1. My criteria for acceptable true crime content are when it's (a) focused on the victim rather than romanticizing the perpetrator, (2) not salacious or treating suffering as entertainment, and (iii) told in a sufficiently thoughtful and concise way that's still engaging to listen to.

*je crois que oui

je ne sais pas d'où le « ne » venu

(aussi, mon français est, euh, comment dit-on "a bit rusty"?)

Irish breakfast tea with plenty of half-and-half and sweetener, or broth made from bouillon powder (I'm partial to Lee Kum Kee chicken bouillon with a little bit of yeast extract).

thoughtful about addressing it, and didn't saddle us with regrettable ideas like "The Chase"

it's not that shocking a result

and, of course, the setting is full of spacefaring peoples that don't follow that body plan much at all

it's still fundamentally a production decision, just as it was for Star Trek, but I appreciate that they acknowledged it from day one but were very cautious and…

(shrews, some small marsupials)

and let's not forget just how much ichthyosaurs looked like modern cetaceans and also like sharks and other fishes of about the same general mass

so if a tool-using biped of about our general mass, descended from a lineage of four-limbed vertebrates, looks like us…

convergent evolution (the tendency we've observed for two or more (effectively) unrelated species of about the same body mass and in similar environments to resemble each other, such as the sheer number of things that have looked a *lot* like Smilodon, or rodent-like animals from other lineages

effort of going there unless it's specifically because it's so way the fuck away from everything else

the superficial similarity of so many spacefaring peoples in the setting can be then explained as a mixture of Sebaceans diverging from the template the Eidelons created (Interions, Zenetans?) and…

galaxy at the time that might cause prejudice (in either direction)

they chose humans specifically because nobody had yet encountered them, since Earth is the galactic equivalent of Tristan de Cunha or something like that — not only is it way the hell away from everything else, it's not worth the…

created by the Eidelons, a race and culture of mediators and peacemakers (and not through the oppressive methods of the Peacekeepers), from human stock tens of thousands of years earlier, to engineer a species that would act as a guardian force and that had no links to the established powers of the…

season 4 when an excavation by a group of Interion archaeologists finds an artifact that has symbols from Interion, Sebacean, and Earth human cultures

again, the writers let this lay fallow until the (premature) end of the series proper and The Peacekeeper Wars explained that the Sebaceans were…

in the third season, we learned that Interions (Jool's species) are closely related to humans, such that the damage inflicted by the removal of the neural chip from John's brain was repaired by a donation from one of Jool's cousins

this is left dangling for an entire season, until it's picked up in

ability of Sebaceans to produce them explicitly highlighted (between Jothee's mother Lo'Laan being Sebacean and Aeryn's statement about "keeping the bloodlines pure", although apparently there was some medical intervention required for conception, according to the comics)

in Farscape, the resemblance of Earth humans to Sebaceans was acknowledged immediately, and the similarities in sexual dimorphism across species was acknowledged in the episode "The Flax" through an explicit exception

we also had the existence of interspecific hybrids (Jothee) acknowledged and the…

now that I'm out of the car, I wanted to expand on this with another example of lampshading that was later successfully turned into an explanation that made the mythology more interesting instead of something being deprecated like "The Chase" (which was acknowledged in deuterocanon but not canon)

without explaining it

they *had* to acknowledge it because of the nature of the episode (integrating DS9 actors into TOS footage)

but they didn't explain it beyond that

and then ENT went and explained it in the most facepalming way possible

I'm reminded of the TNG episode "The Chase" where they decided that they needed to explain not only why so many spacefaring peoples of the galaxy were humanoid but could even produce fertile offspring

contrast that with DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" which lampshaded the Klingon makeup change…