Zhaan was in prison for the politically-motivated murder of her lover, Pa'u Bitaal. Bitaal and a few other conservatives betrayed the Delvian people and called in the Peacekeepers to maintain their hold on the government, imprisoning many moderates and objectors, along with Zhaan's own father. In retaliation, she murdered Bitaal while they were sharing an extremely intimate moment, touching off the beginning of her struggle with the nastier parts of her soul. (Rhapsody in Blue)

Rygel was deposed from his throne by his cousin Bishaan, and handed over to the Peacekeepers to get him out of the way --- but whether that was because A) he was a rotten ruler or B) his cousin was a greedy, power-hungry creep, is unclear. (C) All of the Above is a real possibility.

All three were being transported to a lifer's colony (Taran Rau) in the premiere.

D'Argo finally 'fessed up in Vitas Mortis that the tattoos he bears are the marks of a Luxan general -- which he is not. He had the tattoos applied in order to take the place of his wounded commanding officer, who would not have survived interrogation after battle. He was ransomed, unharmed, but still bears the tattoos, which could lead to some misunderstandings about what kind of pension he's entitled to -- so he's a little embarrassed, as you can imagine.

While the implications are just fascinating (Does this mean that the respect accorded the Sanctity Root is a form of ancestor worship?) we have to admit, we're still stuck back at "whaaaa?!" ourselves. So it's okay if that's where you are, too.

Although it's possible that more than 100 cycles of imprisonment (and torture) soured what was once a sunny, giving nature... we're not putting any money on that. Not yet, anyway. (Rygel reportedly (by his report) had many wives, concubines, and children, but that's no guarantee that they miss the little pip-squeak.)

All Aeryn had to do to get classified as such was publicly attempt to contradict Crais's attitude about John deliberately causing Crais's brother's death. By trying to inject a little reason into the proceedings, she basically sent him a signal that she could not be trusted and had grown a brain. In Peacekeeper circles, this is not considered a desirable quality. The sentence is death, and, not really wanting to die yet, Officer Sun decided to book with Moya's crew while she had the chance.

Officer Sun managed to get added to Crais's Ultra-Hate List a little later due to a little confrontation she had with him in A Hidden Memory. Of course, Crais himself has been declared Irreversibly Contaminated since then, so maybe he can sympathize. (Or not.)

As for Aeryn, she either steals 'em out of the laundry basket, or she's bribing Rygel to snurch them. Public discussion of any other possibilities will get us a Pantak jab in the throat.

Turns out, however, that they didn't escape, but were in fact, allowed to leave Nebari, after being infected as carriers for a rather nasty disease. The principle being that they would infect other worlds, the Nebari would sweep in with the cure to be saviors, and thus bloodlessly conquer and bring clean minds to the rest of the galaxy. Fun people. Chiana thought Neri was dead for a while, but he has since turned up as a resistance leader against the Nebari. Chiana desperately wants to rejoin him, but can't as yet.

Before she was taken aboard Moya, Chiana stole, lied, scavenged, stowed away, and did other unsavory things to get by. Whether she's as unhinged as her homeworld believes (they're not exactly poster children for emotional balance) or simply a little stressed is something we're not qualified to judge (especially if it turns out she did kill her last jailer, and smart money bets that way). But she and John bonded early on, and she and D'Argo have "bonded" as well (see below). This keeps her a little distracted, so no one's expecting any more than the usual amount of trouble from her.

While intensely cute while it lasted, this ended just as messily as we imagined it would. D'Argo was on the verge of formally asking her to marry him (even going so far as to practice his proposal on the DRD's); when Chiana got wind of this, she flipped out and, in an amazing burst of character assassination... ah, temporary insanity, she had sex with Jothee. It was less a matter of adolescent hormones and attraction than it was desperation. Chiana afterwards admitted to Jothee that she only slept with him in order to precipitate D'Argo's dumping her -- she wasn't ready for a commitment, and she needed to hurt D'Argo enough to make him leave her. Despite being incredibly hurt, D'Argo knew that Chiana was sorry that she treated him that way, and the horrible events of Eat Me made them friends and shipmates again. More than an arn later, sharing various near-death experiences versus the Scarrens and Peacekeepers left them a happy couple once more (We're So Screwed), and the shippers let out a great cheer!

Sadly, Gilina lost her life at the hands of the Peacekeepers while helping John and the others escape from the Gammak Base in A Hidden Memory. Her death was a result of a pulse rife wound sustained after her actions on the base; she ended up helping save both Aeryn's life and John's. She then died aboard Moya with a kiss good-bye from John after he admitted that if things had been different, he could have loved her.

As for if he's dead and where did he go... which time? If you mean at the end of "The Hidden Memory", we'd like to know too. According to the official Sci-Fi Channel page, Moya's crew handed Stark a "spare transport pod" and waved him on his merry way. < shrug > Who are we to argue with the official page?

At any rate, Stark reappeared out of the blue in The Locket with news of D'Argo's son Jothee. He and Zhaan, ah, bonded, then he immediately got himself killed in The Ugly Truth. Only to reappear equally out of the blue for the roller coaster of Liars, Guns and Money. And take off again to "hunt for Zhaan's spirit" at the end of The Choice. And reappear again in fourth season.... < shrug >All bets are off with Stark; your guess is as good as ours.

We expect to see them on Springer! with Aeryn and John any day now.

Officially, Virginia Hey asked to be released from her contract due to the stress of performing in full make-up for such a long period of time (and the deep desire not to be bald anymore). TGUT and her fans wish her all the best.

