List of Æon Flux episodes

This is a list of all Æon Flux episodes.

Season 1 (1991)

Serial, six parts of two to three minutes each, shown on Liquid Television. The DVD and VHS releases combine the parts into one short film.

"Pilot" (September 1991)

Æon breaks into a Breen complex in order to assassinate a powerful member of the Breen Government during a battle between Breen Soldiers and at least five other Monican terror agents. She kills many soldiers in the process, many of which were already dying from a disease spread by a small blue arthropod that causes swelling of veins prior to death. The film switches focus several times to show the point of view of several Breen soldiers and their hallucinatory experiences as they lie dying either from the virus or from Æon's bullets, effectively stating that even 'cannon fodder' are human and also suffer.

Æon makes her way up to the top of the building after killing one other Monican, briefly sighting Trevor Goodchild and his lover, a female Breen soldier, in a fully furnished elevator. When Trevor reaches the top of the building, it is seen that the man Æon came to kill is already dead, possibly of the disease. Trevor's lover watches a wall-sized television playing a programme on the disease. She refuses his advances, noting that he in fact has been bitten by the insect. He shows her an injection mark, signifying that he has taken an anti-virus of his own creation, which apparently involves ingesting a liquid made from the insect-like creature extracted from one of his fingers.

Æon watches this from the window and is about to take action when she steps on a tack and falls to her death. It is at this point the only intelligible English quasi-dialogue in the Pilot is heard (the single word, "No!" that Æon screams as the tack punctures her foot). The Monicans destroy her body by remote control and burn her apartment, and the audience briefly sees her bed and her camera. Later, Trevor is lauded for the creation of the anti-virus while his lover holds a baby. The press take photographs of them. The statue of the Breen leader Æon had to kill is demolished. Meanwhile Æon finds herself in the afterlife, where her feet are licked for eternity. The episode ends with a young Breen man buying a foot fetish magazine with Æon on the cover, posing on her bed. The bills he uses to pay his purchase have Trevor's portrait on them.

Season 2 (1992)

Three to five minutes each, shown on Liquid Television.

1. "Gravity" (September 22, 1992)

While Æon and Trevor kiss, Trevor uses his tongue to open up Æon's fake tooth and place a rolled up picture inside. We find Trevor is in a train and Æon on an airplane flying alongside the train. The two are kissing through the windows. Æon spies an industrial vehicle driving past at the same moment. A passenger from the train enters the plane and it flies off. Æon then retrieves the picture from her tooth to find it is a photo of the passenger who just entered the plane, and a suitcase. She climbs out the window of the passenger area and moves along the side of the plane to spy on the man, who is reading documents from the same suitcase. Æon must jump mid-air to the back of the plane to get inside, but she misses and falls.

Realising her impending death, Æon points her gun to her head, but before pulling the trigger notices the industrial vehicle from earlier stopping at the edge of a cliff. Men get out and throw ropes over the edge of the cliff to salvage something. They pull at the ropes to bring it to the surface while an intrigued Æon struggles to keep her binoculars at her eyes from the air resistance. She notices a bridge near the point at which she will land, and shoots a rope at it to save herself. At the same time Trevor's train is passing over the bridge and inside he is kissing his Breen lover. While she swings from the rope Æon is distracted by the men salvaging the object which is obscured from view by the cliff, but is glowing brightly. Æon's distraction leads the rope to loop around her neck. A moment before she can clearly see what the object is, the rope tightens and she is killed.

A deleted scene in this episode shows the woman Trevor was kissing while Aeon was falling slamming a door between her pelvic area repeatedly.

2. "Mirror" (originally aired as "Night") (November 3, 1992)

Æon is on an assassination mission and infiltrates her target's home. On her entry she falls over, and notices she is spied on by a security camera. While walking down a hallway she notices a room where the security camera recorder is being kept, and enters. She goes to destroy the tape but at the last minute decides to review the footage. The picture is faulty because of a loose video jack dangling in front of a running air conditioner. Æon goes to fix the connection but in the process spills coffee on herself. While she is in a nearby bathroom cleaning her arm, unnoticed by Æon, footage of another intruder previously entering the building plays on the monitor. Æon accidentally sprays water on herself in the bathroom's shower, spoiling her signature hairstyle.

Æon hears gunshots, and evacuates the area to find her target killed, shot twice in the abdomen. She rushes out of the bedroom, but is then also shot by the assassin. While Æon lies on the floor dying, she looks at the figure in the security monitor, but the image is still distorted. Æon shoots a nearby temperature control knob, disabling the air conditioner. With the air conditioning off, the loose video cable stops shaking, and the security camera picture clears up. The moment before her death she sees the face of the other assassin on the monitor – Trevor Goodchild. This is the only instance in the Æon Flux universe where Trevor intentionally kills Æon.

