YMMV / Farscape

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Scorpius as a Hero Antagonist by way of Well-Intentioned Extremist, which stems from the fact his purpose behind his actions is sound and even justifiable — the Scarrans are not nice people.
  • Crichton's constant pop culture references, which he should know full well no one else is going to understand. Common theories are that it's a way to keep reminding himself of home, or deriving some satisfaction out of making his shipmates just as confused as they often make him.
• Ass Pull: In season 3, during a bog-standard Monster of the Week episode, Chiana is possessed by an "energy rider". Though it's driven out of her, The Tag reveals she now permanently has psychic powers, despite "having powers" never being a thing with her character beforehand. By an amazing coincidence, this happens right after her relationship drama with D'Argo and Jothee is wrapped up; it's almost like the writing staff were straining themselves to come up with something for Chiana to do.
• Awesome Music: Both of the theme tunes. Also, The Last Stand — the music that plays during the destruction of the Command Carrier at the end of season 3. Since the words are the "Dies Irae", it also counts as Ominous Latin Chanting.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • In an effort to push the envelope as far as creativity goes, they would occasionally get a bit far afield. "Scratch n' Sniff", "Revenging Angel", and "John Quixote" are the episodes that split people down the middle: you will either love them or hate them.
  • Browder wrote the screenplay for "John Quixote" and "Green Eyed Monster"; it might account for the Stark-centric storylines (he's a big Stark fan) and juvenile humor.
    Browder: [on commentary] Now, this is not to say that any of it works.
  • Evidently, the first cut of "Scratch n' Sniff" was really boring. So they brought Ben and Anthony back to shoot the framing device with Pilot, and messed with the editing to make the episode stranger. The ending was also changed to suggest Crichton/D'Argo made the whole story up.
• Broken Base: Expect a debate on whether the mini-series was a satisfying conclusion or not. Likewise, the plots and characterisations featured in the comics have very much divided the fan base.
• Complete Monster:
  • Seasons 1 & 2: Selto Durka is a captain of the ironically-named Peacekeepers who is well-known for being a master of torturing people and enjoying torture far more than is healthy. He had kept and tortured Rygel for years before the story begins, and years later his presence utterly terrifies Rygel beyond reason. Durka enjoys torturing nearly everyone he sees, and when he captures Aeryn, he leaves a comm channel open so the rest of her crew can hear him about to torture her and burn her face off. Even worse, he tried to forcibly abort the living and sapient spaceship Moya's child so she'd be capable of going faster to take him to safety.
  • "Bringing Home the Beacon" through "The Peacekeeper Wars": War Minister Ahkna is the single most ambitious and brutal Scarran in the entire empire. Responsible for countless Scarran conquests with subjugation or extermination, Ahkna is the chief voice pushing for war against the Peacekeepers with full intent to exterminate the Sebacean race. Sabotaging peace talks via murder, Ahkna makes clear her ambition to succeed or overthrow Emperor Staleek and spitefully tries to murder the unborn child of Aeryn Sun and John Crichton. Hunting them for the Wormhole technology in Crichton's head, Ahkna fully intends to torture the weapon our of John so she might unleash it and create an intergalactic genocide until her empire stands supreme.
  • "Eat Me": Kaarvok is a Mad Scientist with a handheld cloning machine. Willing to do anything to satiate his hunger, Kaarvok clones his victims before killing one in front of the other, keeps Rovhu's traumatized Pilot alive so his regenerating limbs can be harvested for meat, and forces members of Moya's crew to breed with his degenerate clone army just so he'd have something tastier than clone-brains to look forward to.
  • "Incubator": Tauza is a Scarran noble who oversees their breeding program, where the humanoid Sebacean women are kidnapped—any families or loved ones with them are killed—and forcibly raped by Scarran soldiers. Tauza subjected 90 Sebacean women to this, with none surviving. One woman had a child, later named Scorpius. Tauza sought to purge the young half-breed of all "Sebacean weakness" by torturing him physically and mentally. Tauza lied to Scorpius, claiming he had a Scarran mother who had been raped by a Sebacean, but she later revealed the truth when Scorpius sought to rebel, showing him a video of his mother's violation to hurt him. Cruel, arrogant, racist, and vicious, Tauza embodied the worst of Scarran culture, and under her hand for all his formative years, it's no wonder Scorpius developed a genocidal hatred of the Scarrans.
