It Came From My Instant Queue, Summer Television Edition: Farscape

Living spaceships still make sure to have mood lighting installed.

Rorie's Note: The summer television season is in full swing, which of course means that there's nothing to watch. Over the next few weeks, we'll be looking at a few television shows that are worth your time to check out on Netflix if you're fed up with network reruns and reality dance competitions. Welcome to Instant Queue: Summer Jams edition.

Few things bore me faster than most basic cable sci-fi. Even Antiques Roadshow usually offers more to capture my imagination. Call it genre snobbery, but I have hard time going through the motions of pretending that I'm watching “bold new ideas” on screen when I already saw something fresher and more provocative in print years prior. Or, worse yet, it's a tamer version of material I've seen at the movies.

With that said, I’ll always have such special fondness for Farscape; particularly the second season. My eye was just caught by all the color, muppets and make-up in the first quick teaser than ran on the Sci-Fi Channel (as SyFy was called back in ’99.) It immediately looked like a bravura spectacle to compete with the likes of The Fifth Element and The Phantom Menace in my head space. The show was produced by Jim Henson productions, aiming to prove that there was still room for elaborate puppeteering in genre television, but they paired up their expertise in that area with some generally excellent CGI sequences.

It was about an Earthman, astronaut John Crichton, getting shanghaied across the galaxy onto a ship filled with alien prison escapees running from an organization of corrupt lawmen: the Peacekeepers. Crichton quickly finds himself embroiled in intergalactic conflict due to his knowledge of wormhole technology that's greatly desired by the various factions he comes in contact with. He, of course, simply desires to return home to Earth, and his struggles toward that goal are, of course, many and varied. That the ship, named Moya, was actually a weaponless living creature was probably the tamest twist of the many that defined this truly diverse menagerie of extra-terrestrials. Crichton was joined by a plant lifeform, a princely slug and a chalk-white nympho who were alien in ways that hadn’t been seen on TV before and haven’t been seen since.

Ready for the cover of your trading card pack.

It took a while for the show to get over the hump of all the “disbelief suspension” episodes that establishing a mythos necessitates. And I honestly checked out around the third season when it got to be too soap operatic for my tastes. (It felt like the cast was playing musical chairs over who would die and get resurrected each episode.) However, that sweet spot in between those seasons remains one of the most colorful and creative stretches of television I've ever encountered. I describe it as "out of this world" without any of the usual embellishment--and the fact that I watched it in such a piecemeal fashion has really nagged at me over the years.

See, this was around the year 2000: DVR wasn’t as ubiquitous as it today and there was yet to be the firm model for TV series getting collected in regular, economically-priced, seasonal box sets. If you fell behind on a show like Farscape, your options were to try to tape the out-of-order reruns, or pick up pricier individual DVDs that collected only a couple episodes at a time. With my viewing experience compromised like it was, I’d been idly hoping to revisit the whole show in a more organized and sequential way.

It’s almost as if the instant queue was created for a guy with my exact predicament.

It is impossible to explain this image.

I got to revisit the show in chronological order recently through this oh-so-easy platform and was so pleased to find it held up to the esteem I'd held it in. It feels weird to describe something that was airing in 2002 as a vestige of another era, but I’ve nevertheless gotten a better appreciation for how unique Farscape was; and how unlikely it is that we'll see something as expensive, yet unconventional, on TV any time soon. Again, I'll single out Season Two, where every episode feels like a stage in a wild oneupsmanship game the writing staff had to see how much more mental they could make the show.

“Crackers Don’t Matter” climaxes with Crichton having to basically cover himself in bird shit to thwart a psychic alien who's made the cast go insane in a serious content-ratings-pushing way. The hilarious “Won’t Get Fooled Again” sees him navigating what he knows is a manipulative lucid dream by indulging his id--that is, killing or hooking up with the entire crew over and over again--until his nemesis, Scorpius, puts him on track. Actually, as fun as Muppets like Rygel and Pilot are, and as alluring as "painted ladies" like Chiana and Zhaan are, the "evil Mr. Spock" Scorpius is unquestionably the stand-out character.

If you've ever face-palmed about supposedly-brilliant arch villains making blatant, stupid decisions, you'll find this unflinching logician to be utterly fascinating. The overarching plot had the corrupt Peacekeepers trying to wrest the secrets of pan-galactic travel out of Crichton. While other officers succumb to their own egos, Scorpius takes a cold, calm approach to the problem by literally putting himself inside Crichton's head. The bizarre symbiotic relationship they form together during the aforementioned "batshit bonkers" episodes of Season 2 is the element that makes the whole series for me. Scorpius often has to put his mission aside to "keep Crichton sane" during all the mind warping plots, and you see an "enemy of my enemy" scenario play out in a weirder way than could have ever expected.

If you're a Muppets fan, watch this to see them in scenarios more deranged than anything in the Dark Crystal. If you somehow have a problem with Muppets, then look past them to see one of the most legitamately creative sci-fi shows ever. You could do a lot worse than Farscape if you're looking for summer entertainment.