Farscape Review
by Michael Lee
I was tempted to do an Enterprise review, but I felt that before
I got to the new Star Trek series, I had to go on about the
space series that I've started following regularly over the last month or so,
and that's the Sci-Fi channel's Farscape.
I've only just gotten into the show with the
start of the daily episodes from the beginning of the series, but this is an
all-out enjoyable series that is definitely not muppets in space, despite
the Henson involvement. Those people who have been into this series for a
while may have known this for years aren't surprised by this, and I'm not
saying anything new.
Like other recent genre shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's obvious
that the creative team is familiar with many cultural trademarks of fans --
when you have the central character quoting Monty Python in a dramatic
context, after an episode that quotes a line from Ghostbusters, and each
time have it make sense as part of the story, not a distracting reference,
you have a winner.
Farscape has a fairly basic set up for a science fiction series -- human
astronaut gets thrown across the universe when he is testing a new
spaceship. He ends up on a living spaceship with a group of refugees and
criminals.
It's a bit reminiscent of Blake's 7 with muppets and bigger budgets. There
are some episodes that could take place in nearly any science fiction space
series, set ups that could have been done on shows from a Star Trek to Red
Dwarf, but these stories tend to be done very effectively.
I don't want to get into a lot of spoilers about the series in this review; but the
characters are excellent. They've got complicated relationships, and sometimes they have conflicts of interest, even amongst people that are on the same side, and you feel that almost anything could happen.
There are a couple small nit picks -- D'Argo is a bit too much like a Klingon at times, and while in general the Rygel character is very effective, you can tell at times that the writers are forced to put him in a bag or freeze him in order to keep him out of the episode. It's sort of like when K9 in Doctor Who would end up in some sort of disrepair because they were in a wild enough setting that they couldn't bring the prop out into the wild.
But those are all really small, small nits. Farscape is one of the most enjoyable series I've watched in a long, long time. I really recommend it.
Some people may have been focusing on Enterprise -- but I think
that it's clear that the space series to watch right now isn't a Star Trek,
but Farscape, and it'll be a real challenge for it to be as good.
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