• Crazy Is Cool: The show runs on insanity. Especially Crichton's.
  • By the end of the series, everyone has had their moments, particularly Crichton. Whenever things don't go according to plan (which happens most of the time), or even in the rare cases where things do (... doesn't really happen a lot), Crichton, Aeryn, D'Argo, Chiana, Pilot, Moya... okay, let's just say nearly all of the main characters end up a large tally on The Plan list. By the middle of season 3, you have entire episodes that are just Crazy Is Cool. "Revenging Angel," anyone?
  • Although Crichton fits the bill more than the other characters, as he is on the razor's edge of sanity, if he hasn't already slipped over by the end of the first few episodes. Most of his Awesome moments come when a plan doesn't work out and he just wings it with a surplus of Confusion Fu. Actually called out directly in "I Do, I Think":
    Lt. Braca: (horrified at Crichton's Taking You with Me gambit to escape capture) You're insane!
    Crichton: (grinning) You're just figuring that out?
• Crosses the Line Twice: In Season 4's "We're So Screwed Part 1: Fetal Attraction", the Scarrans who are holding Aeryn attempt to transfer her baby to another host (Chiana), which is played with all the appropriate horror and angst. Come the first part of Peacekeeper Wars and it happens accidentally after the reconstruction of crystallized-and-shattered John and Aeryn results in their baby being transferred... to Rygel. Then it crosses back again when this results in Rygel being constantly threatened with torture and death by the Scarrans.
• Cult Classic: Farscape isn't underrated (it won awards when it originally aired), it's just that it's mostly forgotten. If Xena, Sliders, SeaQuest, and B5 are no longer relevant in pop culture, then there was zero chance that a show airing on Sci Fi would stick. It didn't help that the show itself veered between the two extremes pretty often.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Scorpius. Gets special points for looking like an elderly iguana in bondage gear and still getting lust-crazed fangirls.
  • Even more irony is that Wayne Pygram, who played Scorpius, admitted in an interview that there was a sexual element to the costume and that he took out a crew member during the show's run and they admitted to him that they "were only interested in the guy in the costume."
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • It's hard to find a fan of this show who wouldn't call Pilot one of their favorite characters. The combination of his sweet, hard-working personality, unique design, and having one of the best puppets on the entire show pretty much guarantees that the audience remembers him.
  • Despite only appearing in three episodes, Jenavian Charto is one of the most popular characters in the series, and actress Bianca Chiminello is in high demand at any gathering for the series. Likely the result of her being a perfect storm of drop-dead gorgeous, unspeakably badass, a skillful and cool secret agent, the first genuinely altruisitc Peacekeeper we meet, and appearing in three of the show's most triumphant episodes.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The Peacekeeper Wars ends with the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans signing a treaty to stop fighting, but it doesn't address the fact that both sides are tyrannical dictatorships who will presumably continue ruling their worlds with iron fists. So basically, everything is right back where it was in season 1.
• Fandom Rivalry: Frequently with fans of Battlestar Galactica (2003). Due to the timing of Farscape's cancellation and the announcement of Battlestar Galactica, many fans of Farscape blame the latter series for the show's cancellation thanks in no small part to the more tactless comments by Sci-Fi channel about the announcement of Battlestar being greenlit because the channel needed a "sexy, dark and edgy space-based science fiction drama"... right as they cancelled their existing "sexy, dark and edgy space-based science fiction drama."
  • Another one of the statements by Sci-Fi Channel at the time was that due to the fact they claimed they didn't have the money to support another season of Farscape, yet they appeared to have more than enough money to fund Battlestar without any issues.
• Fan Nickname: Gilina is sometimes also called "PK Tech Girl" by fans who can't remember (or don't know) her name, as she was the titular Peacekeeper Technician Girl in the episode... "PK Tech Girl."
