i just watched Farscape for the first time, and oh boy...

POSTED BY: onetransmission
UPDATED: Monday, October 31, 2005 05:30
VIEWED: 6754
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DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 30, 2005 11:49 PM

Okay, let me try this again.

Last time my keyboard fried, and when that happens, rather than just politely dying, it goes out with a bang. First it starts randomly going through what is in the keyboard buffer and then it does a magic cursor dance, and then it dies. It all happens quite quickly, maybe taking 5 or 10 seconds, but I get to watch in horror as it types in "pretty bapretty pretty bady badd" and then hits submit. I could have ended task, but I was still cracking up watching it go, it didn't occur to me that it would manage to send the damn thing. Anyway, I guess I've watched some farscape on this machine and so maybe it has an opinion on the show.

Overall, I think farscape is a lot of fun. In many ways it's excellent. It's far from clean, but it's the holy grail compared to star trek. Or star wars.

The flaws with farscape are:

1. It's inconsistant. Some times it's great. Sometimes the story doesn't work. It never ties together well.

2. Like buffy, it has that sort of flavor that doesn't ring quite real.

3. There are some annoying characters whoe should have died except the sci-fi channel wouldn't let them.

Mostly Aeryn. She whined incessantly.
Crais made a sucky villain, but he made an interesting hero in later eps, and scorpius was a better replacement villain.

Overall the peacekeepers are beautiful. I mean visually stunning. Often they didn't do nearly as well with sets as they did with creatures, but the command carrier was lovely. I want one.

Chiana of course helps the show. Not just for being a former miss australia, but she's a lot of fun to watch too.

Dargo starts out as a boring Worf warrior type, but he makes much better comic relief, which they realize at some point.

Crighton is okay. I don't know if he can act, but he says the sorts of upfront things I'd want a viewpoint character to say, and not PC dribble like Dylan Hunt or Picard is liable too.

After a while the sheer joyride of Farscape more than makes up for it's not so well constructed world weakpoints.

Watching any serial SF show is really a committment to watch a season, or it's not a fair judgment.

I don't know what to say about "Stargate Atlantis" since I think if I was forced to watch a season, I might expire.

But in it's own way, Farscape is truly a thing of beauty. It's not anywhere near as realist as Firefly.

Treat it like muppets in space. If you do that, you'll have fun.

LIMINALOSITY

Monday, October 31, 2005 12:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by StarPilotGrainger:
...in Farscape, the individual episodes suck from time to time

...characters do get depth - even people who seem to be outright villains, you'll start to see different sides of them and sometimes even come to root for them. Another is that they will take strange risks.

I agree with this and your choice of spoiler as well. There are several other examples of similar reality bending that, while a similar idea may have been tried in other series, were never as successful as on Farscape.

The ep with animation (w/o spoiling too much). Made me laugh so hard with its post modernist references to a huge variety of other sources. I like this quite a lot when it's done well, and it makes my eyes roll when it's not. (MHO)

I think they did many things that were on a par with Joss' oranges, if not quite as magnificently realised.

Thanks Cybersnark for the details I hadn't heard re: glorified demo reel for Henson's Creature Shop. Also, the extension/expansion of Scorpy a la Spike I had not heard before this. Who would have wanted to do w/o either of them? A great villain is hard to find.

It's difficult and daring to go beyond 2 legs, 2 arms, bumpy forehead, and I think the use of characters with totally different evolutionary paths really added to the richness of the character arcs and situational possibilities.

As Rel writes, "to call them muppets is a severe injustice"

Resorting only to CGI for this kind of expansion on archetypes gets boring for me. I especially liked the pilot. Rygel was small and hard to maneuver a camera around so I was pretty often too conscious of his wire and foam nature, but he was such a fine little betrayer that I was willing to overlook it.

Embers, I enjoyed your take on the pilot ep as well, and thought the premise of John bringing the concept of teamwork to the band of misfits was a good one, and I liked it that they stuck with that as a theme.

I really enjoyed that character in his struggles to stay on the path of doing the right thing in a place where all the rules were different and the consequences for slipping were greater.

Thanks guys, for your thoughts!

Shiny Trees! Yavanna made Shiny Trees!

THRAWN

Monday, October 31, 2005 12:23 AM

Dreamtrove, outside of the fact that we both like Farscape, I don't think I agree with a single thing you said in your post. Crichton and Aeryn were my favorite characters, far and away.

Which, by the way, means it's a good show. Different people read different things into it.

I have had an experience with both Babylon 5 and Farscape of ***HATING*** the first season, and friends begging me to keep going. By the end of Farscape season 1, I was MAD that I had wasted my time on that. But I continued, and by the end, it was one of my 5 top shows ever. Babylon 5 was exactly the same way. (Going back, first season of both is at least enjoyable, knowing where it's headed, but it's still at best charmingly fumbled.)

Either way, I've since made it a policy to give any sci-fi show I start at least an entire season. These shows are hard to make, and often take a long time to hit a groove, since the premise is often very difficult to explain simply.

REXJAYNE

Monday, October 31, 2005 4:52 AM

I agree with nearly everyone here.. I have to say I really did fall in love with Farscape, but it took some time. I saw it first when I was living in Wales and missing Canada so much, and it reminded me of home for some reason, but back at home I wasn't that into it. Then my boyfriend starting renting the whole series and we just got totally addicted. I love Crichton and Aeryn. They definitely had their silly episodes and bizarre plot lines, but wow was it ever creative, and the characters were real.

I don't think you can really compare it with something like Babylon 5 whose only redeeming quality was that the plot was actually planned from episode one and they followed it to the end.

I can't believe I actually watched every single episode of Babylon 5. The acting was just so... awkward. Andromeda is completely unappealing to me for some reason, i can't watch it at all.

I grew up on ST:TNG and other than DS9, nothing has really interested me until Firefly, which I really appreciate since ST: Enterprise basically destroyed my faith in sci-fi for a while.

So anyway after all that rambling, my point was, give Farscape a chance. It has great qualities, though it does take a while to get comfortable with the characters.

---------
Wash: Don't you hate doctors?
Simon: Hey!
Wash: Present company excluded, of course
Jayne: Let's not be excludin' people, that'd be rude.

CALHOUN

Monday, October 31, 2005 5:13 AM

As a lot of others have said I didnt like Farscape and never really gave it a chance. There was a particularly dry spell for sci fi a while back so when I saw full DVD seasons of Farscape on special I bought them and really got into it! I love Farscape. Its got nothing on Firefly but nothing really does.

I gave Andromeda way too many chances.... It provides a sense of order to my universe that most people dislike Andromeda.

DREAMTROVE

Monday, October 31, 2005 5:30 AM

It's a good policy to give sci-fi more of a chance than you would a show about lawyers.

I grew up on star trek and D&D and both in retrospect suck. The thing that I enjoyed then that I still enjoy is Dr. Who, which has no scientific merit whatsoever and stories are often nonsensical, but that just shows that there are other points of merit.

I think only point of merit for b5 is really selling the show short. I don't think that's it's up to firefly or farscape, it's more of a star trek hybrid, but the complex political situations and the breakthroughs in non-studio animation on home pcs (amigas, nine of them) was a real feat. Like most people don't really credit the puppet breakthroughs in farscape. The farscape puppets can act in real time with the characters on the real sets, that's a major breakthrough.

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