3. "Leisure" (November 10, 1992)

Æon enters her living quarters to find some one had disturbed a container of eggs she was keeping in her refrigerator. In a kitchen cupboard, she finds a deformed Trevor (or a clone of Trevor) chained up, licking an egg. Æon leaves her apartment, but before venturing outside the Monican base, she witnesses another agent fall and fail to successfully complete jumping through a row of training grids. Æon steps up to practice jumping through, just as the other female agent walks away, and flawlessly executes the acrobatic and complex jumps through the training grids. Later, she enters an alien spaceship and collects some of the same eggs seen earlier in her apartment. She's agonising while trying to resist breaking one of the eggs. Her desire to play with the embryo is stronger than her good sense to get out of the ship quickly before the parent alien comes. She analyses the broken contents under a portable microscope and finds it to be an aggressive infant form of an alien. It appears the infant alien dies as a result of her probing it.

On her way out Æon is confronted by an adult, four-legged, and extremely tall alien, but holds up one of the eggs and threatens to break it if the alien attacks her. She runs away, and the alien triggers a grid barrier similar to the one at the Monican training base. Æon jumps through it with ease, but its revealed that the alien can use its four legs to navigate the barrier much faster. It swiftly catches up to Æon and kills her from behind.

This episode contains the only English dialogue heard in the first season — the single word, "plop." Given the title of the episode and the image of the mutated Trevor's ecstatic consumption of an egg in the beginning, it's hinted that the alien eggs may be a recreational drug, and the mission to retrieve more eggs could be optional. But may also be financially motivated if the drug were meant to be sold.

4. "Tide" (November 17, 1992)

Æon and a red-suited partner are on an offshore facility. Æon is trying to prevent a plug from being removed by a rope key draped from a hovering helicopter by shooting at it, while her partner holds Trevor Goodchild captive in a nearby elevator. As Æon returns to the elevator Trevor has overpowered the partner, and attempts to leave, pressing all of the elevator's level buttons. Æon stops him and attempts to obtain the numbered key he possesses, but he throws it behind a sink. When retrieving it, Æon accidentally rips off the attached numbered label, so it is unknown on which level the key will be useful.

Æon attempts to use the key in a storage locker on level six, while avoiding gunfire from a Breen soldier and again shooting at the hanging plug key, which has stopped swaying enough for another attempt to pull the plug. Upon returning to the elevator, Æon handcuffs Trevor to a handrail and attempts to retrieve the numbered label, but it is just out of her reach. Æon repeats the leave elevator-shoot at soldiers-try key-shoot plug key-return to elevator cycle for subsequent floors, while her traitorous partner kisses Trevor while Æon is away. By level two, the now-injured Æon realises what's going on, and the partner tries to stop her from killing Trevor, during the struggle she get Æon's empty gun and throws it at her, Æon falls back, strikes her head and is killed (although it is not explicitly indicated in the episode that she is dead, the DVD commentary indicates that she is). The partner takes the key and runs to the level two storage locker. A Breen soldier enters the elevator and shoots Trevor, and on his way out shoots the hanging key to buy him some time to get out of the facility.

The partner opens the storage locker with the key and retrieves a storage barrel that is latched shut, taking it back to the elevator. Inside she finds a giant, ribbed rubber washer (noted to obviously be a double entendre). Unsatisfied with what seems like such a measly prize, she runs out leaving the washer behind and not bothering to check the storage locker on level one. As she reaches the concrete cylinder holding the plug, the helicopter has successfully inserted the key, and starts to pull up and away with the key and the Breen soldier that presumably last shot at the key. We see that the helicopter also has pulled out, with the key, an identical rubber washer, causing presumably seawater to spout out of the newly vacant hole. The facility and gangway to the plug behind her sinks into the ocean, leaving her stranded alone standing on the empty plug.

Peter Chung states on the DVD commentary that he planned this episode like a piece of music. The entire segment is composed of twenty backgrounds shown for two seconds each in the same order and same angle for seven cycles.

