Farscape and Henson’s Lasting Legacy (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Farscape and Henson’s Lasting Legacy (2011)

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91 pointsindigodaddy47 comments

Far and away, one of my favorite shows. The characters, the writing, the sets and the puppets are all top notch. Of course there's campiness. Of course there are bad episodes and tropes, but the thing taken together is a well done work of art. I'm supremely impressed that they were able to pull together support for The Peacekeeper Wars to wrap it all up.

One of the things that I find most novel and appealing about Farscape is that the human might be the lead character, but The Humans are not the galaxy's bad-asses. Quite to the contrary. If not for the circumstances of Crichton's transport, he would have just been some (galactic) low tech monkey from a backwater planet.

I've always found the Hollywood trope of "plucky current era humans face off against pan-galactic force and save the day" to be abused and absurd. Farscape gave that a pass by making Crichton "The dumbest smart person in the room" who didn't want to dominate. He just wanted to be left alone.

Additionally, Farscape did venture a bit into the idea that if aliens exists, they likely don't look like us. There were a lot of bipeds walking around with heads on top, but there were also a good number of extremely different types.

B5 is my favorite sci-fi series of all time but Farscape is up there.

My favorite thing about Farscape is that the writers would just throw so much shit at the wall to see what would stick. So many episodes felt like the writers asking the question "what if X was true", and then spend an episode (or an entire arc) exploring it. They'd let the question lead THEM rather than the other way around"

> I could go on for more pages than anyone would care to count about Farscape. It is, without any doubt, one of the greatest science fiction television series’ ever created. Please quote me on that.

A’men! It holds up incredibly well to modern scifi because there’s very little CGI and it doesn’t look as badly dated as say, Babylon 5. It’s sad that there’s no one who really does animatronics like Henson anymore and if the show were to be remade today (god forbid), all the characters would probably be Andy Serkis in a mocap suit.

My favorite puppet to this day is the Seer Creesus [1] which would have given me nightmares if I had watched the show as a kid.

[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/farscape/images/5/55/Cresu...

My wife and I rewatched it recently. She is not particularly a sci-fi geek but she really liked it - until season 3.

Some of those Season 1 episodes are some of the best TV I have seen.

When my ex told me she "didn't like sci-fi" but couldn't name anything in particular she didn't like, I showed her Farscape, and she watched it end to end almost every year after that. In fact, I just checked the media server logs, and she logged into watch an episode just this week.

And btw it’s still on sale on iTunes for 19.99 for the complete series. Just picked it up before I posted this :)

*The license... you aren't buying the series, just the license to stream it from iTunes.

The Blu-ray box set is $200.

The price difference between revocable streaming licenses and physical media is worth it, as physical media is not revocable.

(You might find it cheaper on eBay)

If that iTunes license goes away that's a morally green signal to get a non-revocable license from The Pirate Bay.

Yep yep I know how it works. But fwiw I’ve never had anything I’ve purchased on Vudu or iTunes not be accessible/playable subsequently. Sure it may get removed and not searchable anymore, but still playable and present in your library. And I have over 700 movies (peanuts by comparison to many though).

And also, re: $200 vs $20, $200 for the physical is most definitely NOT worth it to me.

For anyone looking for a nostalgic, but honest, revisit, check out "Farscape(1999) Retrospective/Review" on YouTube[1]. It is comprehensive and I think picks out the strengths and weaknesses of the show very honestly as a fan. My personal belief is that the show peaked in Season 2 (the heist arc is pretty epic) and then started going downhill after Crichton split, and the introduction of some legitimately annoying crew, but they regained some glory with the Peacekeeper Wars mini-series/movie. The chemistry between the two leads (Ben Browder and Claudia Black) was always a particular strength of the show. Highly recommended but, like with so many series (The Walking Dead, GOT, etc) if you skip the last season(s) you'll be fine.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0POJFs5PUM

I was so amped up when I realized Crichton wasn't going to get merged back together by the end of the episode. They took an old Star Trek trope and _didn't_ resolve it neatly by the end of the episode! They're just dealing with 2 now??

Far and away my favorite Sci-Fi TV show. I agree with another poster here, it's a character study of a normal-ish human losing his mind due to a continuous assault of The New. Poor guy can never catch a break.

Funny, I loved the that the split didn't resolve and let the show go in an interesting direction that most shows chicken out on. I thought season 1 was actually a little rocky and 2-3 were the peak myself.

