The release of the Farscape: The Complete Series on Blu-Ray today should prompt perhaps a bit of nostalgia for those of us with a fondness for the show. It’s been off the air for something like eight years now (six if you count The Peacekeeper Wars), although it does continue to live on in the same vaguely sad realm of licensed comic books and fan conventions featuring guest stars hawking autographs for ten bucks a pop that many sci-fi shows wind up inhabiting after their too-soon cancellations. It’s not entirely too soon to start stabbing at some placement of Farscape in the sci-fi television canon, though, so why don’t we take a look at its positives and negatives and try to hash out our thoughts on it, and perhaps even arrive at a ranking of it in the pantheon of "dudes on a starship" series? (You can also check out Pinchuk's thoughts on the series, which wrote about this summer.)
To the unititiated, Farscape had a fairly great start for a series: astronaut John Crichton is sucked through a wormhole in an experimental spaceship, he earns the ire of the evil Galactic Empire-esque Peacekeepers as soon as he arrives in a far quadrant of the universe, he’s thrown onto a living, unarmed ship full of prisoners, and has to both survive in unfamiliar surroundings and start searching for some way to use another wormhole to return to Earth. It was a refreshingly serialized plot; each episode could usually stand on its own, but the overarching story was what drove the series as it moved forward, even if it did undergo some modulation as the series wore on.
As a production of the Jim Henson Company, Farscape had some fantastic production values, especially in the design of its alien races. We’re all familiar with the Star Trek alien syndrome, where the most bizarre, far-fetched aliens would be humans with an extra bump on their forehead or a crazy patch of weird-colored skin. That wasn’t so much of a worry on Farscape, with numerous cast members being covered in full skin makeup (to the point where one of the actresses eventually had to leave the show when her skin coloring started to cause her kidneys to bleed), or crazy-looking prosthetics, or even being full-on puppets. It always seemed like a show that was dedicated to making its part of the universe full of genuine aliens, rather than simply stock actors with pointy ears, and it’s hard to imagine anyone but the Henson company succeeding as well as they did.
And the characters themselves were almost always interesting. There were some archetypes that they drew on, sure: Ka D’Argo was essentially a Klingon, Rygel was effectively a Ferengi, Chiana was the token sexy alien thrown into the first season, Seven-of-Nine-like, when it needed a boost, Scorpius was often a bit too much the cackling wizard-villain to take seriously, and so on. Still, it was a fun cast, for the most part. At the risk of starting a riot, though, I’ll say that I never cared much for Ben Browder, and that my appreciation of the show as a whole would’ve been higher had someone slightly more serious been in the lead. Browder’s a great lunkhead actor, at his best when he could be snarky and unserious, which served him well in some of season two’s more...interesting moments, but I could never quite believe him when he had to be passionate or level-headed. On the flip side, Claudia Black is Claudia Black and I will watch Claudia Black all the damn time in anything, which made their romantic ons-and-offs far more palatable as the seasons wore on.
Speaking of seasons, it’s hard not to feel like the show did hit a bit of a peak in season two, although it’s been a while since I watched through the entire series. It was a goofy season, more reliant on humor than the more serious third and fourth seasons, which played to the strengths of Browder and let the writing staff play with the concepts of their universe a bit. In seasons three and four, the permutations of Scorpius and Crichton chasing each other around the galaxy eventually became somewhat wearisome, although there were a few high points in those later seasons, as well. I found myself interested by the race for wormhole technology, but I can’t say I generally cared that much about it, aside from the impact it had on the characters. There was something vaguely distant about the Peacekeepers that never made me feel that they were overly credible as villains; perhaps the fact that Scorpius made his rivalry with Crichton so personal overshadowed the larger threat that the Peacekeepers were supposed to pose.Here are some of my favorite episodes:
- Season 2, Episode 15: "Won't Get Fooled Again" One of the most surreal and bizarre episodes of the entire series sees Crichton trapped in an illusionary version of Earth, where all of his shipmates start acting...strange. It's difficult to even start describing this episode without spoiling too much of the fun, and if you haven't seen the series, it probably wouldn't make much sense anyway!
- Season 1, Episode 12: "The Flax" The first-kiss scene is always a risky one for a series to take, but they pulled it off well in the case of Crichton and Aeryn, trapping them on a ship where the air is slowly escaping and forcing them to confront their own inevitable deaths. Ok, that's not such a unique setup, but it was extremely well-executed.
- Season 3, Episode 21: "Into The Lion's Den (Part 2): Wolf In Sheep's Clothing" With the situation looking extremely dire for the crew, a pair of them make the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that the rest escape capture. Hell of a thing to watch; even if it wasn't perhaps quite on the level of the Adama maneuver, it was still a great moment of exploring the boundaries of the technology that was created for the show.
We’ve all seen plenty of “dudes on a spaceship” series, from the sublime (Firefly) to the excellent (ST: TNG) to the kinda average (Enterprise) to the not-so-great (I’ll throw Andromeda in this category, since I effectively gave up on it well before I got to the end of the series). Farscape, to me, fits somewhere on the upper end of that scale, under The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, but certainly above Enterprise. At the same time, while I’ve watched every episode of Firefly and TNG multiple times, I can’t bring myself to buy Farscape again and rewatch it; I get the feeling that once was enough for me. Still, if you haven’t seen it, and you don’t mind clogging up your Netflix feed for a couple of months, you can get your money’s worth by renting it; each DVD disc usually contains four full episodes, making it pretty quick to get through. (One of the reasons I think I hated Andromeda was that each disc only had two episodes, which made the process of watching it seem like it took forever.) If you’re curious about it, you can check out the premiere episode on Youtube.
Where would you place Farscape on a hypothetical list of shows involving people on starships?
