Today, on Farscape…

“I can’t be your kind of hero.”
“No, you can’t be. But each man gets a chance to be his own kind of hero. Your time will come, and when it does, watch out. Chances are it’ll be the last thing you expected.”

John Crichton, an astronaut with the International Aeronautics and Space Administration, launches a low-orbit mission just inside the Earth’s atmosphere. As he begins his experiment, his test module, Farscape One, encounters an electro-magnetic pulse and is whisked away through a wormhole. He encounters a prison transport escaping its Peacekeeper control and is caught up in an interstellar conflict he has no knowledge of. His module accidentally collides with a Peacekeeper’s Prowler, which spins off-course into an asteroid and explodes. The pilot’s brother is Commander Crais, who will stop at nothing to capture his brother’s “murderer”.

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Kevin

One of the things I love about this series is how it handles exposition. The very first conversation we’re treated to is Crichton and D.K. talking about the upcoming experiment, and D.K. is gloating about the article that was written about it in Scientific American. It’s an absolutely fantastic way to explain to the audience exactly what’s going on without boring them or treating it like necessary exposition.

(Get a good look at D.K., folks, you won’t see him again for a while.)

The entire series plays like that, for the most part at least, where information is gained through natural and understandable sources. The characters actually ask questions, or they’re explained things that they didn’t know before, and the audience learns along with them. It’s reasonable because, despite what most fantasy and science-fiction authors claim, planets and even whole galaxies are big, really really big, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist but that’s just peanuts et cetera et cetera. It’s impossible for everyone to know everything. The whole of life is a learning experience, and I’m glad that Farscape takes that angle and runs with it as far as they can.

Crichton gets launched, the experiment begins, and right away things get interesting.

Let’s talk about the actual Farscape experiment for a moment, shall we? The experiment is based upon common knowledge that gravitational pull of a planet or similar body can be used to achieve a slingshot effect, granting sufficient velocity to achieve an escape trajectory. John Crichton proposed a way to take that even further; entering a planet’s atmosphere to gain even greater gravitational momentum, in an effort to slingshot away at tremendous speeds. What was this going to accomplish? Spaceflight, faster than mere engines can produce in a short amount of time, to go further than humans have ever gone. Keep that in mind for later on.

Farscape One hits a wormhole opening in Earth’s atmosphere, and gets sucked away. If you pay attention, you can see John’s father and best friend “realize” that he’s dead.

It’s the standard for this show, not the exception, that a lot of the characters have amazing “face acting”. When John pops out of the wormhole in the asteroid field, you can see that he’s a bit concussed from the ride. He’s slurring his words a bit, and he’s having trouble focusing on what’s in front of him, at least immediately.

The face acting continues when he gets pulled aboard Moya; you can see him just marvelling at the interior before he realizes – almost too late – that he should put out the landing gear. Even Rygel and Pilot have amazing face acting – even more pronounced considering they’re complete puppets, not Rubber Forehead Aliens.

(It’s actually a measure of how well the Henson company knows their puppetry when Rygel is probably one of the most expressive characters on the show. Then again, they’ve had decades to perfect their art.)

One other thing I want to point out is the design of the ships and interior sets. The Farscape Module is very American Space Shuttle in coloration and design, albeit on a much smaller scale. Peacekeeper vessels are pointy, angular, and usually marked in deep blacks and sharp reds. Moya is very warm and relaxing, with her smooth curves and earthy browns and oranges, a trait shared with most other Leviathans. Every detail is extremely well-designed to evoke emotional states.

Finally, remember the point of the Farscape Project? Overcoming atmospheric resistance to produce greater gravitational slingshot effects? This is where it comes in. Moya is outrunning Crais’s command carrier, and John convinces them to dip down into the atmosphere of the “commerce planet”. (Even Farscape falls into the Lucas-vision at times – that of “theme planets“.)

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Noel

What strikes me most about this pilot is just how generic it is. John Carter of Mars. Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. Science fiction is filled with classic examples of a square-jawed American zapped out of his everyday existence and dropped into an alien world of fantastical creatures and sights. This is no exception. Now, those who know the series are aware that it will eventually come to defy the trope of the white man going native and becoming a superheroic presence that completely reworks the society he adopts, but they don’t yet give us a sense of that direction. There’s the above quote about him being a hero. There’s the alien running up against a wall of set ways to whom he tells “You can be more.” There’s the big climax where he miraculously saves the day thanks to a repeat of the very experiment that got him into this mess in the first place. Hell, there’s even the complex biomechanical organism that he repairs with a simple strip of good ol’ fashioned human electrical tape.

