Claudia Black Spreads 'Em Wide On Farscape

It's a real shame the Sci-Fi Channel had to cancel Lexx and Farscape, because those were two shows that were willing to go the distance with bondage imagery.

ALSO FROM PAT POWERS

Take the look at the pic at the top of this page. It's Claudia Black, who plays Aeryn, a member of the Farscape's crew of good guys. She's a former bad guy who's been captured by another gang of even worse guys (at least, I think that was what's happening, as the show was just too serious for me to enjoy so I didn't follow the plot too closely). They've got her secured in a torture chair with her wrists and ankles cuffed to what are, in essence, spreader bars, giving the bad guys plenty of access to all her vulnerable parts.

And that isn't all the bondage n that episode. She's also confined in a gurney cage on the way to a different torture confinement, this one with metal bands that cover her arms and legs at all sorts of opportune places. While so confined, Black experiences some involuntary surgery. Probably unnecessary surgery, too -- these are VERY bad guys.

There's another woman so confined next to Aeryn, and in the background you can see the head of a person of indeterminate sex sticking out of a bag in which (presumably) their body is confined. Pretty wild stuff for TV, perhaps inspired by the imagery of anime or Poser artists.

Here's another elaborate bit of bondage imagery from the same episode. It's a very DECORATIVE bondage device. And that thing between Aeryn's legs? Well, it kinda looks like her pussy, but it's not. She's wearing some kind of futuristic jumpsuit and it's the shadow of the seam formed by her crotch. Still, quite the powerful image, eh?

Black is bound throughout most of the episode, and she's understood to be tortured but actually there's not that much torture, mostly her captors just attempt to bore her into cracking with talk.

The sheer quantity of bondage in this episode was something different, but that spreadeagle was something else. I've never seen an image on TV of a woman with her legs bound so far apart. And on top of that, they showed her bound like that in a beam shot, however briefly, however darkly.

The major problem with this scene is the lighting. It's really bright on Aeryn's pale white face and very dark where the dark fabric of her suit meets the jet black metal of the torture chair.

If the bad guys had the sense to strip Aeryn naked, as required in all Torture 101 procedure manuals, this would not have been a problem. Of course, this being a TV series, they probably would have been forced to confine her to her Tough Peace Enforcer underwear, which would probably be dark leather, like about everything else worn by the characters on Farscape.

Well, the show is history now, so all we can say is, "Thanks guys. You did a great job."

Here's a more typical instance in which you see women bound as Claudia Black was in Farscape. Note the wide-open legs and beam shot angle.