All I will say is that Farscape is really good on following through on how the characters change in response to what happens to them and the situations they're put in. They don't have a "reset button" on the show. So people (not just Crichton) do change a lot, in drastic but very plausible ways. I hope that's suitably vague *g*.

And yay, go for it with staying spoiler-free - I managed to stay pretty much unspoiled, and I'm really glad I did. The writers on Farscape went out of their way to mess with the viewers' minds, so IMHO it's cool if you can get the full shock of it first time round.