Farscape

I didn't like the series much, but I adore The Peacekeeper Wars. Crowder and Black are just awesome in that.

I love that Farscape would regularly do three-parters. Other shows just don't do those, unless they're on the off chance.

edited 17th Dec '13 11:55:14 AM by Nicknacks

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Fuck no, The Peacekeeper Wars really doesn't work for me. It's still pretty good, but not nearly as good as the last few seasons of the regular series. Gigi Edgley lost the Chiana voice, the Eidolon race undermines the shows humanist message, the character of Erin falls for the old trap of making all of her potential happiness contingent on her offspring (it's true often enough, but certainly not universal, that people want to be parents. Erin would be a good character to have break out of this mold. Women who are unhappy about being pregnant are sorely under-represented in media).

There's other issues, but it's not my intention to persuade you to enjoy something less than you already do. So I guess I don't really have a point here.

It's spelled Aeryn.

/pedant

I didn't really like Peacekeeper Wars very much either. It does an alright job wrapping up the series, but it is a bit...I don't know, rushed or something. And the altered character designs - Jothee, Sikozu, Ahkna - really irk me.

I like Seasons 1-3 the most. Season 4 gets a little too weird and a little too dark for my taste.

Fear is a superpower.

Sorry about misspelling Aeryns name. I had forgotten. For me it's seasons 2-4. In season 1, Crichton just isn't curious enough for my tastes. He's a scientist, he should have at least a basic understanding of evolutionary biology. An anthropomorphic plant should peak his interest quite a bit more than it actually does. Scientists tend to be inquisitive and thorough in their thought processes. The way Crichton is presented at the start of the series, he would've made a very poor scientist. I also think Crais isn't a very interesting villain; revenge isn't a very interesting motivation, especially if the audience has no emotional connection to the person being avenged. Crais worked much better as a tentative ally.

I can see why people would dislike the fourth season. The way Chrichtons mental world is visualized is weird as all hell, but it works; his Conversational Troping shows that pop culture is an inherent part of the way he thinks, so visualizing his mind in the visual idiom of various genres of pop culture makes quite a bit of sense. I enjoy me some strong moral ambiguity, but I can understand why people wouldn't.

Crichton is not a scientist, he's a pilot. And he works for IASA, not NASA, so realism can kiss his white ass.

edited 17th Dec '13 7:36:23 PM by johnnyfog

I'm a skeptical squirrel

It's iffy on the specifics of Crichton's job on Earth was...

Even if we take into account the "realism" of IASA it'd still be far-fetched that "pilot" is Crichton's primary role in the organization... He was a pilot, for sure, but a pilot wouldn't develop, head, and test their own project... Not unless they were individually funding it. And really, John Crichton is no Howard Hughes...

edited 17th Dec '13 8:04:06 PM by Swish

Well, he has gone a bit nuts (read: totally nuts) when we see him in Crichton Kicks.

Oddly enough, while Season 4 is my least favorite season overall, Crichton Kicks is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series.

Fear is a superpower.

Is the title for that episode a reference to some film or movie? It feels like it is (though I remember reading somewhere that every episode is based on one film or another).

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I think it's referring to the scenes between imaginary!pregnant!Aeryn and Crichton on the beach. It's not John Crichton kicking, it's the baby. It could also be a reference to a movie, but I don't know. But I do remember reading somewhere that they weren't originally going to title the episodes, but at the last minute TPTB asked for episode titles, so they used working titles for the episodes, which is why they're so unusual.

Fear is a superpower.

I think that the show picked up about halfway through season one and remained strong throughout. I liked season 4 though the writers seemed to be going to ridiculous lengths to delay John and Aeryn from hooking up. Grayza is probably the weakest Big Bad on the series, but I do appreciate that they played her rape of Crichton for horror and not comedy. Scorpius joining the crew was a nice twist, and I really like that he didn't fall victim to Badass Decay, but it seems that the writers couldn't figure out what to do with him half the time so he spends most of the season in the brig. Still, the rest was as awesome as ever.