Season 4 was a complete disaster unfortunately. While Scorpius is fantastic, he doesn't belong on the ship and that wasn't the only nonsensical thing happening by a long shot. I was very happy we got the peace keeper wars to give a solid end to the series, even if it wasn't perfect.

>While Scorpius is fantastic, he doesn't belong on the ship ...

I agree, and so did the maker of the YouTube video I linked to. Interestingly, Wayne Pilgrim, the actor who plays Scorpius, mentions in an interview how difficult it was for him to play the character, since his motivation became, how shall I say, conflicted. It's an interesting case of the story-tellers putting an actor in a very tough spot.

Yeah, I loved the Split -- most SF shows will make one of the two disposable and then kill them off at the first opportunity, usually within the same episode. Star Trek, I'm looking at you.

The only Star Trek splitting story-line that I recall [1] was not actually resolved! Lt. Riker just sort of disappeared into the background at the end of the episode, with Cdr. Riker and the writers never mentioning him again.

EDIT: apparently Lt. Riker showed up in a DS9 episode[2]!

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(Star_Trek:_The...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiant_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space...

Sort of both resolved and not resolved since I can't remember him coming back. It did give Frakes an opportunity to play a different character later on in DS9.

I liked that episode and would have enjoyed Thomas Riker showing up again from time to time. Although it was another one of those "why can't they just restore dead crew from the transporter beam?" episodes. Even worse than the Scotty one since doubling Riker means that Riker's matter didn't really matter much.

There was also Sim, in Enterprise, a clone of Trip who was then harvested for spare parts.

Stargate: SG-1 had robot doubles who were killed off.

Thomas Riker was mentioned again in the animated show Star Trek Below Decks, when one of the characters gets doubled by a transporter accident.

Canonical example? The Enemy Within https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Within_(Star_Trek:_T...

The Crichton Split of course was about coming up short in the budget department. So the storytelling was limited to interactions among 4 characters rather than 7. Those arcs were split every other episode. I think they did a stellar job despite those constraints but no doubt the production took a hit.

But the most telling thing IMO about Farscape was the dedication of the fans that actually pushed and got their conclusion in the Peacekeeper Wars. Contrast that with BSG where we basically got no resolution.

>Those arcs were split every other episode. I think they did a stellar job despite those constraints but no doubt the production took a hit.

As a casual viewer, I didn't catch every episode in order, and so it was very confusing for me. No doubt it would have been a lot better if I had done. Not being able to follow the story-lines, I definitely started checking out at that point. Another commented mentioned that the whole series is being sold on iTunes for $20, perhaps it's worth a purchase and rewatch for this reason alone.

As seems to be the case for another commenter, the double Crichton’s was one of my favorite parts. What it introduced to the storytelling and narrative and characterization was a unique depth and capacity for analysis and consequence that I’m surprised hasn’t been emulated since.

>after Crichton split

I had missed a few episodes that season, and picked back up after the two Chrichtons parted ways, but didn't manage pick up on the fact that there were two of them.

I was so utterly confused and upset when the main character just died and they cut straight to the credits.

That was awesome, thank you

Decided to watch Farscape on a whim after watching Ben Browder and Claudia Black in Stargate. What a great show! It starts off on an awkward foot, like most sci-fi shows do. But it eventually comes around to a really amazing show with great performances both by human actors and by puppets. Scorpius is such a great villain for John Crichton. Pilot is one of my favorite characters ever, and sometimes he feels more human than the humans do (yes, I know only John is technically human but I mean the human actors that play some of the aliens).

Out of curiosity did you notice who the voice actor for Pilot was? When it was pointed out to me, I had a 'no way' type of reaction. It goes to show that some people really know how to give a performance that goes beyond who they are as a person and results in giving a spark of life to the character itself.

I didn't notice before being exposed to that information (I'm one of those "imdb in my hand at all times" kind of watchers). It's way more noticeable in the movie because I guess they lost the voice modification toolset they were using and had to try to make it up again from scratch.

but yeah he does a great job!

I actually gasped. Wow

As sometimes silly and campy as it was, Farscape was a speculative fiction masterpiece. Outside of hard sci-fi books I’ve never experienced more engaging world building. Even if the individual characters sometimes weren’t engaging, the backdrop was rich enough to make up for it.

