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May 15, 2005 This is the second in my series about recent and current scifi. The first was about the Trek franchise and can be found here: http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/may/article184.html Lets talk Farscape! The show ran for four seasons on the scifi channel and could still be running today. The episodes were very expensive to make, and there is much information about why the series was canceled. I won't go into those details here, however, suffice it to say, the series was treated badly by the powers that be, but was allowed to end gracefully (thanks in part to fans), with plot lines resolved. If you haven't seen Farscape, buy it, it's on DVD. Your non-scifi loving SO just may watch it with you – mine did. Farscape is real high on the drama, taking the time to get into the depths of its characters, like any good piece of fiction. Farscape has a bunch of mis-matched folks together on a ship. Sound familiar? Trust me, it's not. It's the most refreshing bit of fiction to come along on TV in a long while. Most of the special effects are brilliant, some are cheesy (cheesy like the old Dr. Who). Jim Henson's company did the special effects – as a result, some of the effects involve puppets. Sometimes, they look like puppets, but it usually doesn't take away from the overall feeling. If anyone remembers the excellent movie, “The Dark Crystal”, you get a sense of what some of the aliens look like. Humans in makeup and CGI are the order of the day for the most part, so it looks modern and rather cool, with a unique, dark, style. The mood is more sinister than Star Trek, often portraying the world as it is (less than friendly). High on action, it's got running and shooting in corridors ala Star Wars, but it's also very deep, with conflicted characters, put into situations of conflicting morality. Its depth comes generally not in the Trek kind of depth, where we are asked to imagine what would happen if the Holodeck malfunctioned in just this funky way, though there is some of that. Farscape is less techy than the Treks – there is less technobabble; it's been called sci-fantasy by many. Portrayal of human drama, however, more than makes up for this, and the result is something more real than Trek. We are made to believe that people really would act as they do, given their fictional situations. It's is a pretty experimental show in content and style – some episodes are animated ala Bugs Bunny, while others start in the middle of the plot, move backwards via flashbacks and then slowly forward. Others tell the same story several times, from various points of view. Episodes stand on their own, but there is an overall story arc, with many mini arcs - lots of two and three part, “to be continued” episodes. I recommend watching the series in order; if you see re-runs, wait until they start over. Following the Ren and Stimpy tradition, Farscape has a bit of a “disgust factor”. For example, in a few episodes, a space ship genetically keyed to just one member of the crew gets operated by the other members anyway via his bodily fluids – vomit and saliva spread over the controls. It also has a fair amount of torture scenes and can get pretty erotic. It's less family-orientated than the Treks, but don't let this be a turn-off – it never feels needlessly shocking; it feels appropriate given the situation. In other words, if the Soviets treated their political prisoners as “nicely” as the Romulans did, we wouldn't have called them the “evil empire”; in Farscape, the bad guys act, well, bad. The broad plot outline, without giving up any spoilers, is that an American astronaut, John Chriton, gets sucked into a wormhole and shot across the galaxy - only to find himself in a battle where he is brought aboard a living ship (named Moya – a giant “space whale”). He soon gets injected with “translator microbes” which allow him to understand alien languages. He becomes part of the crew – all of which are escaped prisoners. Very shortly, he irks the wrong powers and becomes wanted himself. Along the way, he is entrusted with knowledge which can change the balance of power in the region, and is hunted by many factions as a result. He wants to go back to Earth, but doesn't want to expose it to the nasty and much more advanced empires that he's come into contact with. His buddies include the pilot (named simply, 'Pilot') – a being attached to Moya, living in symbiosis with her, an overtly-sexual girl from a very restrictive and corrupt planet (Chiana), an outcast from one of the major powers in the region (Aeryn Sung), a short-tempered warrior type (D'argo), several religious/spiritual types (Zhaan, a humanoid plant, first and foremost), crazy types - folks that were tortured, etc., snobbish strong gorgeous female intellectual types (all wearing nicely suggestive, skimpy, leather/latex comic-book type outfits), and an ex dictator who is arrogant, manner-less and selfish to an extreme (Rigel the 16th, aka, 'Sparky'). Of these, there is smaller group of core characters which are on the show from start to finish – other characters rotate on and off with the various plot twists. The villains are some of the best and deepest characters I've ever seen in fiction and have to be seen to be believed. An added bonus is that a mental-clone of the main bad-guy (Scorpious) also lives inside the mind of John Chriton in order to record information. This in effect adds a new dimension to an already fabulous villain. The result is similar to Baltar and his metal “issues” in the new Battlestar Galactica, for anyone familiar with that series. The show has amazing emotional range, going from comedy, (but not at the expense of reality and stupidity - not like Jar Jar, in other words), to tear-jerking. If you get into the show at all, it will bring tears to your eyes more than once, but you'll also pretty much laugh all the way through; since the show takes place in the present instead of the future and has a resident American, all kinds of references to current events and times are thrown in. And in Farscape, this ploy actually works. Overall, it's big on absolute vs. relative morality, living with consequences of choices, and some rather relevant “war in order to make peace” notions. Like most good scifi, it's applicable to the modern world – the here and now - and attempts to understand it by probing hypothetical, but similar, situations. In other words, you can relate to it, aliens and all. The next article in this little scifi series of mine will be about Firefly, another shafted, canceled show (again, not for lack of audience reaction or ratings) – its saving grace will likely be the movie based on the series, “Serenity”, which opens in September. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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