Watching Farscape

[lizbee]

So I've tried a bunch of times to watch Farscape, including...

• Its first run in Australia, where I bailed sometime during the pilot
• Later in that season, with the episode starring Ben Browder's wife as a nice lady who eats people's bones -- notable primarily for the fact that my adoptive grandmother turned up uninvited halfway through and went off about how anyone who can imagine something as grotesque as an alien has something wrong with them...
• The heavily bowdlerised versions that ran in a kiddy timeslot one summer, in which "Crackers Don't Matter" was cut down to a nonsensical 20 minutes
• With my BFF and her then-flatmate, where I got most of the way through season one and had a lot of feelings about Crais

Anyway, I am TRYING AGAIN! This time my flatmate (who has seen the whole series) is advising which episodes to skip, so we've gotten halfway through season 2 in just a couple of weeks.

My feelings, in no particular order: 

• Claudia Black is a national treasure and we are lucky to have her
• I still have a lot of feelings about Crais and feel like Lani Tupu has been forgotten as an early and iconic Space Pacifika
• I feel like this is the missing link between Babylon 5 and the Doctor Who revival, and also Killjoys
• Ben Browder is very attractive and charming and I kind of hate Crichton
• This show is SO rapey
• Like, not just Moya's pregnancy (and could the Leviathan 'gods' BE more victim-blamey?) but the scene in "Crackers Don't Matter" where Crichton threatens to rape Chiana???
• Maybe there was something to be said for that 20-minute edit...
• There's paranoia and irrationality and then there's ... that
• And generally I LIKE that this is a show about irredeemable assholes in space, and also Aeryn Sun, Who Has Done Nothing Many Things Wrong In Her Entire Life But Is Trying To Get Better, BUT...
• I'm normally into an age-gap, but Chiana is a TEENAGER and D'Argo is ... what, late 20s, early 30s? This is an r/relationships post waiting to happen
• Aeryn and Crichton have amazing chemistry, but I feel like Aeryn could do better
• I'd be into Zhaan except I'm constantly worrying about the state of Virginia Hey's kidneys, and also she's basically What If Delenn But Blue
• This is SUCH a product of Sydney in the early 2000s: cheap, glossy, tacky yet appealing, full of women wearing low-cut pants and no eyeliner (see also: The Matrix and sequels, the Star Wars prequels)
• A useful rule of thumb: the more episodes of A Country Practice an actor has been in, the better they are. Except this is obviously fake because Claudia Black was only in one season of ACP -- she was one of the young actors brought in to sex up the abortive Channel 10 reboot -- and YET...
• There is so much no-homo and use of words like "slut" and "bitch", and I can't believe we took this for granted in the early '00s, but I also can't believe I'm looking forward to escaping to the relatively peaceful setting of, uhhhhhh, Star Trek: Enterprise
• Aeryn wears a leather vest with no shirt or bra, and low-cut leather pants, and I cannot believe we used to do this to women
• Except I can, because the other day I saw a teenage girl wearing camo cargo pants and a satin camisole, and I know what comes next...

I guess it sounds like I'm not having fun? I absolutely am, but then the episode ends and I go, "Oh. Oh dear." Mostly I'm in it for the Auscore, for appreciating the quality of the costume design in the face of budget limitations and also the early '00s, and for Claudia Black and Lani Tupu.

Comments

[laurenthemself]

Good gravy.

[lizbee]

RIGHT? And I don't get any sense that the writers even realised this was a different level of egregious?

[laurenthemself]

As much as I love Auscore, I think I will stay Far away from this scape.

[lizbee]

Do. There's a whole "comedy" episode where Rhys Muldoon plays an alien who falls in love with a male character, and the "joke" is that she's the female of her species and everyone is repulsed because she looks like a man. The only funny bit is that she too is wearing low-cut pants with her belly button out.

[kore]

The way Noranti was treated, down to her terrible makeup, REALLY turned me off the final seasons of the show. (An old woman bellydancing! We'll all throw up and go blind! Yeah, whatever.)


