Tear Jerker / Farscape

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

• D'Argo's entire backstory. All he wished to do was peacefully retire to a humble farming life after his military service alongside his Sebacean wife, Lo'Laan, and their son, Jothee, but Peacekeeper xenophobia conspired to frame, and imprison him, for her death and sell Jothee into slavery. As he put it in his quiet response to a question from a then disgraced Crais, his former jailer:
  Crais: Before you were arrested, were you happy?
  D'Argo: Happier than you can ever imagine.
• The season 1 finale’s last supper before the crew embarks on what they’re certain will be their last stand against the Peacekeepers. Zhaan even made their favorite dishes for the occasion. Sob.
• Aeryn's temporary death in the season 2 finale.
  • John's complete despair afterwards, to the point that he doesn't even care that his brain is destroyed and he's trapped forever in his own mind
  • When Zhaan goes into his head, we hear a lot of sinister whispering from Scorpius, and then Johns voice, loud and clear, telling Zhaan that its pointless to try helping him. Her response was to help him by performing assisted suicide. The others stop her thankfully, but Zhaan would never take an action like that lightly, so his depression must have been unimaginable.
  John: Go away, go away Zhaan. There's no point.
  • "Officer Aeryn Sun, Special Peacekeeper Commando, Icarion Company, Pleisar Regiment. Have you come to reassign me?"
• The hanger scene in the season 3 finale
  • Hell, the whole last half of 'Dog With Two Bones'. Grab tissues, cuz you're gonna need 'em. John's last fantasy flash is less horrific to a post-Red Wedding audience but still shocking and pretty frelling sad. That scene got the waterworks going, and the hanger scene made sure they kept on coming.
  • The general circumstance of the season 3 finale and the season 4 opener- John has been completely abandoned by all his friends, and by the woman he loves. He's alone on a dying leviathan with no real hope of escape.
• Zhaan in 'Dream a Little Dream of Me'. After over a year of freedom, she finds herself imprisoned once more. She spends the whole episode justifiably petrified.
  • Her conversation with the hallucination of Crichton, telling him how much she needs him and the others, that they are her strength and without them she's hopelessly lost
• The circumstances of "...Different Destinations". Seeing through the eye of the viewfinder and watching the nurses scream out for Crichton in terror while being massacred. A real downer ending if ever there was one.
  • The final scene shows D'Argo finding a marker on the wall and looking at it sadly. It was made by the child he befriended, Cyntrina, who worried no one would remember her if she died.
• Anything involving Talyn where Moya is desperately trying to get her kid to listen.
• Moya being willing to sacrifice herself for her occupants.
• Zhaan's death. It's one for both the main characters and the audience. And the look of complete heartbreak on Stark's face is enough to make you cry.
• Talyn and Crais's sacrifice at the end of season 3, where they blow themselves up to save everyone, Crais waking Talyn up for just long enough for them to die together counts, especially considering the lead-up with Talyn trying and failing to control his psychological problems to the point where he attacks his own mother.
• Gilina's death. Especially her asking Crichton, "If things had been different, could you have loved me?" "Yes."
• Most of the backstories for the main characters contain this as well.
• Crais wants revenge on Crichton for the death of his brother, because the pair were conscripted into the Peacekeeper forces, and the last words his father said to Crais was to take care of his brother.
• D'Argo's family, due to he and his wife being Star-Crossed Lovers due to her being a Sebacean, who was murdered by her brother for marrying a Luxan, and D'Argo was subsequently framed for her death.
• The death of Talyn!Crichton. Especially Aeryn bursting into tears and curling up next to his body as the screen fades to black.
  • The others' partings from him are pretty sad too. He and Crais share a last exchange of words that makes it clear each sees honor in the other now, with Crichton telling Crais he needs to find the best part of himself and eliciting a promise that he'll do it so as to protect the others on Talyn; Crais says with deep regret that he hopes he can believe he was telling the truth. Rygel and Crichton exchange one last joke about not being able to claim his things after he's gone, but it's clear the Hynerian is broken up; he looks so small and sad. As for Stark, all he does is pull back his mask to ease John's pain and passing, but the look on Stark's face and the way he cups John's says everything.
• From the moment we first meet the leviathan Elack and his aged Pilot, and we realize they're eventually going to die, everything about them is so deeply sad. It only gets worse when, thanks to the scavengers and the need to protect John and his friends, Elack and his Pilot are forced to flee the leviathans' sacred space where they had sworn long ago to come to so as to die together. The aged Pilot insists to Crichton that she and Elack owe him for saving them from the scavengers, and that they will help them find their friends before they die. Eventually they do (well, except for Aeryn)...only to end up sacrificing themselves to stop Grayza and her Peacekeepers. Just watching the Pilot become increasingly weak, absentminded, and tired is heartwrenching, and her final exchanges with Rygel really bring on the waterworks.
• The Villain of the Week in "Twice Shy" has the ability to take away the crew's most notable traits. Crichton loses his Determinator status and becomes resigned to imminent death.
  Crichton: [to Aeryn] You know what the worst part of this is? You and me. We never could get it together. Now we never will.
• "DNA Mad Scientist" really puts Aeryn's place into perspective. D'Argo, Zhaan, and Rygel have a chance to go home. Aeryn is also certain that Crichton will eventually find a way back to Earth, too. An attempt to find a place of her own to live leaves her being experimented on by Namtar. After revealing the increasing Body Horror to Crichton, she says, "I didn't want to get left behind. I'm so scared."
