Subject: Important note on viewing order!
Author:
Posted on: 2025-02-08 15:52:25 UTC
Sadly, it looks like the official channel's playlists kinda suck. However, be careful if you look elsewhere, because created playlists may have the eps in one of several airing orders as opposed to the production order. Production order as shown on Wikipedia, makes far more sense and will make for a much better experience.
~Neshomeh
So apparently every single episode of Farscape is being uploaded to youtube. Officially! By the rights holders! For free!
Check it out: https://m.youtube.com/@farscapeofficial
Sadly, it looks like the official channel's playlists kinda suck. However, be careful if you look elsewhere, because created playlists may have the eps in one of several airing orders as opposed to the production order. Production order as shown on Wikipedia, makes far more sense and will make for a much better experience.
~Neshomeh
I already started watching and didn't realize about this. I'll have to go back and watch the episodes I missed.
I mean. I won't complain. :-P
(Curious, though, on the Trek-to-Wars scale of political allegories how on the nose is its social commentary, if it has any?)
Farscape is intensely character-driven, featuring a supporting cast who all have misdeeds (real or perceived) in their past and one (1) white dude who is completely out of his depth, but fortunately not quite as dumb as he looks. Their motives in the beginning are entirely selfish: escape captivity, survive, and go home. They're not out to explore the galaxy, and they're not out to take down a tyrannical superpower. Some of that happens, but only when there's no other option. {= P
I will say, it's a late 90s/early aughts show, so be prepared for some period-typical cringe here and there. A couple episodes in season 1 particularly are... not great. ^_^; (No one, and I mean literally no one, likes 1.14, "Jeremiah Crichton.") But nothing is perfect. Get to the end of season 1, and it goes from being generally above average to being generally amazing.
Come for the amazing Henson creatures, stay for the clever trope subversions, wacky humor, and lovable flawed heroes. {= )
~Neshomeh
There are some shows, particularly on the sci-fi side, where you can and arguably should do that: Star Trek TNG, for instance, season 1 is a draaaag. In that case you don't even need to catch up on anything, but is it possible to get into Farscape with a summary of S1 and starting on S2?
(I know the very idea rankles, but I'm not sure I can get Kaitlyn to sit through an entire season of "it gets better I promise".)
hS
Ooh, so it wasn't just me? I tried watching it, I did, but I don't think I made it very far past the first episode. I did skip ahead and watch the one where they go back in time to "The Trouble With Tribbles", and had a good time, but I just Could Not get into it in order. I had set out to essentially watch all of Star Trek in release order, too, after getting into it via AOS, so it was pretty disappointing. But if it picks up after the first season and I could get by with, at most, looking up a summary on the wiki...maybe I'll give it another go sometime??
~Z, a bit intrigued ('a bit' because by now it's been a while since I watched or read anything Trek, even if I still think fondly of it - wait, hold on, I watched a few TOS episodes a couple years ago! I remember now. It was strange, nostalgic, and comforting to be watching it again. I'd forgotten about that!)
About the only things that carry over, outside the basic "Space... the final frontier" setup, are:
Next Generation is very strongly a planet-of-the-week show. I'm not saying it's always good, and a lot of very silly things happen, but it's certainly consistently better after S1.
hS
And it when I say it gets better by the end of it, I say it goes fairly steadily from above-average to great. Yes, there are a few stumbles here and there, but even Farscape's worst episodes still have something worthwhile about them. Even 1.14, which is arguably skippable from a plot and 90s-cringe standpoint, still contains some good character development for Rygel, which would be a shame to miss—he doesn't often get to be the hero. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. {= )
To answer the question directly: Not remotely! It's a character-driven show. You could summarize the major plot events, but never the evolution of each character and their relationships from ep to ep. In fact, the necessity of watching pretty much every episode to get what was going on from week to week is part of why it (like other great sci-fi shows) got cancelled before its time.
Which reminds me: the SciFi Channel-that-was did not help by screwing around with the viewing order, but I'll make a separate post about that.
~Neshomeh
Assuming "S1E1 - Pilot" is the first episode, obviously... ^_~
There's a lot to like. The muppets are shockingly Labyrinth, which shouldn't have taken me by surprise but did. I enjoyed the fact that John Crichton (Kaitlyn, incredulously: "Is his name actually John?!), Human Manly Adventurer, actually isn't a pilot. He's a scientist! The fact that he latches onto the first person he meets who looks like him is a problem, but it's a problem because of the character, not the writing. (I also giggled at the reveal that he apparently thinks Pilot is actually transparent and blue. Has he never seen Star Wars?)
In terms of plot, there wasn't much to say on the basis of one episode. It feels like it's setting up a "planet of the week (because we're being chased)" show, a la Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, arguably Voyager and Quantum Leap... there was a bit of a growth industry on those, wasn't there? But for all I know, they could have escaped the Peacekeepers at the end of the episode and will now spend three seasons floating in a nebula.
The Peacekeepers... would operate a lot better if they weren't being led by '90s Lin Manuel Miranda. The dude repeatedly watched clear footage of his brother harassing and sideswiping a stationary ship, and still went with "you killed my brother, prepare to die". If we could just promote him to a desk job, the rest of the crew should have this whole escaped-prisoners malarkey locked up by lunchtime.
Moya is beautiful ^_^. I'm less instantly enamoured of her crew, which consists of Ood Klingon, Sex-Cultist Twi'lek, Evil Muppet, Transparently Blue Guy, and now Adventure Scientist and Literally The Enemy. They're good TV, but I don't find myself liking them as people straight off.
Except Pilot, who... isn't a pilot? I'm confused. He seems to be the Ops officer, keeping ship's systems going and maybe telling the "autopilot" where they want to go. I would have expected him to have the manual flight controls, but I guess the translator microbes got a bit mixed up. (Love those, by the way, though them being given in childhood makes me wonder whether anyone speaks the same language as anyone else, or if everyone across space just invented their own language which the microbes translate.)
hS
I would love to respond to all of this in detail, but the show will do that itself, and it's better if I let that happen. Basically: You're not wrong; keep going. ^_^
I will say that the Farscape fangroup I joined back in the day was called the Friends and Defenders of Pilot (FaDoP, pronounced like "fed up"), and that is why to this day my emoticons wear Pilot's carapace on top. {= ) And I'll clarify that he can direct Moya, but since she's a living ship, she can also direct herself.
And yeah, it's rather planet-of-the-week to start and maintains elements of that throughout, but the overarching plot (beyond "evade pursuit, survive, try to get home") cometh in due time.
I shall be following along with the episode transcripts by FaDoP founder Sojushisan, which are blatantly opinionated and very fun. ^_^ Caution: May contain spoilers, I'm not sure.
~Neshomeh