ARGH I didn't realize you hadn't seen the whole thing, sorry!

[starlady]

I just finished watching the whole thing last year for the first time. It's a wild fucking ride until the end but the gender stuff has not aged well--except the gender stuff with Aeryn and Crichton, which I think does hold up. The show does eventually get to a place of calling rape rape, and less no homo, but it takes a while.

Anyway I enjoyed it on the whole and I'm glad I watched it! But it will not be high on my rewatching list hereafter.

[hamsterwoman]

I feel like this is the missing link between Babylon 5 and the Doctor Who revival, and also Killjoys

I watched (a couple of seasons, I still plan to go back) of Farscape while already being a fan of B5 and Killjoys, and it really did feel this way!

Also, consequently my reaction to Zhaan was also "What If Delenn But Blue" (And Also Plant?? apparently???) She was therefore my favorite, but I'm happy that I did not learn about Virginia Hey's health issues from the body paint until after, because I think that would have also interfered with my enjoyment of the character...

[kore]

I enjoyed early Farscape very much when it was more about the ensemble of these wild characters thrown together who eventually become very close. I liked it a lot less when it was the Crichton/Aeryn soap opera. I liked the very final seasons and the Big Finale even less. The wrap-up miniseries was fun, except you could see which different scenes would have been entire episodes. I don't like the way a lot of space operas tend to slide into milsf and the plots always turn to war as the big conflict, but that's just baked into most of the genre I guess.

I always wondered if Farscape influenced Firefly a lot, even though you could see Whedon's stock characters showing through.

[lizbee]

I don't like the way a lot of space operas tend to slide into milsf and the plots always turn to war as the big conflict, but that's just baked into most of the genre I guess.

This disappointed me about Killjoys -- I liked where it wound up, but I also wish it had stayed a story about the working class joes of the system.

I always wondered if Farscape influenced Firefly a lot, even though you could see Whedon's stock characters showing through.

No, I can see it.

[kore]

Yeah, I don't think it's one-to-one mapping (Crichton/Mal, Aeryn/Zoe, Zhaan sort of a combo of Book and Inara maybe? lol) but more the "ragtag band of mercs/space pirates not associated with the military" seeking adventures setup. I feel like I haven't seen a lot of stories like that outside the military, or outside some global empire. Dark Matter was kind of another one, except that also wound up with space empires and war. The Expanse has the Rocinante, but that gets drawn into war too, &c &c.

I should try Killjoys again! For some reason I REALLY bounced off it when it first aired. Then again, I bounced off Farscape, Buffy, Angel, The Expanse (S1) and a whole bunch of other shows I came to love, lol. Nowadays I try to be less knee-jerk about shows.

I also forgot to say LANI <333333 Crais was SO GOOD, and he was so awesome in the trippy episodes, and he also did such a magnificent job as Pilot. And he was even doing three big roles, really -- Crais, Pilot, and Moya as interpreted by Pilot. He was just fantastic.

[grav_ity]

I love Crais so much.

[deird1]

I feel like this is the missing link between Babylon 5 and the Doctor Who revival

Apparently when New Who began, Davies showed episodes of Farscape to the writing team and said "I want it to feel like this", so it definitely is. :)

[ironed_orchid]

I think I made it through the first two episodes of the first Australian run and then barely thought of it again only to discover several years later that it has something of a cult following.

I think a list of which episodes to miss would help. I used your episode guide when I started watched TNG and that made a huge difference.

[jesuswasbatman]

I disagree on a couple of things:

Firstly, yes, there's a lot of rape, but most of it happens metaphorically and in the end literally to Crichton. In ways that make him considering raping Chiana when an alien influence is driving him insane feel a bit minor?

Also, I can forgive Farscape a lot given that compared to practically every other show in the genre of its era, it hardly ever judges its female characters for having sex or experiencing sexual desire. I can think of about twice in the whole run (neither which I think you've seen yet), and both times the character involved had done something genuinely reprehensible.