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Maldis appears to be wearing Elizabethan clothing, complete with a ruff... only it's all rendered in leather.
  • Scorpius, too, with his gimp suit.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Crichton and Scorpius. "Insert the rod, John!" Crichton lampshades it a few times.
  Crichton: "Get a new girlfriend, Scorpy!"
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With the Mass Effect fandom. Mass Effect shows a lot of influence from Farscape, and even had Claudia Black voice two characters in the games.
  • Also with fellow Sci-Fi Channel series Stargate SG-1, where Claudia Black had a recurring role as Vala Mal Doran beginning in season 8. She and Ben Browder ended up both joining the regular cast in season 9, with Vala becoming a member of SG-1 the next year.
• Genius Bonus: Crichton referring to Sikozu as "Sputnik". While at face value it's a reference to her spiky hair, the episode introducing her is peppered with Crichton demonstrating his knowledge of other languages. Sputnik incidentally means "Companion" in Russian, which is quite an apt nickname, since at that point Crichton had yet to learn Sikozu's actual name.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The show began life as a fairly generic — if well-executed — Space Opera whose most notable selling point was the Jim Henson Workshop creature designs. But starting with the back half of season 1, it created its own unique tone and style, which mixed heavy emotion, dark alien elements, and characters visibly falling apart under the stress of Black-and-Gray Morality. While there were precedents for its distinct tone ("PK Tech Girl" and "DNA Mad Scientist"), it was the introduction of strongly serialized elements that really allowed the show to flourish, by giving the writers multiple episodes to ramp up the stakes and the Emotional Torque until the viewer feels like they've had a few rounds in the Aurora Chair themselves. "Nerve" and "The Hidden Memory" in particular truly built upon plot threads from multiple earlier episodes (chiefly "A Human Reaction") to kickstart the series' Myth Arc into full gear. They took the show to its darkest (and most emotionally arresting) place since the premiere by introducing main villain Scorpius and driving Crichton to the brink of madness. It's telling that after this Crichton started wearing black Peacekeeper leather rather than the beige IASA jacket he wore ever since the premiere. The dark tone of that two-parter continued through the following episodes and into season 2, as our heroes are hunted by the Peacekeepers while struggling to help Moya give birth to her child — who is promptly hijacked and stolen by fallen Peacekeeper Crais, the man who genetically engineered him to be a warship. Things got so grim that the episode "Re:Union" — originally the season two premiere, which postponed the resolution to the season one cliffhanger by a week — was pushed back seven slots, had a Framing Device tacked on, and retitled "Dream a Little Dream". Although our heroes survived the multi-episode, season-spanning story arc, they all carried their scars for the rest of the series.
  • After the extended story arc above, the first standalone episode that truly encapsulates the Farscape experience (aesthetically and tonally) is "Crackers Don't Matter", the point at which the beard was completely grown in. The second season got over the wonky aesthetics — makeup issues and over-lit sets — that plagued the first season, allowing for a darker and moodier atmosphere that carried through to the rest of the show. The writers really cut loose with the batshit-insane weirdness and dark sexuality that now defines the series, and the director went to town the weird wobbly steadicam that fluctuates between emulating a weekend bender and a nervous breakdown. And even moreso than the usual absurdity, it features a surreal apparition^note  which would later become fan-favorite character Harvey of the villainous Scorpius...decked out in a Hawaiian shirt...who recommends pizza with margaritas.
    John Crichton: "Nobody. Has margaritas. With. Pizza!"
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the Season 1 episode "Back and Back and Back to the Future" (one of the earliest examples of a dark episode), Crichton's forward-flashes in time depict Matala aggressively performing sex acts on him, and the scenes very much come across as though she's raping him. Flash forward to the Season 4 two-parter "What Was Lost", in which Crichton is raped by Grayza.
  • From the same episode, the "ultimate weapon" Matala was trying to steal (and which gave Crichton temporary precognition) was a piece of a black hole. One whole series later, and the wormhole weapon Crichton deploys takes the form of... a black hole.
