Unexplored Territories: What Farscape Delivers

By Charlene Brusso
28 November 2000
The SPACE.com Guide to Farscape

For a very long time, science fiction fans had little choice when it came to SF on the small screen. Unless you had access to British SF shows (admittedly cheesy special effects, but some great characters and imaginative plots) like The Prisoner and Blake's Seven, your viewing choices were limited to one thing, and one thing only: Star Trek in different demographic flavors, with brief competition from Babylon 5 and a few others.

Then came Farscape and its unforgettable, unclassifiable ensemble of fugitives, foundlings and out-and-out villains -- and a wonderfully Zen-like theme something like: "What goes around, comes around."

Consider the premiere episode: While testing an experimental spacecraft of his own design, intrepid scientist/astronaut John Crichton [Ben Browder] gets sucked through a wormhole and finds himself in the midst of a space battle between a large, strangely sinuous vessel and a slew of vicious one-man fighter ships. Crichton survives, barely, thanks to being pulled aboard the large ship, Moya, right before it "starbursts" out of the fight.

But surviving that initial danger doesn't mean he's safe. It turns out Moya is a "she", a Leviathan, a biomechanical ship, and a newly liberated prison ship to boot. Next Crichton has to convince Moya's crew of escaped convicts that he's not a threat, even as they're busy eyeing each other with sidelong, paranoid glances. Ka D'Argo [Anthony Simcoe], a huge bad-tempered guy with tattoos and tentacles for hair; Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan [Virginia Hey], a gorgeous blue renegade priestess; two foot tall Rygel XVI, annoying ex-Dominar of 600 billion loyal (he says) subjects, dethroned in a coup; and multi-armed, multi-talented Pilot, the voice of Moya, and her intermediary with those traveling inside her:

The Peacekeepers are led by Captain Bialar Crais [Lani John Tupu], who's now bent on revenging the death of his brother, who Crichton accidentally killed when his IASA test ship exited the wormhole. To make matters even worse, Moya also picked up a Peacekeeper fighter pilot, Aeryn Sun [Claudia Black] who longs to rejoin the Peacekeeper fleet --except that her capture has contaminated her irrevocably in their narrow vision; if she attempted to return, they'd shoot her on sight.

So right from the start, we have an ensemble cast of characters who don't like, let alone trust, each other and our human hero has already earned a deadly enemy. The only thing holding this gang together is the relative safety of numbers and a mutual wish to get home alive and intact.

Over time -- none of it easy - they've learned each other's strengths and weaknesses, formed alliances, friendships, and even closer relationships, like the evolving romance between D'Argo and self-sufficient loner and sexy con artist Chiana [Gigi Edgley]. They've also fought and argued, and come damned close to killing each other more than once. This is majority rule, not exactly a democracy, and each character has only his or her individual sense of morality to guide them.

Moya's crew aren't the only characters who grow and change as the series continues. Crais' obsession with hunting down Crichton has ruined his own military career. The only way he can survive is through an uneasy alliance with Moya's crew, while bringing onstage a magnificent new bad guy, Scorpius [Wayne Pygram], who's bent on ripping the secret of wormhole technology from Crichton's unwilling brain.

Farscape implodes all of the most familiar, most "taken for granted" tropes of SF, reviving a sense of wonder many of us haven't felt since the first time we saw Star Wars.