Farscape Season 1 Episode 5

[Candi Ruman]

Farscapeis a science fiction television show. Four regular seasons were produced, from 1999 to 2003. Each season consists of 22 episodes. Each episode is intended to air in a one-hour television timeslot (with commercials), and runs for 44 to 50 minutes. The regular seasons were followed by Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars in 2004, a 2 part miniseries with an air time of 3 hours. Several of the early episodes of Season One were aired out of the intended order. As the official Farscape website[1] lists them in the production order as opposed to airing order, the list below reflects that.

When D'Argo's new ship malfunctions, D'Argo blames Crichton and in a fit of hyper-rage knocks him into a coma. While the others attempt to deactivate the mysterious ship's self-destruct before it destroys Moya, Crichton finds himself in a literally animated world.

Following the series' unexpected cancellation in September 2002, a miniseries was produced to wrap up the season four cliffhanger and tie up some elements of the series in general. The Peacekeeper Wars was broadcast on 17 and 18 October 2004.

Americans love hair, I think more so than any other country so if you can have your hair out I think that's a big plus. It seems to go with the genre as well, to have the wind blowing and the sparks flying and the hair going. We would try and give everyone a mix of everything, so that there was a look that everyone would like, audience, producers, network, everyone.

The practical issue of how my hair would be for each episode began to override all other issues because we were starting to overlap a lot of our shooting schedules. It became impossible for them to allow time to go from one style to another. It flattened out for a lot of season two and season three, where I had the very slicked tight pony. The battle pony was the first one we designed and we were very proud of that. It was that very weird rockabilly front with the loose pony at the end. The slicked look was originally what I'd wanted for the character. I'd wanted her to be quite severe, and I think everyone was a bit nervous about having a leading lady on television with such a harsh look, but it just to me epitomised the true character of Aeryn.

In fourth season David Kemper had said he'd wanted Aeryn to look like she'd really been through hell. I wanted a quite punkish 'Run Lola Run' style hair-cut that looked like she gone through some changes. We wanted to work along those lines, but it was a bit hard to convince people to go punk. We ended up creating a three-quarter wig which provided us with the opportunity to not bring me in unnecessarily early to straighten my hair, which is very curly and frizzy. it became a very girlie issue of time and money! If we'd done to my hair every day the way the wig could do for me, it would have fallen out after about 4 weeks of doing it. I was getting closer and closer to the special effects, [but] it was somebody else's hair in the hair piece rather than mine so it was safer. It told the story of Aeryn having been away for a long time. I never expected it to be as long as it was and we had to go through a lot of changes trying to make it work and integrate it, but I quite liked it.

It was the most Gilroy that Aeryn looked, really, in season four. [I had] different make-up artists. There was a high burn out rate, because people worked such long hours. We developed these very strong relationships with the make-up artists, and fantastic shorthand so we'd never have to say anything - we knew exactly what we needed to do every day on set together. I would say to them, 'technically there's not much more you can learn doing my make-up, go off do other shows. Take other jobs, please, otherwise you'll burn out.' So I would always encourage them to go off and do it, even though I knew it would disadvantage me because I'd be losing a great make-up artist.

Every year we'd still get another person in who was fantastic, but the looks would always change because it was someone else's input. I'm of the opinion that I shouldn't dictate how I should look, even though there is a certain continuity. I always liked people to establish the look themselves and try something with my face as a canvas. It gives them an opportunity to be creative, because Farscape essentially was a very creative environment - we wanted everyone to collaborate and feel that they were involved.

Farscape's first true arc came in the form of "Harvey," a neural clone of Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) the villain had secretly planted inside protagonist John Crichton's (Ben Browder) head. John, your everyman Earth-based astronaut, christens the series by getting dragged into a wormhole and tossed across the galaxy. Trapped on a living ship and surrounded by wacky alien criminals, all John wants to do is go home. By the time he and Scorpius cross paths in Season 1, Episode 19 ("Nerve"), an alien species has already given John the secret to wormhole travel. They just buried it deep within his subconscious, because such game-changing knowledge demands character development before it's taken for a test drive. Scorpius, seeking to master wormhole technology, ruthlessly tortures John for answers. Knowing John will temporarily escape his clutches, Scorpius injects John with a neural chip designed to unobtrusively find and extract the wormhole information. Unfortunately for John, having a clone of Scorpius embedded in his head means the clone eventually assumes control, with tragic consequences.

Following some problem-solving, Kemper conceived the arc that defined Season 2. The neural chip's conceit allowed "our retroactive stuff," as Kemper put it, to be cloaked inside a believable reason why John wouldn't remember having a clone rattling around his brain matter. Kemper retconned "Nerve" to include Scorpius inserting the chip, and "Crackers" became the clone's first appearance after the episode was already filmed. Scorpius chasing our heroes could have been a traditional on-the-run from the bad guy tale. Instead, a one-off joke where Scorpius swapped his leather S&M duds for a Hawaiian shirt and margarita bottles kickstarted a season-long descent into hell that transformed Farscape Season 2 into a psychological horror series chilling enough to make David Lynch envious.

