Hacker News Reader

Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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...

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com