And then there’s the broader cast. While the costumes, makeup, and puppeteering are magnificently executed, none of the outcasts aboard the organic prison ship Moya feel anywhere near as alien as they look. D’Argo is the bearded, pierced, tattooed barbarian thug who spends his time polishing a blade when not picking fights or delivering a blunt tongue lashing (literally!). Zhaan is the elegant and wise “pagan” priestess who only resorts to quiet prayers when all other conceivable courses of action have been exhausted, and casts a playful smirk when people make mention of her sect’s sexual practices. Rygel is the bloated, entitled aristocrat whose respect of the rabble and their possessions is dependant entirely upon how useful they are to him. Pilot is the over-the-phone tech support who gets increasingly frustrated as people keep breaking the things he’s trying to guide them through repairing. Aeryn is the soldier; the badass who takes delight in following the rules of a supreme force; the fighter introduced as she drops our hero to the floor with a super groin straddle attack. Hell, even the villain Crais fits the Grand Moff Tarkin mold: a purebred in a crisp uniform leading a ship filled with purebreds in crisp uniforms as they constantly go against a rigid set of laws so as to enforce the authority of that rigid set of laws.

Yes, it’s all very well written and cast and directed and designed, but it’s still a very comfortable set of conventions and doesn’t push the utter alieness of everything nearly enough. However, there are two very good reasons for this. 1) For those who know Farscape, take a moment to think about all the disgusting, challenging, ballsy things they do in the years following. Got the image? Good. Now imagine pitching that show to network heads in an era when Farscape itself still didn’t exist. 2) Repeat all of “1”, but replace the network heads with the home audience. Sure, there are people who would have immediately clicked with the show were it to start where it eventually went, but it always had a struggle with the ratings and instantly hitting people with the Epic Weird would not help that.

To sum up, it’s a largely by-the-numbers pilot, but that’s because it needed to be. I don’t know if the show was meant to go the way it eventually did or if the creators just found their way down that road as it went along, but this is where it had to start, for better or for worse.

Now that I’ve got that epic lecture out of the way (sorry!), I need to take a moment to slightly disagree with Kevin. He’s right that this show does have an amazing way with exposition that lets us follow these characters as they casually tumble from weirdness to weirdness, but there’s some forced groaners in there. Exchanges like the one Kevin mentioned with D.K. and Scientific American or the “hero” quote roll out of their performers in ways that can’t hide their forced artificiality, as does

“She is a Leviathan! It is the single defensive maneuver that she is capable of!”

or

“Peacekeeper? You’re one of the ones out there attacking the ship.”

or

“Compassion? What is compassion?”

or

“It is my duty, my breeding. Since birth, it’s what I am.”

But I’ll admit that these are more glaring exceptions than the general rule. The scene where John first stumbles upon the command deck of Moya as she and her inhabitants are in the midst of a violent escape does a marvelous job of quickly laying out the situation and people involved. And then there’s a great conversation between D’Argo and Zhaan that not only firmly establishes their backstory and reminds me that D’Argo is still supposedly an adolescent, but sets up a surprisingly hot bit of flirting between the two. And then the meeting of John and Aeryn. Have I mentioned the super groin straddle attack?

Damn. Looking back over this wall of writing, I’ve come down a lot more on the negative than I meant to. It’s conventional, it has some stiff writing shortcuts, Zhaan’s skin isn’t nearly as sexily detailed as it will be down the road, but it’s still good. Really good. Really really good. It plays the notes so well that it’s a rare cover that reinvents the old tune for the new age. The characters don’t magically get along, with everybody already working their own angles against the broader group. The sets are colorful and textured and alive. The costumes and makeup instantly set the characters without feeling artificial. The extensive CGI is used just right and, over a decade later, still holds up astonishingly well. The music Weston mentioned is a wonder to behold. And there’s so many great little things. Our first glimpse of Moya. Rygel’s emissions. Naked Zhaan and John (the first of many times). Aeryn’s reaction as tables turn against her. Collar-bone piercings. The bug on the windshield. “It’s time for us to eat.” John holding the gun backwards. What looks to be that quadrant’s version of a spork. Have I mentioned the super groin straddle attack?

And the best moment sees our human hero on a grungy, back alley world covered with grime and pollution and poverty and criminals and likely more than a few diseases … and all he can do is gape in wonder.

“I’m on another planet.”

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Weston

One of the first things that always hits me about this series is the alien-ness of the languages. Maybe it’s because they won’t have to deal with actual languages for the rest of the season, but for those first introductory moments, you’ve got two very strange aliens babbling at each other in two languages that you’ll never be able to reproduce, much less understand. Until you rewatch it, that is. Then you may catch “Moya” in the mess.

The music starts off weird and alien, most notably during the shuttle liftoff. It’s… odd, probably foreshadowing, that the weird alien music plays during an event that tends to be set to something more evocative of awe and wonder. This music leads into the opening credits, a tune that’s definitely different without John’s voiceover, and one that you’ll be getting used to over nearly fifty episodes. From there, the music over the opening action sequence takes a cue from Lexx – heavy guitars and amps. It’s less impressive.