Jool woke up healthy, but with a hellacious attitude problem which marginally improved with time. While she's no good at violence or diplomacy, her xenobiologist's training and ridiculously over-educated background in a number of esoteric sciences made her useful (albeit thoroughly irritating) crew member.

As for who's real... well, it depended on who you listened to. If you asked Jool, she'd tell you that there's no genetic difference between the two Crichtons, and that there's no DNA degradation (as there is in clones) between them either: they are exact copies of each other, and therefore both of them were John. If you asked John Green (for the green shirt) or John Black (for the black shirt), each one would tell you that he is the real original John Crichton. If you ask Aeryn--- well, she 'recreated' with John Black on Talyn, which seems to indicate her POV on the matter. If you ask us? It doesn't matter: they both had little Scorpius echoes in their brain, they were both smart, compassionate, smart-mouthed and played a mean game of Rock-Paper-Scissors --- and both of them hated Crais and Scorpy, love Aeryn, wanted to get home, and tended to get more Southern when riled. You make the call. We're not taking this bet.

And anyway, it became moot in Infinite Possibilities 2: Icarus Abides, when the John on Talyn died stopping a Scarren assault ship from getting crucial information on wormhole weapons. Aeryn mourned him, big time, which made things not-so-easy for the John left behind. And neither did her pregnancy....

As to what else she got in the package, she seems to to have developed some really debilitating headaches whenever she gets one of her visions. (All jokes re: Cordelia on "Angel" have already been made; give it up.) The theory is that it's a side-effect of the aforementioned brain expansion; her brain is really not built to deal with any of this. (Weren't you listening? We said all the Cordelia jokes have already been made! Sheesh!) She also occasionally does weird things like wake up people who are unconscious under water a 100 yards away by yelling their names; we'll see what that turns out to be.

The post-vision blindness was a later development, as Chiana's powers expanded. She had more voluntary control over her funky new sight -- including built-in slo-mo and instant replay -- but the price is temporary blindness after the fact. Or, not so temporary....

Officially, Tammy MacIntosh, again, seems to have had trouble with the prosthetics. Life on a sci-fi show sucks, and we wish Tammy the absolute best of luck.

As for the new attitudinally-impaired redhead, that's Sikozu Svala Shanti Sugaysi Shanu -- just call her Sikozu. Kalish by race, She's an expert on Leviathans, in that she's read every book there is, but she has really poor taste in employers, and almost no field experience. She got picked up by John when pirates tried to take over and kill an ancient Leviathan he was travelling on temporarily, and stuck around rather than go back and face her employers after she betrayed the pirates she was contracted to. Chiana's new hobby seems to be figuring out new ways to take Sikozu down a notch or two, and we can but applaud.

In We're So Screwed 3, we discovered that Sikozu is a genetically enhanced member of the Kalish underground, working against the Scarrens who enslaved them (they needed a race of good little bureaucrats to run things). Evidently, she's the equivalent of a thermonuclear Scarren bomb -- whatever.,p> As for the Scorpius thing? Your guess is as good as ours -- possibly better, since Your Faithful and Open-Minded Tour Guides are squicked beyond belief at the very concept of anyone bonding to Scorpius as closely as Sikozu seems to have. Some kind of mental soul mates thing? We don't know, and we don't want to know. But they do have things in common -- they both think they're smarter than everyone else on the ship, they both have severe personality disorders, and they both have more than slightly questionable fashion sense. Of such things are relationships born.... At least Sikozu left Moya with Scorpius, so whatever they're doing, they're not subjected Our Faithful Crew to it anymore.

What's she doing on Moya? Um, not bathing, cooking badly, doing serious drugs, and messing with John's head. Seriously, no one has any idea; apparently she jumped aboard in the chaos of the carrier explosion/great escape and just decided to hang around. Although D'Argo gets really tempted, no one ever kicked her off, and she's since proven her worth by clinging to her sanity in some pretty tight places, in addition to being a damned knowledgable healer. Plus, she drugged Stark. Where's the bad there?

Sadly, one of the first things Scorpius did when he came aboard Moya was claim to remove Harvey from John's head -- he didn't of course, but at least John didn't have any little visits for a good long time there. Harvey seems to still be around, but has learned the art of staying silent.

Peacekeepers don't want to lose any of their people unexpectedly to silly things like pregnancy, but they also need their female soldiers to be producing little baby Peacekeepers to be brainwashed and later killed. So female soldiers have the most complicated IUD in the history of the universe -- fertilized eggs are snagged and put into a stasis field inside the mom before she starts to show any effects of pregnancy. Even the moms don't know until they get checked out by PK medics, and only special technology can release the stasis fields, which will hold for seven years.

Thus, Aeryn is actually a little bit pregnant -- she's carrying around a fertilized egg in a stasis field. But, since she didn't find out about that until they were on the PK carrier, she has no idea when in the last seven years she might have conceived. Which leaves the list of known possibles at three -- Velorek, John Crichton pre-split, and TalynJohn post-split -- plus whomever else she recreated with in the meantime. (We make no judgements, we simply state the facts.)

Aeryn was heading off to get the stasis field released when she left John at the end of third season; she ran into complications involving assasinations, heat delirium and Scorpius along the way -- details still aren't too clear. So, she stayed almost pregnant until she was aboard the Peacekeeper carrier in We're So Screwed 3 and had the stasis field released. She informed John of this -- and of his impending daddyhood, as he is the father -- and promptly accepted his marriage proposal.

D'Argo is reacting to these revelations fairly calmly -- after leaving Macton trapped in a coma where he's reliving Lo'Laan's death and subsequent desecration over and over and over...