One that did end well is my candidate for the best ever. Over the recent holidays I revisited the first season of Farscape on Blu-ray. It's also available for streaming on Amazon Prime. A space opera like no other in my experience, Farscape was a joint Australian/American production from The Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment. The series was produced in the fledgling days of high definition. Seasons 1-3 were therefore shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio common to shows of that era; only season 4 is 16:9 (though the Amazon Prime versions of the first three seasons are...yuck...panned and scanned to 16:9!!). And while the series was filmed, which would have allowed it to be rescanned in high definition for a video release, the film elements were lost somewhere along the way (why does that happen so often!?). The Blu-ray releases were therefore upscaled from standard definition using the videotapes made for broadcast. Fortunately, those tapes utilized the PAL format common in many parts of the world, including Australia where the series was shot (Australian accents are heard throughout, but mostly from one-episode or minor characters). PAL's standard definition offers roughly 100 more lines of vertical resolution than our NTSC's standard of 480. Thanks to that, the image quality in the upconverted Blu-ray discs is good apart from (sometimes significant) black crush in the darkest scenes in some episodes, though brighter scenes are fine. The Blu-rays' DTS-HD Master Audio sound is often surprisingly good for television, though not up to the best 2021 film standards.Three separate boxed sets of the four seasons have been released, the latest in 2019. I have only the first two. They appear quite similar both in content and audio-video quality, though I marginally prefer the second release, the 15th Anniversary Edition. But neither of the first two sets include the TV movie produced to wrap-up the story after the series was cancelled (though the 2019 release reportedly does). That movie, The Peacekeeper Wars in full widescreen (though still not in HD), was produced after the fourth season's cliffhanger ending and comprised (in highly condensed form) what was intended to be, pre-cancellation, the series' fifth and final full season. Fans were outraged at that cancellation, which ended the saga on an unresolved downer, and their efforts helped in the decision to produce the film and avoid the fate of so many TV series that either end badly or merely peter out. Thanks to the movie, clocking in at three hours, Farscape had a well-deserved and richly satisfying resolution. Unfortunately, The Peacekeeper Wars was not available on Amazon Prime when I looked. I do have it on DVD, but not the available Blu-ray. The DVD is adequate, but significantly softer than the Blu-rays of the series itself, plus some of that black crush as well. If on-line viewer comments are correct, however, the Blu-ray of the movie is no better than the DVD and possibly worse. But it's still infinitely better than ending the story without it.The meat on the bones here is the series itself, and (for me at least) definitely worth fighting through some of the uneven quality of the video releases. It's by turns bizarre and fascinating. An earth astronaut, John Crichton, is sucked into a wormhole on a test flight and ends up near a huge, alien-like ship under attack. He's sucked into the ship, called Moya, which turns out to be a part mechanical, part live organism—an original concept for filmed science fiction. There he finds several escaped prisoners of various alien races, plus a female from the race, called the Peacekeepers with more than a little irony, that was attacking Moya. That race is humanoid (visibly indistinguishable from Crichton). As Crichton remarks in one of his many choice comments throughout the series, "Boy, did Spielberg ever get it wrong!"One of the cleverest concepts in that first episode answers the proverbial sci-fi conundrum: how can all these mixed alien races talk to each other so easily? The answer here: translator microbes that enable instant communication between those speaking other languages. Farscape, like most TV series, can be uneven, but its efforts are ambitious. Season One is largely about the fugitives' efforts to evade the Peacekeepers. More so than in later seasons it falls into the "monster of the week" trap. But it's never uninteresting, and things get cooking later in the season as the series' prime villain enters the picture and the episodes become more interdependent. From there on it's a wild ride until the end, and needs to be watched in order. The production design is extremely high for a series originally broadcast on the Sci-Fi (now SyFy — gag) channel. The series' real strength, however, is in its characters and how, though often at loggerheads, they band together into a close family. The scripts are uniformly well written and the acting superb. While it's primarily an ensemble show, the characters of John Crichton (Ben Browder—the only American actor present in every episode) and the female Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun (Australian actress Claudia Black) who reluctantly joins the group. Browder and Black later joined the cast of Farscape SG-1 (as different characters) in that show's final seasons.Oh yes, not to forget, the show also features two muppets (thus the Jim Hudson connection). That appears to be a sticking point with some potential viewers, but it's their loss. They're two of the shows more interesting characters: Rigel XVI (by his constant reminder, the deposed Dominar of the Hynerian Empire) and Moya's pilot, cleverly named...um...Pilot. They're both superbly voiced, and if you can't see them as real as any of the other characters in the show after an episode or two you need an immediate imagination transplant (you likely don't like animation either). But this doesn't mean that the show is for kids. In fact, it can occasionally be sexy (but not overtly so) and some parents might find it inappropriate for pre-teens. Ditto on the cursing, limited mostly to variations on the real thing. Frell (or frelling) is a stand-in for—I think you can guess. This idea was later ripped-off by Battlestar Galactica as frak or fraking. Log in or register to post comments COMMENTS There was no steal of the work Frack / Frak Submitted by miklos on January 12, 2021 - 1:31pm If you did your research you would have come across the use of the word Frack in the 1978 version of BSG. The word was shortened in the later incarnation but was original to that series. So your end of piece should be revised to show that the language of 1978 influenced more modern shows and not whip up a false narrative of word/ idiom theft.

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