I love how none of the characters has any previous (knowing) interaction with another, with one exception in Rygel. The way these characters interact when they’re in a group versus paired off with another introduces them to the watcher as much as each other, and reveals right off the bat the depth of their characterization. D’argo is aggressive but young. Zhaan is harsh but seductive. Aeryn is… well, Aeryn. Rygel is obviously duplicitous, and he has many layers thereof. Crais is two kinds of crazy. And Crichton… man, he’s all wide eyes and curiosity.

It’s so much fun looking forward to his development. >:D

Get used to some of the external CGI. The extreme close up of the Command Carrier, the prowler leaving the hangar for the planet, the Moya flybys. That’s par for the course with this kind of series, but a nit to pick at. Especially when you see one in season four.

Crichton’s attempts to bring Earth culture to the ass end of the universe hits repeated stumbling blocks from day one – a lack of common reference points completely shuts him down.

The big dramatic moment at the episode’s climax is kinda cheesy, but still neat in how it demonstrates John’s greatest strength. His technical aptitude is pretty amazing, but his lack of familiarity with the technology level he’s stranded in is a significant weakness.

“And there’s life out here, Dad. Weird, amazing, psychotic life.”

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Adam

One thing I like about this episode is the interplay between Crichton and his dad. The relationship between the two is shown in a very short amount of time, but you get a good sense for both of them in that short period. The dialogue in general for this one is very good, with enough exposition to the general idea without bogging down. Crichton’s dad seems concerned and proud at the same time, and it adds a lot to the first episode to have them talk like this.

The puppetry and animatronics in this episode are especially good, especially the DRDs. It’s amazing how much personality the little guys can have, especially without any real “face” to speak of. All of the puppets are superb, with Rygel and the zergy merchant on the Commerce planet. I think the best things about Rygel are his eyebrows, they remind me of a very old, very pompous old man. Pilot also has a very interesting design, well suited to his role on the ship.

One thing I’d like to touch on is the costume design for the Peacekeeper forces. Lots of leather, buckles, and metal plates on these uniforms, it’s almost fetish gear in some ways. The helmets on the rank-and-file troops are especially silly, with semi-opaque visors that look like they’d serve as more of a hazard in a firefight than any protection. Someone at Peacekeeper HQ needs to read the Evil Overlord list, if only to save themselves embarrassment. The other costume work is pretty interesting, especially D’Argos outfit. Lots of reds, with a low front to show off his tattoos and the hoops that are pierced through his collarbone (ouch!). Zhaan’s blue outfit is a good contrast, with Crichton’s beige outfit striking a bit of a balancing point between them.

Definitely a strong first episode which sets up future plot points. I’ll be interested in seeing how Crais and Crichton develop as the series continues.

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Noel’s Re-Rewatch (3/17/2022)

Oh look, some extra content! Howdy again, everybody. Noel here. While applying for programming at this year’s upcoming CONvergence, I saw they were doing a panel on Farscape. Well, with all the collective expertise we gathered on the series through this blog, I absolutely couldn’t pass up a chance to sign up. I don’t know if I’ve been accepted yet, but what I do know is, over a decade down the road from what we wrote above, I need to give Farscape a fresh watch. So here comes the updates! (and a much needed purging of some spam, I see!)

Revisiting “Premiere”, I still have some of the same issues. The characters are generic, the exposition is clunky, the music is inconsistent. But again, it’s very much in line with typical TV pilots where they probably had studio notes and audience consideration to deal with, so they kept things simple and focused to ease the sell. And sell they do, as it’s already a strikingly designed series, which gets its spin on Flash Gordon off and rolling, and already sets up a varied and gorgeously realized world. In just one episode, we get Earth, the space battle, Moya, the Peacekeepers, the alien planet. Entire arcs of allegiances play out and evolve. Even at the extended running time of 50m, it packs a lot in. While it hasn’t fully played its hand at what this series will be – and how could they as, from what I’ve since heard, they were often playing by ear and constantly re-inventing themselves along the way – the core of the story is there in the form of John and Aeryn. He’s the hunky but lunky guy who defies tropes by always fumbling his cool, and instead of saving the day through action, as he doesn’t even know how to hold these guns very well, he’s going to do it with his brains and math. And Aeryn is the dedicated soldier suddenly faced with the harsh reality that the petty government she serves is ready and able to flip on her in an instant, who has no choice but to suddenly take up with the very escaped cons she was just going toe to toe with. Really, Ben Browder and Claudia Black continue to be amazing, they’re instantly iconic right from the start, and why they didn’t carry on to massive stardom is still something which boggles me.

Rygel is also his gloriously Rygel self. Zhaan, D’Argo, and Crais are well played, but still pretty by-the-numbers characters, and it’s interesting seeing them set up angles which won’t actually come to define them very much once the writers start digging in.

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Prelude || Episode [1.02]: I, E.T.