Watching it a few days ago for the first time, I was taken aback myself by the beautiful and detailed environment/world. Not at all what I was expecting from a seemingly B-grade budget 1999 show.

>> a seemingly B-grade budget 1999 show.

Then don't watch the original Trek, or B5, for Stargate. Farscape was far from b-grade budget. That was as good budgets ever got for TV in the 90s. Definitely in the A-grade budget of the time. For b-grade, look to Space:AboveAndBeyond or even SeaQuest:DSV.

First season seaQuest wasn't B-grade either, unless you're overly influenced by the use of mid-nineties CGI. Just look at the interior sets and how much water they use! Add to that the sheer amount of CGI they used (anything happening outside the ship) and there's no way that show was cheap. Of course, once they lost their major producers in season two and three there was a definite drop in quality, but season 1 was definitely up there.

CGI looks expensive because of the nature of how it is billed: one big cost to a CGI studio. But in television a much greater expensive is on-location shoots. A few thousand or tens of thousands for a CGI sequence is nothing compared to keeping a hundred people fed and working at a remote location.

It looks like the article was migrated at some point in a way that broke the images.

I found this archived version with working images: https://web.archive.org/web/20160330064639/http://www.tor.co...

As a teenager, I really enjoyed watching Farscape. As an adult, I definitely feel a lot of the flaws that the show has. But, they didn't compromise on wardrobe or set design or on the characterization for the main characters. Pretty much everyone had some sort of arc going on more or less all the time. And besides all that, it was legit scifi.

But the thing that stands head and shoulders above the rest was Wayne Pygram's Scorpius. You simply do not get villains of that caliber every day.

Interestingly enough, Pygram also plays Tarkin in a blink and you miss it scene in Revenge of the Sith. Which makes me think that we missed out on something very special with Rogue One. Instead of CGI Tarkin, I really wish they could have had Pygram sprinkle some Scorpius magic into a Tarkin role.

The show definitely has some campiness to it and some episodes are a little cringe, but overall it's wonderful and a breath of fresh air. I didn't watch it until I was a young adult and enjoyed it. The Farscape corner of the galaxy is so bizarre it does feel actually alien in a sense.

Scorpius is a terrifying villain. He's brilliant, ruthless, and seemingly always one step ahead.

If anyone hasn't seen it, I'd recommend giving it a go if you like scifi and anything Henson.

If you haven't watched it as an adult, in the era of binge watching, you should give it a shot. There's more there than you think.

What I get from it most clearly is the slow unravelling of one man's mind under the assault of the new. If you focus on Ben Browder you get something that's almost a character study.

Farscape was a great show with bold choices. I really miss it and wish it had more recognition.

I once made a comprehensive list of all the television I have ever watched, which included the Star Treks and various other science fiction shows, and Farscape was at the top. Highlights include the chemistry between Browder and Black, Scorpius, the above average writing, and the originality and catchiness of the themes. It was hard to say whether it was better than DS9 at the time but if I had to choose one to rewatch, it would be Farscape for sure.

I think my favorite part of DS9 was how many non-human / non-federation cultures they had walking around in the spotlight. There's a great little scene where Quark gives Garak some root beer and they commiserate over how weird humans are.

Anyway, Fascape is basically ONLY that kind of thing. Only the aliens are significantly more alien. Even the sebaceans and crichton keep clashing because they both expect the other to act more like themselves.

Although the linked article is missing its images (at least for me), the archived version from tor.com has them: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305081415/https://www.tor.c...

Oh nice, that’s way better with the pics and the formatting is also nicer. Maybe @dang can update the URL in the OP.

I can't see Farscape discussed without reminiscing on the episode of Community where Abed "really likes talking about Farscape". [0]

It still makes me laugh after all these years.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT1QPFr6qPI

I remember being blown away by this show. It’s a rare gem with one of the best executed love stories between Crichton and Aeryn that heightened the stakes as the series progressed. I hope other writer/producer types are paying attention and taking notes.

There was a touching and hilarious nod to Farscape in SG-1 after Browder and Black both joined the cast (3 minutes 20secs in)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=whfMMfR4KKw

Funny thing about Farscape, it was my favorite TV show as a child. Fond memories. The only thing that doesn't hold up is Rygel, maybe back then it was ok, but it's pretty horrific to see it now in all of it's Animatronic glory.

The living ship and the blue woman are so powerful and so different. There from the first episode.

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