  • In a meta sense, Sci-Fi Channel's cancellation of the series. On the official website, when the news of the cancellation was made, Sci-Fi posted up a FAQs on their Farscape show page answering "questions" about the show's cancellation. Jump forward to 2010's Caprica. After one season the show was cancelled. SyFy reused the exact same FAQs they posted on the Farscape page with very minimal changing of details (such as the name of the show that was being cancelled).
    • Even worse is SyFy's cancellation of various shows after Farscape, basically using the same methods (such as changing the show's time and day of airing to cause lower viewer numbers) in order to cancel shows they no longer wish to continue to fund. Other shows that were victims of this include the previously mentioned Caprica, Dark Matter (2015) and Defiance (another show created by Farscape series creator Rockne S. O'Bannon).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Family Ties," D'Argo takes charge and issues orders—leading to an annoyed Aeryn grumbling, "You are not the captain here!" In Season 4's "Natural Election," D'Argo would be elected captain of the crew and Aeryn voted for him.
  • The show being filmed in Australia meant that it wasn't too surprising that it eventually racked up appearances by actors from every Mad Max film. Then the tradition was continued by Mad Max: Fury Road casting Melissa Jaffer (along with a return to the series by Hugh Keays-Byrne).
  • "DNA Mad Scientist" has as its opening line "If you need to blink, do it now."
• Homegrown Hero: The main character is an astronaut from the US, blasted to a faraway region of space.
• Ho Yay: Lots of it.
  • The most shameless example is Scorpius and Braca. Noted by Crichton in season four. "Yeah, feel the love, Mr. Burns."
  • Spoofed in "Scratch n' Sniff" with D'Argo and John denying they're a couple, while D'Argo later calls John (sarcastically) "sweetheart". Earlier on, when John asks D'Argo to be his best man in "Look at the Princess", D'Argo misunderstand's what "best man" means... and suggests that if he weren't in a relationship with Chiana already he wouldn't be completely uninterested in the possibility. In the later episode, given how Crichton wakes up from their hangover in stockings, Crichton and D'argo have a minor freak-out out that they might have done something last night.
  • Chiana and Jool get very touchy-feely in numerous episodes. Of particular note: their girl-on-girl dance in "Scratch n' Sniff", and their rather... intimate... placement of hands when Jool says goodbye in "What Was Lost Part 2: Resurrection".
  • After Jool leaves, Chiana and Noranti spontaneously decide to go undercover as a lesbian couple in "Bringing Home the Beacon", and seem very enthusiastic about their roles. In the same episode, Chiana gets mildly tortured by a Dominatrix masseuse, but doesn't seem especially traumatised by it...
  • In Crais's last episode as John's Arch-Enemy, John plants a "Take That!" Kiss on him.
  • After Scorpius takes over as John's Arch-Enemy, there's a lot of this. Most notoriously in their fight around the cliffhanger of "Into the Lion's Den", which ends with Scorpius lying full length on top of John and looking as if he's about to kiss him. And in the final season, there's the infamous "Scarran blood vow" scene, where the actors outright say "screw subtext" (finger-sucking is involved).
• Iron Woobie: Crichton himself, who remains a Determinator after multiple instances of torture, being relentlessly chased around the galaxy, finding himself undergoing Sanity Slippage, having a neural copy of his worst enemy placed in his head that increases his mental issues and killing Aeryn when the duplicate takes over, and many other traumatic experiences.
• Jerkass Woobie: Xhalax Sun was forced to kill her own lover and surrender her daughter to the torturous Peacekeeper training regime; following her only chance to see said daughter again, she was promptly shoved back into another twenty straight years of assassination—which she hates—in a process that slowly and inexorably destroys any trace of pity or compassion in her.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Scorpius was once a nameless child born of a twisted breeding experiment by the Scarrans who schemed his way to freedom and murdered his abusive caretaker Tauza. After finding out about the horrific circumstances of his birth via the rape of his mother by a Scarran soldier, Scorpius dedicated himself to destroying the Scarrans in retribution. Becoming a top officer in the normally fiercely xenophobic Peacekeeper armada, Scorpius tries to hunt down the Wormhole technology in hero John Crichton's head, constantly manipulating others to his ends, using and betraying others in his way and destroying his enemies while the crew of Moya barely remains a step ahead of him, proving himself the single most brilliant and dangerous enemy John has ever faced who will stop at nothing in pursuit of his goals to destroy the Scarrans.
