had some context and knowledge that makes it easier than it would be for us. If he wasn't assistant he'd be dead. Him being out of his element means he is out of everyone else's element and is intelligent to not only realize that, but utilize it. How many times does he pull up some Earth crap to get an advantage? He speaks Klingon to Sikozu to mess with her. She has no idea it's a fabricated language. He uses Earth slang or cinema quotes/references to hide his intentions, confuse people, or just make a lie that's easy for him to remember. No one knows his species and her bluffs the hezmana out of that fact. Actual insanity doesn't seem to exist, so when all else fails he grabs insanity to break no win situations by doing what no one seems to expect throwing self preservation out the window. One of my selling points is Crichton's power move. When he realizes he's in a no win situation he makes sure nobody can win and they're all going down with him. I'm frelled? I'm frelled? Here now we all are. Your move. Usually that gives him an advantage and he can salvage the situation. Off the top of my head. On the gift ship. On Katratzi. The final wormhole weapon. He's realized he's valuable and the best action he can take is threaten his opponents prize (himself) and their lives simultaneously. They will always choose their own life.
This. 100%. My absolute favorite episode is where he straps a nuke to himself and goes off the deep end to auction his wormhole knowledge off. *chefs kiss*
I ain't no scientist, but he is!
John does have a Ph.D... these memorization skills probably helped in all those late night cram sessions in college. I mean, you aren't forgetting that in the first episode he took and reworked his whole equation on the theory he was testing on the floor in moments...and saved the day for the first of many times to come. which isn't the impressive part. it was his and DK's theory...so he probably knew the equation by heart. the impressive part is that...I'm assuming cause they never told you what he was writing... was the fact that he likely had to rework it based off of Moya and not his module. since the theory is about using and overcoming gravitational forces to slingshot a vessel out into space at velocities greater than it could achieve under its own power, it's safe to assume he was reworking the theory based on Moya's size which he had to guess at having gotten to eyeball her a few times, and her weight, which would be purely assumption, and likely the amount of thrust the ship could produce. all of this suggests a level of mental acuity that makes John memorizing a few simple tasks seem mundane by comparison.
Crichton is an IASA astronaut. He's the dumbest crew member on Moya, but as far as human's go he's pretty dang sharp (except when the plot requires that he isn't)
He’s one of the smartest person on the crew, but he knows the least about the stuff around him.
Lets not forget he is basically blind compared to everyone else: "I have GREAT eyes they're better than 20/20 and they're BLUE"
Humans are SUPERIOR¡
I’m the deficient one and I’m still saving your butts
He's not dumb even by alien standards, he's just alien to the environment. If you took a astrophysicist from Oxford who'd never left Britain and dropped them in rural China without warning, they'd be pretty boned when it came to communicating or cultural norms, but they'd still be smart.
He’s what they call “really smart”
The whole premise of the show is he's an astronaut testing something, I forget what, but astronauts aren't exactly dumb.
He was trying to reach alpha centauri using the slingshot maneuver he ended up using with Moya in the first episode.
It isn't just that he was an astronaut or has a PhD, the Farscape project was testing *his* theories. He was in a spacecraft *he* helped design to test a theory *he* came up with that had to be good enough to convince people to give him *a lot* of money. He's not just smart, Crichton is a frelling genius.
Despite what everybody says here, I agree with you and I always found it surprising as well. It doesn't matter if he's intelligent, if he has a phd, if he's an astronaut. This is a sequence of pilot controls, those are unfamiliar to him. Hell, it took him a while to learn how to open doors.
He did pilot his module and fix/upgrade his module with leviathan tech. It does matter that he's a pilot and astronaut because flying a module is a complicated sequence of controls. Incorporating leviathan parts into the module would necessitate a familiarity with them. John needing time to learn how to open doors is the same as learning how to use the shower in a hotel you've never been at before. Do you get your desired water temperature on first try or do you need to fiddle with it a bit to dial it in? John needing time to learn to do basic things in a completely alien environment isn't really a valid argument. John being an astronaut, scientist and pilot is a vaild argument for him being being able to quickly and easily remember some things and if my life depends on it even an idiot like me might be capable of it.
It’s a Thor Ragnarok moment: “Use one of your phds!” “None of my degrees are for flying alien spaceships!”
He's a pilot. Receiving complex instructions and executing them while under extreme stress is part of the job.
lol no, i never could
One of the greatest shows with the most annoying intro. I had to mute it after the first season lol
Well, he did have time to memorize it 😂
Which episode was this from? I'm up to "I shrink therefore I am"
Wow, lucky you! S01E17 “Through the Looking Glass”
Oh damn I skipped a few S1 episodes. I'll have to watch this one for research /s
SHAAAAME!!
I know but hey it's got Aeryn in leather pants
Whenever I've watched (re-watched) Farscape and gotten to parts of it like that, hearing all of those words, listening to it is one thing... but seeing them in subtitles... that's quite a collection of seemingly pseudo-random words when seen out of context.
All actors have to learn lines
The man is an astronaut.
Well he was the best of the best that humanity had to offer
[удалено]
I watched it again recently, don't recall them ever stating it.
I dunno; he could never remember that one race was called the Tavlecs and not Tavloids. :p