Scratch and Sniff is a breezy, light-hearted episode that deals with a forced vacation on the part of John and D’argo when Pilot kicks them off of Moya for ten solar days because he’s getting sick of hearing the two of them arguing constantly. And considering what a patient, kind-hearted soul Pilot normally is, you can imagine just how bad John and D’argo must have been behaving in order for them to have been kicked off the ship. Taking place while Ayren, Rygel, Stark, Crais and the duplicate Crichton are away on board Talyn, Scratch and Sniff effectively uses the sunny beach side of Australia as a location for LoMo, its pleasure planet--where Chiana and Jool join the boys for some fun in the sun that gets sidetracked when D’argo and John wind up getting rolled for all their money by a pair of swindling women.

Yet that doesn’t come close to the danger that Chiana and Jool face at the hands of Fe’Tor, an exclusive perfume maker who creates his fragrances using the body fluids of captured party goers. John and D'argo are warned of the girls' plight by Raxil, a petite--and very goofy--female alien who swears she only wants to help the boys find their friends--until it's revealed that even she has an ulterior motive. What makes Scratch and Sniff so good is the fact that it’s actually being told in flashback from the POV of John, who’s telling the story to Pilot much later in an effort to get back in his and Moya’s good graces. This gives the episode a unique, and very funny story-telling style as Crichton tries to get it to all make sense, and failing horribly. Pilot actually stops the story dead at one point to complain that if Fe’Tor had truly taken the amount of body fluid from Jool that Crichton said he did, she would be dead.

The episode is also further inter-cut with split-second cuts that hilariously illustrate what a character is saying, or thinking--which makes Scratch 'N Sniff even funnier to watch on a second viewing. This is basically a silly spring break vacation gone awry, and in addition to being extremely funny, it also smartly explains away whatever plot holes there are by having it being told in overly zany style by Crichton. Everybody is great in this episode--including guest star Francesca Buller, who gives a great comic performance as Raxil, an engaging character I wished we could have seen more of. Buller is the real-life wife of Ben Browder, and she appeared in several more episodes of Farscape--but, alas, she did not reprise the charming Raxil. Scratch and Sniff is one of the bold, off-the-wall episodes that's truly fun to watch, and it helped to set Farscape apart from other SF shows on TV at that time.