  • Rygel XVI was Dominar of the Hynerian Empire, ruler of over six hundred billion subjects, before he was deposed by his cousin and spent over a hundred cycles in Peacekeeper captivity. He masterminded the prison break aboard Moya, and never lets the others forget it. While he's frequently dismissed by the rest of the crew due to his diminutive stature, relentless greed and self-absorption, Rygel is intelligent, cunning, a competent negotiator and statesman, and can be surprisingly violent when the situation demands it. While he makes no secret of the fact that he's out for himself first, neither will he betray the crew for no reason — as he's smart enough to know they're helpful allies, and he has to be fairly certain he'll actually profit from turning on them. If there's nothing to be gained by working against them, he'll have a flawless scheme up his sleeve to protect them. As the series goes on and Character Development sets in, Rygel lets his genuine care and love for Moya and his friends show more often, but never loses his capacity for brilliant scheming and brutal violence as needed. In "I-Yensch, You-Yensch" he becomes one of very few to cross wits with Scorpius and come out on top.
• Mainstream Obscurity: A cult classic in its time, Farscape became a forgotten gem after it ended. It was largely left by the wayside in the Darker and Edgier post-9/11 milieu, where all genre fiction had to be thunderingly obvious allegories for the war on terror like The Dark Knight to be taken seriously. However, in the post-post-9/11 era, Farscape has proven to be enormously influential to the next generation of sci-fi creators like James Gunn and Justin Roiland.
• Memetic Mutation: Fans like to refer to the Sci-Fi/Syfy Channel executives as "frelling blue monkeys" after the villains of one episode.
• More Popular Replacement: Sikozu was in every way designed as an upgrade to Jool, who was originally created as a replacement for fan favourite Zhaan. But where Jool was a stuck-up, spoiled princess whose main feature was a scream that could melt metal (yes, really), Sikozu was more of a frustrated genius coping with being surrounded by crazy people, which made her all the more sympathetic, despite her abrasive personality.
• My Real Daddy: Rockne S. O'Bannon created the series, but stepped down as executive producer after Season 1 — leaving David Kemper to be showrunner for the next three seasons. Brian Henson also deserves mention — not because of any creative decisions, but because he spent the better part of The '90s trying to sell the series despite constant rejection.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.

• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ben Mendelsohn played Sko, one of the squawking alien burglars from "I-Yensch, You-Yensch", years before Bloodline (2015) put him on the map.
  • Melissa Jaffer who played Noranti and Hugh Keays-Byrne who played Grunchlk are probably better known nowadays for their appearances in Mad Max: Fury Road as, respectively, the Keeper of the Seeds and Immortan Joe.
  • The blue-haired nurse that attends to Scorpius in "Incubator" was played by Stephanie Jacobsen who would go on to prominent roles in Battlestar Galactica (2003) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  • Natalie Mendoza, who played Lishala in the Season 1 episode "Jeremiah Crichton", would later become recognized by horror fans for her performance as Juno in The Descent.
  • Zukash from the "We're So Screwed" trilogy is played by Dean O'Gorman, who's now better known for his roles in The Almighty Johnsons and The Hobbit.
  • Captain Jenek from the second half of season four is played by Jason Clarke, although the heavy Scarran prosthetics mean he's still pretty difficult to recognize.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: How some viewers see John and Aeryn's relationship in Season 4 and The Peacekeeper Wars.
• The Scrappy: Exactly who qualifies as the scrappy may vary a great deal from viewer to viewer, but a lot of people hated Jool — including the other characters (at least at first). This was actually deliberate on the part of the writers, but Tammy MacIntosh stated in an interview that the hate Jool — and, in some cases, Tammy herself - received reduced her to tears.
  • Jool's actually a decent character. The problem with her is that she would. Not. Stop. Screaming!
