How Sci-Fi Tampered with the Beginning of Farscape, Season #4
POSTED BY: RustySlinky
UPDATED: Thursday, March 27, 2003 11:21
VIEWED: 2277
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Quote: The next “request” Kemper faced from the network was to alter the style of the show. “They were saying, if we could make it more like Stargate, everyone would love it,” he says.
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-Spoiler Warnings for season #4 and season #5
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SFX article on FS cancellation
Date: 03/25/2003
From: the_cadpig (at the DOM)
Main body of SFX article on Farscape's cancellation. Thanks go to Maayan for the scans at her blog.
Read it. Get angry. Go to www.savefarscape.com and get involved.
~cp
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Rarely has a show with so much potential been wrenched off our screens. And the bitterness in the Farscape camp is still palpable, as Paul Simpson found out when he met up with the cast and crew for the series’ post-mortem.
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The warehouse complex at Homebush Bay should be bustling with activity. But it’s dead.
Actors should be coming out of their trailers parked at the intersection of Moya Avenue and Talyn Way, and heading down to the makeup rooms, before cutting through the warehouses, or down narrow passageways to the set on which they’re filming.
In the production office, new directors should be sitting in the anterooms by the entrance, looking at maquettes made by Creature Shop Supervisor Dave Elsey of the alien races that are going to feature in their upcoming episode. The notice boards should be constantly changing with updated production schedules. Upstairs, around the large table in the writers’ room, David Kemper, Ricky Manning, Lil Taylor and the writers should be working out the broad strokes of five episodes ahead, while still breaking the story on the episode that’s due to start filming in a few days’ time.
But nobody is filming the fifth season of Farscape, and it looks as if it’ll be a long time before we know just why Crichton and Aeryn were “neutralised for inspection” at the end of the final episode. The cast and crew have scattered to the four corners of the Earth – some are in England, others in America.
Six months ago, at the start of September 2002, nearly everyone was on a high. The end of the fourth season was in sight, with only a few days of shooting left. The final episode, “Bad Timing”, was in the can. Only a few more segments for the documentary episode, “A Constellation Of Doubt”, needed to be filmed.
“I had been on location since four in the morning and was exhausted,” Gigi Edgley recalls. “So I decided to put some tunes on in my trailer and have a little dance, as aliens often do. I heard rapping outside. I thought it was Claudia, as we share trailers, asking for some quiet. I turned the music down and realised it was someone knocking on the door. My makeup artist popped her cheeky smile in and said, ‘Did you hear?’ ‘Hear what?’ ‘It’s over.’
“’What’s over?’ I asked. ‘It’s a hard wrap!’ she said. ‘Farscape’s finished.’
“’Yeah, I know,’ I said excitedly, ‘We go on holidays tomorrow.’ She replied, ‘No hon, that’s it. It’s not coming back. They’ve asked us to package up all the makeup goods and send them to the States.’
“’What? Oh frell, are you kidding? You’ve been playing with the hairspray again, haven’t you? No, this can’t be right! Shit, I’ve gotta tell my dad, my agent. I need a new job…’
“My nervous giggles fell to my trailer floor. ‘It’s lunch’, she says, ‘you coming?’
“Usually I stay in my trailer over lunch as Nebaris and sun don’t mix too well. There was no chance I was staying in my trailer today. I was done up head to toe in Nebari as they required Chi in all her fullness on this day. I stumbled out of my trailer in shock, and fumbled all my grey bits into the mini van to go down to location for lunch. The feeling was bizarre. Claudia and I gazed into each other’s eyes whilst we blurted on the phone to all the necessary people.”
Looking back, David Kemper notes that, “It was rancorous from the beginning, to a degree.” Although the Sci-Fi Channel gave the show a two-season pick up at the start of October 2001, there were some con
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