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?
It's certainly second tier, down from you TNG's and DS5's and such.
I'd say, personally, one above Stargate:SG1 when stargate SG1 was good. It takes a LONG time for Farscape to get good and it has trouble staying good until they start pulling characters out of their comfort zones. The show really reaches a steady stride when Scorpious starts becoming an ambiguous ally. And yes, the show is very muppety, but I'd rather that then a bunch of vaguely humanoid aliens painted different colors or with funny noses. Aliens in Farscape are alien ass aliens.
I just recently got into it thanks to Netflix and I am so glad. I heard about it while it was airing but never watched it. I'm definitely hoping it stays enjoyable. For me it fits well within the category of other good sci-fi shows.
Also it has Claudia Black, how can you not like it.
There should be a video with Dave and Rorie talking about Farscape.
Top tier for me. Absolutely loved the show when it aired on Space but the first season was very slow.
Great show.
Down a bit from me, I agree with @Mesoian in that it sits around SG-1. Great Sci-Fi for me but not truly genre breakingly great. When I first started watching it I thought it was weird as hell too, but the story was enjoyable and yes it was slow at the beginning but then again TNG took a while to get into its stride.
I love this show with a passion. but I agree with what you said. Also, HUMANS. ARE. SUPERIOR.
i need to get into this.
I've watched all of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, all of tng,ds9. maybe i need a new old series...
Best Sci-Fi series I've seen, hands down. Only behind Twin Peaks for best TV-series ever. Claudia Black and Ben Browder are absolutely superb on screen together, and Wayne Pygram as Scorpius is the best antagonist since Darth Vader.
By far this IS my favorite Sci-fi series. The creatures were great, and if you don't pay attention to the makeup changes between seasons they are interesting to look at. Every season has its peek, but Season 3 really felt like it tried too hard to keep things up to snuff. The episodes on earth in Season 4 were amazing and fun. This was a classic fish out of water story, but the fish was also teaching. So much greatness.
Love the hell out of Farscape, but nothing beats Firefly in my book. Farscape is probably a close second behind it, then Stargate SG-1 then Atlantis. Never got into any Star Trek so my top Sci-Fi are those with BSG at the 5th place. Ben Browder is the MAN!!! Loved him on the last two SG-1 seasons. Kinda wish he had lead more seasons of it, but what we got was pretty awesome! He's no Jack O'neill, but who is really?
I put this in my Top 5 SF series, with the likes of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly.
How does it stack up to SG-1? I've said this a couple of times, but I really liked my first run-through of SG-1, but when I went back to show it to my sister, it was significantly less thrilling than the first time I watched it. Apart from the still great first episode (Children of the Gods) the whole first season has this awful, cheap 90s feel to it and it seems like a good 90% of the show is filler.
Some BSG fans recommended Babylon 5 to me, and I watched a two minute Farscape clip on Youtube and thought it was enjoyable and had the appropriate level of sci-fi campiness.
I'm going relatively high on this, as in Firefly high. Ok, ok, it was mostly running through the standard Alien of the Week formula, but it did so in such a fun, fresh way. Great characters, pretty solid writing, young Claudia Black, there was a lot to love with Farscape. And we've had absolutely nothing, other than the aforementioned Shiny show shown briefly on Fox, even approach the same level since Farscape got unceremoniously canned.
I had to put off buying the DVD set for a couple years because of the price, I imagine I'll be waaiting awhile on upgrading to Blu ray.
Crackers Don't Matter!
Farscape is much more fantasy in space that sci fi or space opera. I still think them actually coming back to Earth was one of the riskiest things the series could have done. And while NASA is a parking garage it still sort of works.
@RockinKemosabe said:
This should totally happen! Subscriber content in a few weeks?
And I have to say that Farscape is probably my favourite series of all time. Watched the whole thing on DVD last year, I remember putting off papers to watch more and routinely staying up until 5AM to watch it (thank God senior classes are in the late afternoon at my university).
And totally agree with BagronkeN, the only antagonists I would rate higher than Wayne Pygram as Scorpius would be Forest Whitaker's Lt. Kavanaugh from The Shield and of course Darth Vader.
Not on the Top 5, Top 10, Top 20.
But hey if people like shows like this and Babylon 5 and SG-1, etc. too each his own. It just confuses me.
Farscape probably takes the top place in my personal pantheon of Sci-Fi series. I think the first one I got into and watched religiously was ST:TNG, then I kind of lose track, I wasn't a big X-Files guy, so I'm not sure how much I'm attributing to Farscape was pioneered there, but I think that much of modern Sci-Fi storytelling owes a lot to Farscape. However I was late to Buffy, and I'm not sure when that started with the modern storytelling, so this opinion is very much from my personal chronology. I also came to Farscape kind of late, maybe mid season 2, so the show had already kind of hit its stride which colors my remembrance of it.
In any case, I think Farscape broke ground in the area of Sci-Fi storytelling when it moved away from the Monster/Alien of the Week being the driving force in the narrative. Farscape to me seemed very character driven after a certain point. You had John who should have been driven mad by everything that had happened to him and he used everything in his power to deal with constant psychological assaults (either indirectly by just being the stranger in a strange land to direct assaults on his mind by Scorpius, Harvey, or a bevy of other alien entities) and my favorite way of his to ground himself was to reference pop culture (can't remember if he referenced Major Tom at all, but he should have if he didn't). Then there was Scorpius who was torn between two worlds that didn't want him, he eventually ended up with the side willing to put up with him and he also saw as the greatest good. Then you have the relationship between John and Aeryn, which I think was very compelling and handled very well by the standards of Sci-Fi shows.
Another great part about this series was that unlike many other Sci-Fi shows then and today there weren't many alternate universe/time travel episodes that end up making absolutely not impact on the main storyline (I'm looking at you every iteration of Star Trek). The only things in Farscape that I can remember that come close to this are the episodes where wormhole travel goes weird, and those are contained to an episode showing John the power of wormholes, and John's doubling or whatever they call it which had major story consequences.
Also, I started re-watching some episodes when they became free on Amazon Prime, and man this was one really trippy show, in a good way!
As far as Matt Rorie's complaints about the show, I'll bullet point it up to try to keep this more brief than I would make it otherwise.
Peacekeepers not being villainous enough: I don't know that they were intended to be villainous, just a force trying to secure hegemony or sovereignty in borderlands against a force that might be superior in numbers using whatever methods necessary. They aren't evil, just a government doing what governments do in those situations. This is one of the aspects of the show that I loved, the ambiguity of things, there were so many shades of grey in this universe.
Ben Browder playing a lunkhead: As I stated earlier I think John's behavior was very much a defense mechanism against the psychological assault that was thrust upon him. This may be wishful thinking of looking on the show in retrospect, and just remembering having fun with the way he played the character and liking it, but I'm going to stick with that story.
Scorpius being wizard villian: I've already stated how much I love the John/Scorpius/Harvey trichotomey. He may have seemed that way initially but once he and his doppelganger became more fleshed out it was that relationship that helped define the series and make it great, especially the John/Harvey relationship.
TL:DR Farscape rocks an is one of the best frelling shows to grace the small screen, oh and I didn't even mention made up swears.
It's not the soul reason I liked Farscape, but one of its stronger points was the trippy character designs. Some were so weird that they felt much closer to what I imagine aliens would look like than ANYTHING that came out of the Trek universe.
I also found Crichton's overarching confusion and plight to be pretty damned compelling too.
And Scorpius, Scorpius kicked ass from my POV.