Farscape - 25 Years On.

Not a wargaming post, but so what?

25 years ago the SF series Farscape started its run. Originally on a satellite channel it came to the BBC2  on the 29th November 1999. I have to say that I was hooked from day one. I loved it (the DVD collection is a bit of a giveaway). We all loved it. It was one of the reasons my eldest daughter met her husband. 

We have been re-watching them this year, usually three episodes back to back on a Friday evening (we know how to have a good time). There are a few dud episodes in there, but it is still, at its heart, one of the best SF shows ever made. To those of us who loved the programme, its inability to get a real mass audience in the way that Star Trek or the execrable Stargate SG-1 did is a mystery. In terms of the decision to cancel it, well that ranks right up there with the Original Star Trek and Firefly. However I'm aware that there are people who just didn't get it at all.

In its premise it is a ship-based drama, focussing on what the crew get up to. So far, so much Lost in Space/Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica et al. The crew are a bunch of misfits, with a central character as an American astronaut as a fish out of water. The difference is that they really are a proper bunch of misfits. Escaped criminals, or perhaps more properly political prisoners, are the core with a number of others added for different reasons - the aforementioned accidental tourist American, a soldier/pilot from a fascist military dictatorship and people picked up along the way. It has been cited as the inspiration for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and it really has that sort of feel to it. It's smart and shambolic in equal measures, tense and funny. 

What turned a number of people of it was the use, in the infancy of CGI, instead of new technology to create aliens, the utilisation of animatronics and puppetry. One of the central characters was a toad like deposed monarch, the ship  - a living biomechanoid ship - was controlled by a giant multi-limbed, multi-tasking creature called "Pilot".  In the same year that George Lucas brought us the fully CGI'd abomination that was Jar-Jar Binks, these were aliens with tactility and real heft, from the people who produced the original Yoda (The Jim Henson Company) and, of course the Muppets. Either that, or the fact it was made in Australia, and most of the characters didn't sound American.

What was also great about it was that the central character didn't have all the answers. Often he didn't have any answers. Plans inevitably went awry, mistakes were made, misses were near. He was utterly bemused most of the time - as he should have been, in a strange new world, surrounded by new life and new civilisations all superior to what he'd had at home. 

The dialogue was always well crafted and witty. People got cross with one another and made mistakes. Over and over again. The space ship wouldn't always do what the crew wanted. The Pilot had to be negotiated with if things got dangerous. 

All great SF is about the mirror that it holds up to us. The small number of episodes set on Earth are some of the best "First Contact" SF ever made. The "documentary" episode made after they leave and return to deep space, featuring hand held candid video footage ("Constellation of Doubt") is a brilliant piece of television. The now defunct BBC Cult website still has the viewer reviews selected from those sent in, including one of mine. The website now is no longer updated, and many of the links are dead, a piece of cultural vandalism brought about by vested interests who didn't like the Beeb supporting its own programmes.

I submitted quite a few reviews for the final season, and end up being the top reviewer, for which I won one of the DVD box sets you see in the picture at the top of the page.

For those of you who don't know the story of the show, it was cancelled in 2002 at the end of season 4, on a cliff hanger. A ferocious fan campaign eventually convinced someone to cough up the money to make a three hour movie to round everything off, which was released in 2004, called "The Peacekeeper Wars". That's pretty damn good too, with spectacular space battles and shoot outs to round out all the normal brilliant stuff associated with the show.

Ben Browder, the show lead, eventually ended up on Stargate-SG1, where he was reunited for a few episodes with Claudia Black, who played the aforementioned fascist pilot (I won't demean the character by describing it as the "love interest"). Those Stargate-SG1 episodes are amongst the best I remember watching. They canned that shortly afterwards too.

So, never watched it? Give it a go. It's a 50:50 coin toss as to whether you'll like it or not. But if you do, you'll be hooked for ever.