  • Even die-hard Scapers have trouble coming up with good stuff to say about Stark. He doesn't get a chance to be statesmanlike like Rygel, or handy like Zhann (see his botched surgery in "Relativity"), or shrewd like Noranti. And he whinges more than Jool! Paul was also popular with the crew, which means plenty of screen time. However plenty of fans do enjoy him simply for his insanity, and while his moments are rare, when he does come through big it tends to be spectacular.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • In its time, season 3 was less well-regarded than the first two. Reasons include obvious filler episodes, Chiana randomly gaining superpowers to give her character a plotline, and the notorious introduction of Jool as a Replacement Scrappy for fan-favorite Zhaan. Much later however, season 3 underwent a reevaluation and (despite the aforementioned issues) is often considered the best season.
  • Season 4, on the other hand, is sometimes considered seasonal rot for taking the series' inherent weirdness and wackiness and dialing it up to eleven.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In the first episode of the second season, when Crais is being hooked up with the neural interface to the baby leviathan you can clearly see a hand holding up the metal-tentacle thing, near the bottom of the screen.
  • In the third season, "Jack" is switching between his human form and his actual Ancient shape and there is almost no similarity between the Muppet and the CGI used for the transformation.
  • Crichton's beard in "Jeremiah Crichton". Good luck paying attention to anything else while watching that episode. Funnily enough, in the DVD Commentary for "Jeremiah Crichton", Ben Browder relates how fans were angered that Crichton's beard in "Crichton Kicks" apparently looked more fake than the one used for the former episode. Browder genuinely did grow an actual beard for the latter episode.
  • The episode "Jeremiah Crichton" also had a scene where Rygel's puppeteer is visible on the right side of the screen.
  • In "Picture If You Will", it is startlingly obvious when Zhaan's collar and gauntlets switch from hard and shiny to the dull, rubbery-looking stunt ones.
  • In just the third episode, we get a stunningly jarring CGI Rygel. Witness how much this improved by "Peacekeeper Wars."
  • "Peacekeeper Wars" fails to put the same post-production process on Lani Tupu's performance as Pilot that the regular series did, making him sound different enough that it could be mistaken for The Other Darrin. Apparently the post-production crew lost the settings used during the original run and couldn't recreate the exact filter.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The creators openly admitted they wanted to give the Jim Henson Workshop a chance to do the Star Wars cantina scene on a weekly basis.
  • The series also has very strong overtones of "Blake's 7 with an effects budget". This was openly admitted in the final season with the addition of the villainous Commander Grayza, whose dress sense and hairstyle are clearly inspired by the Big Bad of Blake's 7, Supreme Commander and later President Servalan.
  • Later flipped on its head when James Gunn admitted Farscape was an enormous influence on his Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) films (to the point he gave Ben Browder a cameo in Vol. 2), which are the renewed Star Wars franchise's biggest competitors for fantasy space opera.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • For all that it's built up as a horribly dangerous area where even Peacekeepers and Scarrans fear to go, Tormented Space never once comes off as any worse than the places the crew usually goes. It doesn't help that they get a hardware fix for what little effect it has literally the second episode they spend there. Additionally, there ended up not being many episodes which actually dealt with Tormented Space. From "A Prefect Murder" to "Prayer" there were 10 episodes. Two ("Unrealised Reality" and "Prayer") involved travel to alternate realities. Two ("Kansas" and "Terra Firma") were set on Earth. One ("A Constellation of Doubt") was based on Moya about watching a documentary. This only left five, one of which ("Twice Shy") was entirely on Moya and two of which ("Mental as Anything" and "Bringing Home the Beacon") used Peacekeepers/Scarrans as the antagonists. This only left two episodes (the first two) to try to do something unique to Tormented Space.
