Awhile back one of my co-hosts over at the Fanboy Buzz podcast told me about how much he enjoyed the TV series Farscape. While I had heard of it , I never actually got into it. I discovered the entire series was on Netflix so I set out on a quest to watch all the episodes.
As I began watching the show I remembered some of the elements of Farscape that put me off of the show when it was first on the air – looking back, none of these were good reasons not to watch. For example being that Farscape is a Jim Henson Company production, naturally the series has a variety of puppets in space. When I was younger I was REALLY into (and I mean almost unhealthily into) Star Trek – which made the leap to space-puppets hard for me. I also remembered how irritated I was with the D’Argo character, which at the time I felt was simply an attempt at Farscape’s version of Worf. Watching the series back neither of these bothered me anymore, perhaps because of how good the other elements of the show were (not to mention I was completely wrong about the Worf comparison).
Farscape often went places that other sci-fi shows of the time dared not to go. There are many major characters written off throughout the show and some of them are even brought back a season or two later. As I often watched the episodes back-to-back(-to back) I also got the feeling that the creators of Farscape were always thinking many steps ahead, often issuing a pay-off many episodes down the road. This arc style of writing is something that we often see now in Sci-Fi, but back in the day that Farscape came out there were not a lot of other Sci-Fi series doing this.
Although Farscape was a very successful franchise, Sci-Fi channel abruptly cancelled it after the 4th season which led to the series being wrapped up in a three hour mini-series finale titled Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. In my opinion the series is by far one of the best Sci-Fi series out there and it really is a shame that people like me didn’t watch it when it was on the air as if we had, maybe it would have continued. Either way, if you like Sci-Fi and have never seen Farscape, I suggest you check it out – it’s worth watching.
