Cancelled too soon: Farscape

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, astronaut John Crichton was conducting an experiment in manned space flight. Everything was going peachy, until John’s shuttle module got inadvertently sucked through a freak wormhole and landed in a distant part of the galaxy. As if this wasn’t bad enough, he lands in the middle of an alien prison break and crashes into another ship, resulting in the death of the pilot. He then gets pulled aboard Moya – a living spaceship – who’s currently being used as a prison barge, and falls in with the escapees and one captive fighter-pilot. That’s when things start to get really weird…

Crichton’s new captors – who soon become friends and eventually a surrogate family – include Zhaan, a living blue plant arrested for being too much of an anarchist for her home world; D’Argo, a squid-headed warrior whose response to everything is shoot first and then shoot it again later; Aeryn Sun, a peacekeeper fighter-pilot who can’t return to her kind because she’s been ‘contaminated’ by contact with the prisoners; and Dominar (King) Rygel XVI, a two-foot green toad who manoeuvres around the ship in a floating chair and farts helium as a defensive mechanism. Crichton travels with them further into unknown space in a bid to escape his pursuers, the series’ initial protagonist Captain Crais, on a quest to recapture the fugitives and avenge his fighter-pilot brother, who Crichton accidentally killed on his arrival, and later the mysterious figure known as Scorpius, who desperately wants to turn Crichton’s knowledge of wormholes, planted in his head in the first season by a race of benevolent aliens as a dubious ‘gift’, into a weapon.

As Crichton gets more and more accustomed to his new strange circumstances, he becomes not only increasingly obsessed with using the wormhole knowledge to return to Earth, but also banterous with his shipmates, and much of the show’s humour comes from his jokes and references to pop-culture which remain lost on the other characters, as does his predilection for giving out nicknames, especially to Rygel (known variously as ‘Spanky’, ‘Sparky’ and ‘Buckwheat’). Later additions to the cast include Chi’ana, a ‘street-smart’ (or what passes for streets in space) nymphomaniac from a race of albino mind-controllers; Stark, a half-mad prisoner who controls a secret source of incredible mental energy; the Scarrans, a race of reptilian aliens who also want Crichton’s wormhole knowledge to take over the galaxy; and a clone of Scorpius placed inside Crichton’s brain as a safe-guard against the knowledge falling into unfriendly hands, whom John nicknames ‘Harvey’ (after Harvey the invisible rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart film).

Farcape’s brilliance derived from not simply being another cheesy science-fiction show, but from treating its characters as three-dimensional people – rather than simply generic aliens – reacting to extreme circumstances, their development as individuals, and their dynamics with each another (as Crichton said, ‘We might be a Jerry Springer family, but we’re a family nonetheless’). Farscape also went where few other such shows would dare to tread, mixing classic science-fiction drama with comedy firmly grounded in popular culture – the episode where Crichton imagines everyone as cartoon characters is a stand-out, as is the second season’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, which is one of the most bizarre and funny pieces of television ever made. At the end of his journey, as you might guess, Crichton found a way back to Earth, but returned to his friends to prevent a war which would eventually consume the entire galaxy. Though the final season, which ended on a cliff-hanger, was followed by the short-lived Peacekeeper Wars mini-series that served to wrap up the loose threads, it remained an unsatisfying end to one of the most underrated shows on television.

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