• Season 4's 'Constellation of Doubt'... because watching Crichton losing his faith in humanity due to that frellnik documentary, plus how the camera pans over to Chiana hearing the unkind things that the human commentators had to say about her... yeah. And if that isn't enough of a downer, pretty much everyone on the crew is convinced that Aeryn is as good as dead, and even if she isn't, they have no way of finding her and Crichton is the only one who even thinks its possible, is absolutely heart-breaking.
• Once Aeryn meets her mother Xhalax in "Relativity", every moment between them is fraught with tension and high emotion, as Aeryn keeps trying to reach out to her, break through the Peacekeeper conditioning, and get her mother to admit she still loves her, only to be rebuffed again and again—sometimes cruelly, sometimes with cold matter-of-factness. Each time her mother rejects her, calls her a mistake and a traitor, dismisses her love as weak sentiment, or denies her as having any value, you can see Aeryn's heart breaking piece by piece behind her stoic facade. By the end, when they have no choice but to kill Xhalax, Aeryn is going to do the deed but Crichton insists she should not be the one, instead leaving it to Crais (with Xhalax even claiming Aeryn was too much a coward to have done it anyway). Crichton leads Aeryn away so see won't have to witness it...only for Aeryn to desperately try to turn back to stop Crais. The gunshots fire from offscreen, and Aeryn breaks down sobbing in Crichton's arms.
  • When it turns out that (as might be expected, though not for the reason you'd expect) Crais didn't actually shoot Xhalax but let her live in exchange for their lives, so as to keep Peacekeeper Command from sending more teams after them, the follow-up to this turns out to be almost as heartbreaking: despite wanting to make Aeryn suffer for costing her her life, her love, and everything she had among the Peacekeepers, including being forced into the life of an assassin by her superiors, it turns out Xhalax did love her after all...that the choice was not about her possible redemption but rather a Sadistic Choice—either her father had to die or baby Aeryn did. In the end Xhalax's revenge scheme was more about ending her pain...and so when Crais breaks in and shoots her to (he thinks) save Aeryn, all she can do is bitterly whisper that she "died long ago" and ask to be allowed to fall from the window ledge. Aeryn holds her, dying, in her arms...then lets her go, absolutely bleak and devastated yet again.
• "Incubator."
  • Scorpius' memory of his first twelve years of life. While it in no way justifies the crimes he's committed, you can't help but feel sorry for the child he once was. To whit, Scorpius is the product of a Scarran breeding experiment where Sebacean women were raped by Scarran warriors. Only Scorpius survived and spent his years as a tortured victim of his caretaker until he finally escaped.
  • When Scorpius returns and is recaptured by the Scarrans, he is forced to see the truth. Always taught his father was a Sebacean, he instead sees his mother raped by a Scarran soldier and is grief stricken. When he accuses his caretaker Tauza of killing his mother, Tauza's response? "Your birth was difficult. You killed her.
  • Everything Scorpius does, every atrocity he has committed? All to pay the Scarrans back. And avenge the mother who never knew or wanted him. Even for a man as ruthless and cruel as Scorpius can be, it's hard not to pity him and his drive when he's unable to hold back his emotions upon the flashbacks.
• The final moments of "Bad Timing". John and Aeryn have just got engaged and for a second it looks like the season is going to end happily for once...and then a ship flies overhead, its pilot identifying the cast as intruders on the planet. Unable to return to Moya, John and Aeryn embrace and kiss as the ship opens fire, its weapon reducing them to millions of crystals spread out across their rowboat. D'Argo, Chiana and Rygel can do nothing but watch helplessly from Moya's command centre. D'Argo's howl as his friends are crystallised is absolutely gut-wrenching.
• John being confronted with his mother in the Mind Screw of "Won't Get Fooled Again", whom he knows is dead...and then having to watch her collapse and die in front of him. The way he holds her, touches her face, and sobs at how cruel the whole thing is is utterly heartbreaking—and makes what he does to the Scarran behind it all oh-so-cathartic.
• As if the entire concept of "The Locket" isn't bad enough—one group of people stuck frozen in time forever, never aging, and never able to see their loved ones again, while another pair get to grow old together—there's the scene when Old!John makes it back up to Moya, and when the others open the transport door they find him cradling the dead Aeryn in his arms...meaning she died on the way up, in space, just the way she'd wanted. Then comes the bittersweet moment when he sits by her body, telling her about the lake in Maine he used to go to with his father, and all the things/people he never got to show her, followed by him looking in the titular locket to find the picture of "the only man [she] ever loved" was him. (He breaks down himself over this.) And then finally at the end, after reverse-starbursting also reversed time and left them alive and young again before they ever entered the mist, they're left with just echoes of all those years they spent together...and the locket, which had somehow fused together, is pried open to reveal the photo had turned to dust which just pours between their fingers while they share a Held Gaze.
• The death of Jool and the Eidolons in PKWars, and Chiana's miserable lampshading of how much Moya's crew is a Doom Magnet.
  "We're cursed. Everything we touch gets destroyed."
  • And of course the noble last stand of D'Argo, especially the exchanges with John and Chiana beforehand, and the fact the latter has to be carried away sobbing and screaming.
• "Kansas":
  • While hiding nearby, Crichton and Chiana observe Jack and Leslie having a rather happy couple moment. Crichton remarks he knows why it won't last, while Chiana alludes to having had a rather unpleasant childhood herself.
    Crichton: They look happy. I didn't see my parents like that very often.
    Chiana: I never saw that in my sires.
    Crichton: I just want 'em to stay like that. Y'know, they think they got all the time in the world, but pretty soon, it's doctors, tests...
  • While trying to get history back on track, Crichton talks to his mother a couple times and really struggles to resist warning her of her fate. When telling her about the housefire that his younger self needs to be rescued from, he cracks.
    Crichton: Mom, listen! When you first feel the pain, don't—! [sees she's already gone] Don't wait.