I like Peacekeeper Wars, but it suffers badly from being forced to cram a season's worth of story into three hours. Chianna's blindness gets resolved offscreen despite season 4 building it up to being a major plotline, Jool's death has no real emotional weight to it, and Sikozu's betrayal doesn't have the impact it should. I also found the last scene with Crichton and Aeryn's son to be really, really cheesey. Still, overall its fairly good, but I would much rather have gotten a season 5.

edited 18th Dec '13 7:14:05 PM by lrrose

Really? I think Grayza's fantastic. She's not meant to be a big time villain in and of herself, though she is dangerous. Much of her danger is rendered through being a capable enough person to upend the status quo, but not being capable enough to rectify the situation. She was meant to be the solution, but she became part of the problem.

Given that, I think she basically becomes a Power Rangers villain on one occasion, but it's just the one time.

It pisses me off, thinking about just how many balls this show left hanging in the air at the end of its run though. Furlowe, the Nebari, Granny. A grand total of three, but they were an interesting three.

Edit: Oh, and spider-bitch, but Claudia Karvan would have been a difficult actress to pin down.

edited 18th Dec '13 7:49:15 PM by Nicknacks

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Farscape liked to change the mood (and the myth arc) year by year, which is a strength. On the other hand, it did tend to keep old characters and stories as ballast. It's a big universe; better to just leave em and move on.

The Peacekeepers were becoming old hat by season three, so I can't imagine how they flogged those guys for another year. And Power Rangers is very apt; I skipped ahead to "Terra Firma" and "Bad Timing" - because I couldn't contain myself - and Grayza is literally siccing rubber monsters on the Crichtons at Christmas. She's just padding out time, that's what her character does.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

Yeah, Terra Firma's the one I was thinking of. She's decent in the later Bringing Home The Beacon arc, though, but only because she's particularly desperate and overcompensating.

I think Rebecca Riggs does a great job with making the role more than the Servalan clone it was introduced as being. (Blakes Seven lent a great deal of its DNA to Farscape.)

edited 19th Dec '13 2:53:47 AM by Nicknacks

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Just started watching. I hear it gets better, but it also turns out I'm exactly in the mood for corny sci fi right now so everything is working out great.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

It soon stops being corny sci-fi and starts going CRAZY, like clinically insane.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

But I want corniness forever :(

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Claudia Black changed everything. Judging by the tone of season one, the aspirations of the showrunners weren't very high. The casting sheets aksed for a waifish, sympathetic love interest for the hero, preferably blonde. They got a pokey soap actress with a repertoire theatre background whose only film roles were getting massacred in cheesy b-horror. They did not have a clue what they had in their hands.

Anyway, once she demonstrated her crazy range, the whole show shifted. I consider her the central character: she had the longest arc, the narrative hinged on her, and she was probably the best actor of the bunch. Not that everyone else sucked, but she's in a league of her own.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

Totes agree on that. In fact, her performance in what I saw on telly of the Peacekeeper Wars convinced me to buy the dvd. I am pretty sure I have that somewhere in my collection. Claudia Black is a fantastic actor.

Claudia Black is amazing, but in "The Peacekeepers' War" she gets reduced to a wannabe mom. It's such a shame.

Then I suggest you turn the show off before "Nerve" and "The Hidden Memory"; that's the Clip Show episodes, where Crichton's luck finally runs out and he gets caught by the Peacekeepers. In their own base. Where they house a very potent memory extraction torture device. And it's run by Scorpius, who is an expert in this sort of thing, and has more than a passing interest in wormholes. Which is how John found himself in this mess. And then Crais shows up. Then it gets worse.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Noooooooooooooooo

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

And then in season 2 you get bizarre episodes like "Won't Get Fooled Again". You still get the occasional bizarre episode mixed in, but it's more that there's somewhere for the story to go.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Speaking just for myself, when you took away the weird stuff and the character studies, Farscape's myth arc is pretty weak. The more time we spend with the Peacekeepers, the less sense they make.

Crichton doesn't need an origin — he's basically Buck rogers — but Aeryn's motives didn't scan and needed a lot of retconning, so much so that I wish she had just been imprisoned on Moya from the start. (Her behavior with Crais is retroactively explained in "The Way We Weren't; but the tolerance of a half-breed like Scorpius makes zero sense if Crais was ready to flush Aeryn for far less.)

I'm a skeptical squirrel

I can see them barely tolerating Scorpius given how useful he was to them, but I don't see that working for Grayza, who was probably not a pure blood Peacekeeper herself.

edited 27th Dec '13 9:19:33 PM by Nicknacks

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