  • The Nebari are established as a major, Borg-like threat who can and will perform mental cleansing on anyone they wish and have a plot to spread a virus throughout the galaxy to facilitate their impending conquests. And despite having no warships, a single host vessel is capable of annihilating a ship as large as a Command Carrier. There's also a resistance against the establishment, with whom Chiana's brother is an important member. This never comes up again after "A Clockwork Nebari" in season 2.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: "Prayer". Wall-to-wall torture and death with no respite. The scene with Scorpius and Crichton spinning in the cockpit doesn't further the plot in any way; it's there so the show can throw in a joke at the very beginning. Still, the episode is worth watching in a Did they actually just do that sort of way.
• Ugly Cute: It's a guarantee that most viewers will see some characters as this. NamTar's original form is a good example, as it looks quite similar to Jabba's pet.
  • Pilot is probably the crowning example. Yes, he's a giant multi-armed crab creature with dried, wrinkly skin, but his highly emotive, turtle-like face and huge, soulful eyes make fans want to stroke him like a puppy.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Until you hear someone use a male pronoun to refer to Pilot, it's difficult to determine if said character is male or female.
• Villain Decay:
  • Crais when the Stern Chase got old and Scorpius stepped up to became the Big Bad, eventually leading to a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Harvey started out as another Scorpius who, by virtue of being in Crichton's head, could win a lot and be consistently scary. By the end, he's cracking jokes about E = MC Hammer. He was also created to avert this trope in the original Scorpius — it allowed Wayne Pygram to show up as often as the writers wanted and let him showcase his comedy skills, without forcing them to have Scorpius defeated each week, letting him keep his menace for when the original did make an appearance.
  • Almost immediately after her introduction, Grayza is getting stomped in the villain stakes by the Scarrans. Ironically,^note Or at least what Alanis would call "ironically" this is what makes her so dangerous within the Farscape universe: the fact that she's got all the power of a Peacekeeper Commandant but consistently makes dumb decisions and punches above her villain weight, putting lives in danger by accident and allowing the real villains to cause far more havoc than they ever would have normally.
• Vindicated by History: Around its airing in the 2000's, Season 3 was often considered an example of Seasonal Rot. Later on in the 2010's, popular opinion on it largely flipped, with people warming up to it due to its darker tone, emotional character arcs, and experimental structure. These days, it's not rare to see people proclaim it as the show's best season.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While the show's CGI attempts haven't always aged well the practical effects still look impressive thanks to some excellent work by The Jim Henson Company. Pilot and Rygel's puppets are extremely expressive and emotive for Starfish Aliens and even one-off aliens looked similarly convincing. Creating these characters practically allowed the actors to interact with them in a way that would have been impossible with CGI, such as all the times people hug Pilot or manhandle Rygel.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?:
  • YTV, a Nickelodeon-flavored Canadian channel was the first to pick up the show in the Great White North, probably misled by the fact that the show was made by Henson Studios. This did not end well, since they only bought the first season and edited the crap out of it.
  • A newly-appointed head of the Sci-Fi Channel was a big proponent of Farscape's 'edginess'. This was partly due to the presence of Jim Henson's moniker, not to mention the family-friendly puppets; both of which were unnerving to a company that was re-styling itself as an adult network.
• The Woobie: Just about everyone on occasion, but especially:
  • Stark. Damn. You just want to wrap him in a straitjacket and give him a hug. And although his status as a badass nearly disqualifies him, Rygel approaches Woobie territory on several occasions throughout the series.
  • Gillina earns this title following the events of her first episode. Not only is she the only survivor of her team, but she's been trapped on a Ghost Ship that's been claimed by the Sheeyangs and forced to hide under a corpse; then she's menaced by Aeryn and D'Argo, spat on by Rygel, almost gets incinerated when the Sheeyangs return, and then is forced to leave Crichton for her own well-being. And while she waits for Crais to retrieve her, she has to stay behind on the Zelbinion— not exactly the safest or the most reassuring environment.
  • Pilot. He spends the first season and a half in substantial pain because of his artificial grafting to Moya, feels every bit of damage done to her as pain to himself, and gets yelled at by everyone on board.
    • Let's not forget, Pilot also gets one of his arms cut off by the crew. It's enough that he's in pain from the graft, but then having his crew members mutilate him for their own objectives (yes, his arms grow back, but it still doesn't make it easy).

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