After appearing in only three season one episodes, Peacekeeper Gilina found her way into the hearts of Crichton and the audience. Mark Juddery meets up with actress Alyssa-Jane Cook and find out what it's like to live and die on Farscape.

Alyssa-Jane Cook is an expert at being nice. Everyone who works with her seems to agree. As a singer, a game-show panelist and the cheerful host of Australian shows ranging from the kid's series Breakfast Time to the magazine series Sex/Life (which wasn't for kids, incidentally), she is one of Australia's nicest television personalities. Farscape fans know her as Gilina Mays, the PK technician introduced in the seventh first-season episode, PK Tech Girl. Peacekeepers, of course, are not known for their nice qualities. Aeryn Sun, heroic though she is, isn't exactly renowned for her sweetness. With Gilina, however, we saw that Sebaceans could in fact be kind, gentle and emotionally accessible. The clever technician, who never carried a gun, was a perfect role for Cook.

Surprisingly, however, she hasn't always been nice. Not on-screen, at least. Her first major role, at age 19, was in a 1987 episode of the children's show Winners, co-starring with a certain up-and-coming teen star named Nicole Kidman. "She was the nice girl and I was the out-there chick who no one at school liked, the black sheep," comments Cook. She then became known as a young star of the 1980s soaps Sons and Daughters and E Street.

Her introduction to science fiction, in the Time Trax episode Catch Me if You Can in 1994, was another walk on the wild side. "She was the sidekick girl to a baddie," explains Cook, "so she was kind of a bad girl. But I got to play with sci-fi guns and do lots of action scenes It was great."

Four years later, she introduced Gilina to Farscape. "I have a lot of respect for the whole idea behind the show. It's trying to go where no sci-fi programme has gone before. It's try-ing to show a different angle, which I really liked," she continues. "The whole experience was great Action and... God, how could you not like Crichton? Ben [Browder]'s divine!"

Gilina was the first Sebacean to declare her love for Crichton, but any romantic moments between Cook and Browder were purely professional. "He's a married man and I'm a married woman, and that's always strange. Here you are, kissing another human being. It's thought to be a mortal sin in the real world - which it is! I'd only known him for a few days and all of a sudden you're in a passionate embrace with someone! You have to have some sense of humour about it. It can get kind of embarrassing at times, because they ask you to stand there, while they do lighting, and you're in very close prox-imity with some-guy-you've-only-met-three-days-ago's lips. And a lot of people are watching!

"The wardrobe girls and the make-up artists have a judgement on whether it was a good or a bad kiss," Cook continues. "I don't think they'd ever tell you if it was a bad kiss, but they'll say '0oh, that looked like it was a good kiss, love!' Not in front of Ben, of course. That's girly stuff."

Despite being one of the sweetest characters ever to wander the Farscape universe, Gilina was also one of the best fighters. "Her brain was her weapon," says Cook. "As a Peacekeeper, it was her heart and her brain that got them out of the situations that they were in. At that stage in the series, most of the crew weren't operating like that at all. It was all based on who had the biggest gun -except for Ben's character, of course."

Following PK Tech Girl, Gilina returned for the two-part adventure Nerve/The Hidden Memory. In The Hidden Memory, Gilina's intelligence saved the day once again - saving Crichton, fooling Scorpius and incriminating Crais by loading fake memories into the Aurora Chair. By the episode's end, however, she found herself on the battlefield, where survival required more than just a sharp mind.

"I don't love guns," says Cook. "I absolutely despise them. But the idea of pulling one out every now and again, and having a bit of fun with it, seemed fantastic to me." When trying to go gun-happy, however, Gilina died heroically, shot by Scorpius while helping the others to escape.

"I think it was a really nice end to the connection that Crichton and Gilina had," says Cook of her final episodes. "He really had an understanding that his relationship to Claudia's character was a lot more than he'd ever really imagined it to be. He really had to make a decision about it. It was nice to be part of that triangle.

"That's what makes drama interesting: when a character is challenged by their feelings for another charac-ter, and someone else is thrown in there to challenge them again. I think it was all resolved in the end for him. Not so much for Gilina, because some of her last words were, 'If things had been different...' And then you never got to hear what she said. She will always really love him, regardless, but he knew where he stood. I think that was really important for his character."

Gilina's death - as Stark (Paul Goddard) eased her pain with images of beauty - is one of Farscape's most poignant scenes to date. "Who knows what death's like?" comments Cook. "I don't ever want to know. I don't want to have one of those experiences. It was just a case of knowing and under-standing that it's quite peaceful. It took about an hour to film that little bit - and if anyone makes you laugh, it's like, 'Now I've lost my train of thought."

"I thought that was a good thing to happen, in some ways, [though] I guess you think that if they kill you off, you can never come back. But television is television."

Cook, like many other Farscape starved Australian viewers, hasn't seen beyond season one, but she is delighted that her friend Tammy Macintosh has joined the cast as Jool, and is excited that Paul Goddard is now a regular ("He's fantastic!"). She also believes that - if not for the exhausting make-up schedule - Virginia Hey would still be there. "If you were on that show, you wouldn't leave it."

In fact, Cook would return in an instant, even if it meant one of those four-hour make-up sessions. She can't say anything against Farscape or anyone involved. She had a wonderful time. "It was just fabulous," she concludes.