5. "War" (November 24, 1992)

Æon is involved in a large battle between Bregna and Monica. After killing many soldiers, Æon is attacked from behind by a Breen fighter who was previously playing dead. With a gun aimed at her head Æon notices an approaching Monican soldier and tries to buy some time by distracting the soldier by licking her lips suggestively. We see the soldier's eyes twitch in anger, before he kills both Æon and the approaching Monican. He then removes his helmet, revealing a heroic blond soldier (said to be named Vaasch Lockney in the DVD commentary). The blond soldier looks down a large hill, fires at an approaching army of Monican soldiers, almost all of whom are killed. Later the soldier moves towards the entrance of an underground Monican base, off-screen violently engaging the guards. We see a bloody tooth landing directly into an empty glass drink bottle, signifying that violence has taken place nearby, emphasizing the random nature of life (and their downstream consequences). This theme of random, cascading events and their effect on people is perpetuated throughout the Æon Flux universe. Incidentally, Æon has a fake tooth, as we see in the next episode "Gravity".

Inside the base, the blond soldier is confronted by a sword-wielding long haired Monican man, but is unconcerned because he has a gun. He fires a single shot, which the Monican soldier (called Romeo Svengali in the DVD commentary) deflects before stabbing him. The Monican soldier then comforts his daughter and sends her to her living quarters after an alarm goes off. Meanwhile another Monican soldier's painting is interrupted by the alarm and he leaves to join the Monican forces. While the swordsman opens a gate to leave the base, grease drips into a pool on the floor. Outside, he kills oncoming Breen fighters who drop down from an airship. Inside the ship, he kills a few more Breen fighters, but he is shot in the chest. Then comes a female Breen soldier (named Donna Matrix in the DVD commentary), wielding a powerful machine gun, who enters the Monican base using the painter Monican's body as a doorstop. She then frees her captive lover and they run from gunfire, unknowingly towards the dripping pool of grease. It seems their deaths are inevitable.

This episode was created to play with the emotions of the viewer, showing the stereotypical way that people view a hero of a Hollywood action film as invincible. This episode crushes those assumptions and keeps the viewer truly on their toes feeling a sense of shock and loss every time the new "hero" is killed.

Running order

For the 2005 DVD release, the shorts were arranged in the following order:

1. "War"

2. "Gravity"

3. "Leisure"

4. "Mirror"

5. "Tide"

Season 3 (1995)

Thirty minutes each with commercials. This is the original broadcast order the episodes were aired.

1. "Utopia or Deuteranopia?" (August 8, 1995)

Æon searches for Clavius, the deposed ruler of Bregna, held captive by Trevor.

Trevor says he has decided he must monitor all activity in Bregna to achieve justice, so he sets up a pervasive surveillance system, which has the effect of rendering speech unintelligible to the audience. (Dialogue is used to cloak, as much as to reveal actual intent in the rest of the episode.) Trevor has a dirty little secret: He is the one keeping Clavius, the former leader of Bregna, prisoner. Even more secret is the bedroom hidden inside the vibrating body in which he wishes to keep Æon. He is proven right that a loyal Breen like Gildemere, who is searching for Clavius, would not violate the portal built into Clavius, so for him, hiding the chamber thus is the ultimate safeguard against discovery. Trevor lets Æon go about her plotting with Gildemere. He waits for the right moment to capture her and charge her with the kidnapping of Clavius. Her partnership with Gildemere intrigues him enough that he lets it go to see what they're up to. She uses her seduction of Gildemere in the meantime to torment Trevor as well as to eventually manipulate Gildemere into killing Clavius himself, which he does. Æon had planned everything to work as it did: We see her setting up her escape route at the beginning—placing the bomb in the wall, dropping the ladder in the manhole. The part for which she wasn't prepared was the hidden love-nest in Clavius' body.

Clavius, it is revealed, is dangerously insane. Trevor has taken power by staging the kidnapping, then using the disappearance to promote fear and anxiety, against which he offers himself as the people's protector. Meanwhile, Æon lures and captures Trevor, forcing him to watch as she cavorts with a Breen officer, making a mockery of his attempt to enforce compliance by suggesting they are under his gaze. If he wants to see their secrets, she's only too willing to oblige.

Æon ultimately wished to eliminate Trevor's Clavius problem by forcing a Breen loyalist to take the fall. In the process, she gets rid of the anti-Trevor agent Gildemere, revealing the threat to Trevor himself. It is not only for Trevor's benefit, but indirectly for hers. She'd rather square off against Trevor than anyone else, plus she thinks (perhaps in a way that Trevor doesn't) that no punishment could be worse for him than being leader of Bregna.

2. "Isthmus Crypticus" (August 15, 1995)

Trevor becomes obsessed with and imprisons an anthropomorphic bird-like creature, while Æon tries to rescue the creature's mate. Notable for introducing Una, a friend of Æon's who would later be recast as her sister in the comic book & film.

