Most episodes of Farscape had a single writing credit, but here's how I think they were really written: Half a dozen geniuses in a room have fun writing a script together to the best of their ability. When they're done, they lock themselves in there for a further week and take it apart line by line, constantly asking, 'How can we do this better? How can we do this different? How can we put an original spin on this?' They do this until it's no longer fun and they hate each other. When they break through that and they're in love again they go back once more and really have fun putting humour and sick stuff in.
Almost everything in Farscape had that little extra tweak. A mining colony which on any other SF show would be on an asteroid is inside the corpse of a gigantic spaceborn creature. Space pirates don't use tractor beams, they have vast webs or grapple their prey with huge rocket-harpoons. Where other shows would have a lie-detector machine, Farscape has an alien scorpion-spider which squats on your head and will stab you through the eye if it senses you're fibbing.
My favourite example of this (spoiler), the scene which for me encapsulates the whole show: a spaceship is destroyed, the baddies' mobile HQ, a ship so big its recreation area features a real park with real grass - and a real lake. So the ship is blown up, and, yes, there are explosions and fires and the usual things. Then the chief villain, who is by the way the greatest villain in the history of TV, stands in his command centre contemplating the ruin of all his schemes, posed coolly on the steps of this huge dais in his black leather - AND BEHIND HIM WATER IS POURING IN. Tons of water, cascading down the steps, smashing and shorting out everything in its wake, an apocalyptic deluge! You think of U-boat movies! And as if that wasn't enough, you don't even hear the water, because on the soundtrack A BLOODY CLASSICAL CHOIR is going absolutely mental like the climax of an opera.
That's Farscape for me right there. A space opera with the emphasis on the 'opera'. Individual episodes did all the fun or thought-provoking things the very best SF short stories are able to do, but as an ongoing story it owed more to opera, to fairy tale. The role of the Henson creature workshop and the show's brilliant, brilliant designers was vital. In Star Trek the aliens look just like us except they have pointy ears, wrinkled foreheads, snub noses, the occasional spot; you see weirder creatures at any bus-stop. On Farscape, the aliens are really alien. On Farscape, the monsters are out of Bosch, Goya, Giger, Burroughs, the Brothers Grimm. On Farscape, the villains are pantomime demons from your childhood nightmares.
On Farscape, most of the episodes begin at a point it would take the modern Star Trek series half an hour of arrival and exposition to reach, and then pack in as much as any film. On Farscape, most of the episodes begin with the crew already chased up a tree with no idea how to get down. Three key Farscape phrases: 'We're cursed', 'You have got to be kidding me' and 'We're so screwed.' This last became the title of one of the episodes and could have been the title of almost all of them. The episodes start with the heroes screwed; then they become more screwed; at length they make a plan, that backfires, and they get progressively screwed even more. I lost count of the number of episodes where I genuinely thought one or more of the lead characters was doomed; and sometimes they were.
What else to say? The characters were heroic but flawed and fallible, delightfully colourful and individual, the way they almost constantly bickered with each other a refreshing change. The very gradually blossoming love story at the series' core became genuinely romantic and moving. The actors were great and even the characters played by puppets become very real. There were moments of hilarity, of very dark black comedy, of genuine creepiness and fear.
The first half dozen or so episodes of the first series are merely quite promising. You could look at it and think, 'Well, they took that from this and borrowed that from the other and this reminds me of that.' But it very quickly transcends this and becomes more than the sum of its parts, and when Farscape found its unique voice it was the most original thing on television. It just got better and better and better and then, when you thought it couldn't any more, even better. It was a labour of love and a work of collective genius.
Almost everything in Farscape had that little extra tweak. A mining colony which on any other SF show would be on an asteroid is inside the corpse of a gigantic spaceborn creature. Space pirates don't use tractor beams, they have vast webs or grapple their prey with huge rocket-harpoons. Where other shows would have a lie-detector machine, Farscape has an alien scorpion-spider which squats on your head and will stab you through the eye if it senses you're fibbing.
My favourite example of this (spoiler), the scene which for me encapsulates the whole show: a spaceship is destroyed, the baddies' mobile HQ, a ship so big its recreation area features a real park with real grass - and a real lake. So the ship is blown up, and, yes, there are explosions and fires and the usual things. Then the chief villain, who is by the way the greatest villain in the history of TV, stands in his command centre contemplating the ruin of all his schemes, posed coolly on the steps of this huge dais in his black leather - AND BEHIND HIM WATER IS POURING IN. Tons of water, cascading down the steps, smashing and shorting out everything in its wake, an apocalyptic deluge! You think of U-boat movies! And as if that wasn't enough, you don't even hear the water, because on the soundtrack A BLOODY CLASSICAL CHOIR is going absolutely mental like the climax of an opera.
That's Farscape for me right there. A space opera with the emphasis on the 'opera'. Individual episodes did all the fun or thought-provoking things the very best SF short stories are able to do, but as an ongoing story it owed more to opera, to fairy tale. The role of the Henson creature workshop and the show's brilliant, brilliant designers was vital. In Star Trek the aliens look just like us except they have pointy ears, wrinkled foreheads, snub noses, the occasional spot; you see weirder creatures at any bus-stop. On Farscape, the aliens are really alien. On Farscape, the monsters are out of Bosch, Goya, Giger, Burroughs, the Brothers Grimm. On Farscape, the villains are pantomime demons from your childhood nightmares.
On Farscape, most of the episodes begin at a point it would take the modern Star Trek series half an hour of arrival and exposition to reach, and then pack in as much as any film. On Farscape, most of the episodes begin with the crew already chased up a tree with no idea how to get down. Three key Farscape phrases: 'We're cursed', 'You have got to be kidding me' and 'We're so screwed.' This last became the title of one of the episodes and could have been the title of almost all of them. The episodes start with the heroes screwed; then they become more screwed; at length they make a plan, that backfires, and they get progressively screwed even more. I lost count of the number of episodes where I genuinely thought one or more of the lead characters was doomed; and sometimes they were.
What else to say? The characters were heroic but flawed and fallible, delightfully colourful and individual, the way they almost constantly bickered with each other a refreshing change. The very gradually blossoming love story at the series' core became genuinely romantic and moving. The actors were great and even the characters played by puppets become very real. There were moments of hilarity, of very dark black comedy, of genuine creepiness and fear.
The first half dozen or so episodes of the first series are merely quite promising. You could look at it and think, 'Well, they took that from this and borrowed that from the other and this reminds me of that.' But it very quickly transcends this and becomes more than the sum of its parts, and when Farscape found its unique voice it was the most original thing on television. It just got better and better and better and then, when you thought it couldn't any more, even better. It was a labour of love and a work of collective genius.