Farscape (TV series), Season 1
Jan. 25th, 2013 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroMy name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I'm lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen, please. Is there anybody out there who can hear me? I'm being hunted by an insane military commander. Doing everything I can. I'm just looking for a way home.
In 1999, somebody at Jim Henson Studios decided they were sick of the rubber forehead aliens that overwhelmed every Star Trek show, and that they needed to make a series with more “alien” aliens. So we’ll have several regulars that were so inhuman that the needed to be complicated puppets! Plus, we’ll make it as un-Star Trek-like as possible: Galactic war! A living ship! No useful maps or reliable allies! Unreliable technology and constant bickering! And the most human-looking characters are the villains!
Except, of course, Deep Space Nine and Voyager had actually already done most of those things. And they didn’t actually have any new ideas for scripts using all of this, so they stuck mostly to the sci-fi tropes playbook. And it seems like the big dreamers for those non-human aliens didn’t quite understand what a budget was, so most of the guest star aliens are just standard rubber-forehead-and-green-bodypaint costumes; and the puppet characters end up doing very little and mostly being talking heads.
Add to this such exciting problems as: Highly problematic female characters, being consistently either evil seductresses or quickly fridged. Inconsistent characterization with virtually all of the main cast, plus a lack of relationship continuity between sequential episodes. Crichton’s yo-yo intelligence, as he can go from meathead to brilliant scientist to giant chump to master detective in the space of half an episode. Oh, and the strange breathy, halting speech that every weird alien uses. God, that’s annoying.
Overall: Jethrien lost interest in the series as a whole over the course of watching the first season. I’m told it gets better. I suppose I’ll find out, as I run out of other things to watch and drift back to this.
In 1999, somebody at Jim Henson Studios decided they were sick of the rubber forehead aliens that overwhelmed every Star Trek show, and that they needed to make a series with more “alien” aliens. So we’ll have several regulars that were so inhuman that the needed to be complicated puppets! Plus, we’ll make it as un-Star Trek-like as possible: Galactic war! A living ship! No useful maps or reliable allies! Unreliable technology and constant bickering! And the most human-looking characters are the villains!
Except, of course, Deep Space Nine and Voyager had actually already done most of those things. And they didn’t actually have any new ideas for scripts using all of this, so they stuck mostly to the sci-fi tropes playbook. And it seems like the big dreamers for those non-human aliens didn’t quite understand what a budget was, so most of the guest star aliens are just standard rubber-forehead-and-green-bodypaint costumes; and the puppet characters end up doing very little and mostly being talking heads.
Add to this such exciting problems as: Highly problematic female characters, being consistently either evil seductresses or quickly fridged. Inconsistent characterization with virtually all of the main cast, plus a lack of relationship continuity between sequential episodes. Crichton’s yo-yo intelligence, as he can go from meathead to brilliant scientist to giant chump to master detective in the space of half an episode. Oh, and the strange breathy, halting speech that every weird alien uses. God, that’s annoying.
Overall: Jethrien lost interest in the series as a whole over the course of watching the first season. I’m told it gets better. I suppose I’ll find out, as I run out of other things to watch and drift back to this.