3. "Thanatophobia" (August 22, 1995)

The title is the medical term for the fear of death. At the beginning of the episode the timbre of clapping with a maintained tempo is heard as two children throw fists near each another's face. The view then shifts to the source of the sound, a third child happily clapping. The scene then shifts to Trevor, elsewhere. As Trevor installs a vicious border-control system, two lovers try to escape to Monica. During the border crossing, the woman is shot, destroying one of the vertebrae in her spine. She survives, but is forced to stay in Bregna and work in a factory regularly bombed by Æon Flux, making "medical parts". Meanwhile her boyfriend, under the guise of trying to get her across to Monica, meets with Æon who lives across from them, and who he's watched as a voyeur for some time. At this time Trevor Goodchild begins to show marked interest in the young woman posing as a doctor to inspect her spinal gap. Using various tools inserted into the hole in her back, he manipulates her nerve endings, leading her to orgasm. Æon, seeing this from across the street, becomes jealous and pleasures the boyfriend in return, indulging in his fetish for femdom and bondage. In spite of her relationship with Trevor and her suspicions about her lover's infidelity, the woman still wants to cross the border to Monica, and meets with her lover at a hole in the border wall daily. She lets Trevor know of this, and he reacts violently, having enjoyed the relationship thus far, and calling her the "best I've ever had". Æon, tired of their sick game, confronts Trevor and delivers the boyfriend back over the border unconscious. The woman, now sure of her lover's betrayal spurns him when he tries to renew their relationship, and attempts another border crossing. Due to her newfound flexibility with a missing vertebrae, she avoids the guns but is trapped by tiny wires at the entrance to Monica. In a moment of sick revelation, machines come out of the wall, anesthetising her legs, and then with saw blades, cuts them off and sews them up. In her horror she sees that the machines were built with the same parts she constructed at the factory. She lies motionless on the ground, stuck in Bregna forever, a cripple. At the end of the episode another sound can be heard, but it turns out to be the sound of fists making contact as the two children actually hit each other in a brutal manner. The sound of clapping cannot be heard at all, but as the view shifts to the third child again, his arms are shown to be cut and sewn shut, signifying he had made a similar attempt to crossing the border, and failed.

4. "A Last Time for Everything" (August 29, 1995)

Trevor develops a method for creating human duplicates. After Trevor copies Æon, the real Æon conspires with her doppelganger and switches places with her, but finds her loyalty to Monica challenged; meanwhile, the copied Æon prepares to kill the original.

5. "The Demiurge" (September 5, 1995)

Trevor and Æon battle over the fate of a godlike being.

Monican agents have captured a being called the Demiurge and prepare to launch it into space. Trevor desires the Demiurge because he believes it will restore peace to Bregna. It has the ability to generate beautiful and peaceful images which entrance those who view them. In order to capture the godlike being, Trevor has his Breen forces attack the launch site, and during the battle, all of the troops on both sides die except for Trevor, Æon, and two Monican lovers: Nader and Celia. In the aftermath, Æon and Trevor tangle in the launch pit. As they make out, Trevor notices Nader at the launch controls and shoots him. At this moment, the Demiurge opens the rocket capsule and shines forth with a blue light, which has a hypnotic effect on all who observe it, although Æon seems to be able to shake the hypnosis off. The Demiurge uses its power to restore Nader to life. While Trevor is distracted, Æon launches the rocket and the Demiurge is gone. Trevor absconds with Nader's glowing form.

Back in Monica, Æon and Celia meet in a mortuary, and encounter another incarnation of the Demiurge in the form of a glowing bird, which Æon captures in a box. At home, Celia tries to destroy another incarnation, this time in the form of a small catlike being with a third eye, but is moved by sympathy to the crying creature and leaves it alone. Not long after, Æon, pursued by Celia, observes Trevor and Nader from a structurally unsound safe house. As a result of her lightning reflexes, she accidentally kills Celia.

Æon infiltrates the medical lab where Trevor is holding Nader who is on the verge of giving birth to a new Demiurge. As the baby emerges, Æon and Trevor fight over whether to save it or kill it. Æon believes that the Demiurge is evil, while Trevor believes it is their salvation. Before they can resolve the conflict, the Baby causes in them a drug-like feeling of bliss, but when it abruptly leaves, they have sudden symptoms of withdrawal. They bicker over morality, and Æon laughs as a glass breaks, which Trevor claims reveals that she subconsciously believes that the Demiurge is good.

Meanwhile, Breen everywhere are seeing visions of the Demiurge which cause feelings of bliss or remorse. Æon and Trevor finally encounter the fully grown Demiurge in the safe house; it collapses; the Demiurge restores Celia to life, and Trevor saves Æon's life. But Trevor and Æon continue to disagree, while Nader and Celia resolve their conflict over the catlike being, and restore their love.

6. "Reraizure" (September 12, 1995)

After a Monican agent is captured, Æon, disguised as a Breen soldier, infiltrates the prison where he's being kept. When she comes upon a young woman trying to escape (strangely enough with Trevor Goodchild's help) she attacks Æon, believing her to be an enemy soldier. Æon accidentally kills her and when the woman's partner drives up out front of the building, she gets inside, hoping to alleviate her guilt. The man inside is the dead woman's(whose name is Muriel) boyfriend Rordy, and he is stricken by his lovers death. When Æon tries to comfort him, they end up sleeping together. The next morning he tells Æon of his plan. Years ago he and a young woman took a drug called Bliss together. The terrible side effect was that they lost their memories. Not knowing who they were or why they knew each other, they formed a bond. The drug Bliss is only created by one known creature, a small turtle like creature called a Narghile. In a pouch on its back it forms, pearl like, the pellet which can be easily consumed. Since the Narghile cannot be killed for some reason, Rordy planned with his ex-lover to collect them all and blast them into the sun on a rocket platform, forcing their extinction in revenge. They were getting down the the last few, and now it seems their dream was crushed by fate. Æon who is touched by the story, and has fallen more than just a little for Rordy promises to help him finish his mission. With Narghile's in tow, she climbs a sheer cable up to the rocket platform, suspended miles up in the air. Expecting to find thousands of jars filled with the Narghiles on the platform, she merely finds a few empty jars, and oddly enough, Trevor Goodchild. Being as they are both wearing bulky protective air suits, Trevor doesn't recognize Æon, thinking her to be the now dead girlfriend. He connects the tube from his air suit to hers and by having the air forced back and forth through the tubes they have a bizarre form of non-contact sex, forcing Æon to orgasm. During this strange exchange, Trevor confesses to his newest evil: He and the now dead woman were lovers and they both led Rordy on his wild goose chase quest so that Trevor could gain control of the Narghiles. The woman gave Trevor all of them, in a fantastic act of betrayal. Æon attacks Trevor, revealing her self, but Trevor escapes. When she tells Rordy (who's never actually seen the platform for himself), he reacts violently, unable to believe this. While Æon goes after Trevor, Rordy climbs to the platform and finds the proof of his girlfriend's betrayal. Shattered he blasts the platform away and awaits Æon back a his home. She arrives finding him in a bathtub, memories completely erased by another bliss pill he took, a sort of mental suicide. As he tries to figure out who she is, she flees the house, leaving one of the few men she may have ever loved.

7. "Chronophasia" (September 19, 1995)

Æon's sense of reality is shattered when she finds herself trapped in an underground facility with an ancient, and possibly evil force.

According to episode writer Peter Gaffney in the commentary track of the DVD, this episode draws upon The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes as well as adapting quotations from the Diamond Sutra.

8. "Ether Drift Theory" (September 26, 1995)

Trevor creates The Habitat, a place where experimental life forms are kept, and Æon and her friend infiltrate it.

9. "The Purge" (October 3, 1995)

Æon teams up with an all-woman insurgency and tries to stop Trevor's plan to give everyone an artificial conscience.

10. "End Sinister" (October 10, 1995)

The arrival of an alien spacecraft begins a battle of wills between Æon and Trevor that lasts for centuries. The title makes reference to a bend sinister, though it may also make reference to the dystopian novel of the same name.

Running order

The above list reflects the original broadcast order of the half-hour episodes. However, the 2005 DVD release is arranged in a different order separated by director.

Episodes directed by Peter Chung (Disc 1):

1. "Utopia or Deuteranopia?"

2. "Thanatophobia"

3. "A Last Time for Everything"

4. "Ether Drift Theory"

5. "The Purge"

Episodes directed by Howard Baker (Disc 2):

6. "The Demiurge"

7. "Isthmus Crypticus"

8. "Reraizure"

9. "Chronophasia"

10. "End Sinister"

According to the 2005 DVD release, "The Demiurge" was originally intended to be the first episode, but MTV felt that, although promising, it was too radical an introduction to the world of Æon Flux. The episode was therefore moved to later in the production order, and "Utopia or Deuteranopia" was written to replace it. In addition to beginning with the original broadcast episode, the 2005 DVD also retains the order of the original finale episode entitled "End Sinister".