Setsuled's Journal: farscape

Showing posts with label farscape. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Farscape is Near

25 years ago, Farscape was born. One of the greatest space opera franchises of all time, it combined top notch art design, Jim Henson creatures, brilliant actors, and even smarter scripts. It was so good, it inspired James Gunn to make the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. If you haven't seen this series, you should jump on this opportunity.

The 25th anniversary stream, hosted by the official Farscape YouTube channel, is one of two continuous marathons of the entire series on YouTube. The other is hosted by Shout! Studios:

Both streams seem to be on season 4, episode 4, as I write this. If you prefer to start at the beginning, Shout! also has the premiere episode available for free on YouTube:

The Farscape channel has the first five full episodes of season one as well as the first four of season four. If you're feeling let down by Star Wars and Star Trek these days, Farscape is an antidote I heartily recommend. It's classic serial, seat of your pants, storytelling. It's a true Flash Gordon for the 21st century with some of the smartest scripts by David Kemper (Star Trek: TNG), Naren Shankar (Star Trek: TNG, The Expanse), and Rockne S. O'Bannon (Seaquest DSV) of each of those writers' careers. It's dark, it's funny, it's sexy, it's immensely satisfying. WATCH IT.

X Sonnet #1867

Engrossing lamps prepared the mind for streams.
Aggressive rivers laid the bed for eyes.
Aromas cooked for men derail their dreams.
However, ev'ryone would like some pies.
Disturbing towers spit the nuns afield.
Aggressive dreamers push the dead to kill.
Above the rain, the air compels a yield.
Oppressive mists distort the sister's will.
Returning print presents a sleepy son.
Authentic dames redeem the picture book.
Impressive slugs consider sleep as fun.
It takes a hill of gold to make a hook.
Concussive thoughts subdue the forward flow.
Beyond the garden wall, the flowers grow.

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Mind Time

I watched "Inner Child" last night, a first season episode of Fringe. It's the best example so far of the show's tendency to introduce two ideas and have them converge. In this case, Olivia's pursuit of a serial killer turns out to be aided by the simultaneous discovery of a feral child in an abandoned building with special powers.

Walter insists they're not psychic powers but empathic powers. I'm not sure that goes anywhere towards explaining how he knows names and addresses Olvia doesn't know. But okay, it's still fun. It's sweet she and the boy form a bond, it'll be kind of a shame if the show just forgets about him.

I also watched "Crackers Don't Matter", the legendary Farscape episode, last night because sometimes it's comforting when the level of craziness you encounter in life is reflected and amplified onscreen.

X Sonnet #1815

Desired action fizzled out of light.
Reflective disks contain the movie stuff.
A broken laser dropped the day for night.
The angry captive broke a rusty cuff.
With simple shading, pictures sleep alive.
Distorted fire brings itself to bliss.
The meaning changed for desert kings to thrive.
Another swing was Casey's final miss.
On fire loops, the dreams return to port.
Assuming sherry's gone the way of knights.
As dreary voices stall the royal court.
The absent cabbage wins the daily fights.
Across a rougher soil, linen breaks.
And all her sequined skies, the lady stakes.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Peace Kept on Farscape

Farscape, a Science Fiction series that began as a story about misfits, finding a way to live in a hostile galaxy, concludes with a story about choosing mass destruction over perpetual war. For the most part, the strokes are too broad for this war story to really work but there are still enough moments for characters to provide the Farscape fan with a bittersweet farewell.

The Peacekeeper Wars, Part II

Very quickly, many plot elements from Part I are resolved as our heroes escape from Scarran imprisonment, the baby is transferred from Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) back to Aeryn (Claudia Black), and D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) and Chiana (Gigi Edgley) return from their apparent deaths along with a team of Luxan commandos headed by none other than D'Argo's son, Jothee, now played by Nathaniel Dean, taking over the role from Matt Newton.

Jothee's former internal conflict about his identity as a Luxan, something that fit well in with the series' general theme of misfits, is totally absent as we find the young man now fully integrated with Luxan culture. The rocky love triangle between D'Argo, Jothee, and Chiana, which dealt with the blurred lines of a family dichotomy, are only briefly touched on here. Instead, we mainly see exchanges between D'Argo and Jothee that resolve their relationship to a seemingly comfortable father and son rapport. Chiana's feelings for Jothee are never discussed, the simplification all apparently being in the interest of bidding D'Argo an uncomplicated farewell when he dies heroically near the end.

Ben Browder and Anthony Simcoe maintain an entertaining chemistry and the two busting balls a little bit while D'Argo's dying does bring a smile to my face. I never really liked the idea of D'Argo and Chiana as a couple though it might have been entertaining to see their plans to become farmers on Hyneria meet with catastrophe. I'd love to see a story about D'Argo getting furious after discovering Chiana's developed a taste for frelling Hynerians.

But I was really disappointed by the conclusion of the relationship between Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) and Sikozu (Raelee Hill). When Scorpius unmasks her as the spy, he has one line where he laments she has ruined something "unique". But despite Sikozu's history with the other characters, particularly Crichton, we never get any hint of internal conflict in her nor are any of the other characters shown reacting to the revelation of her betrayal. That's the kind of thing that should have been the meat of the episode, that would have been in the first three seasons.

Crichton's decision to finally use the wormhole weapon gives the series finale an appropriately spectacular note but one can't help remembering that this very thing was the climax of season three and, in that case, the show did a much better job of trying it to character motives--the Scarrans had to be stopped and suddenly twin Crichton sees his life as not amounting to a hill of beans. In Peacekeeper Wars, the need to forge peace between the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans is never as strongly established. Like many other genre series--as I complained constantly about with Game of Thrones--getting a glimpse of the average civilians affected by the ongoing conflict might have been helpful. Weren't the Peacekeepers supposed to be an evil empire and the Scarrans ruthless killers? I kind of feel like the Yojimbo solution might have been more reasonable. As it is, it's still not clear that Crichton destroying a planet was the best idea.

I'm still not crazy about the pregnancy plot but it is great watching Ben Browder and Claudia Black together. Browder musters his madness wonderfully for one last time, too, and the sight of him stumbling about, bleeding from the head while arguing about his lousy position in life captures one of the essential aspects of the series.

So that's it, for now. There are canon comics which I haven't read. There's always the potential for the show to return, too. When I spoke to Gigi Edgley last year, she seemed certain it would. I find myself hoping she's right.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing
Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster
Episode 9: Losing Time
Episode 10: Relativity
Episode 11: Incubator
Episode 12: Meltdown
Episode 13: Scratch 'n Sniff
Episode 14: Infinite Possibilities, Part I: Daedalus Demands
Episode 15: Infinite Possibilities, Part II: Icarus Abides
Episode 16: Revenging Angel
Episode 17: The Choice
Episode 18: Fractures
Episode 19: I-Yensch, You-Yensch
Episode 20: Into the Lion's Den, Part I: Lambs to the Slaughter
Episode 21: Into the Lion's Den, Part II: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Episode 22: A Dog with Two Bones

Season Four

Episode 1: Crichton Kicks
Episode 2: What was Lost, Part I: Sacrifice
Episode 3: What was Lost, Part II: Resurrection
Episode 4: Lava's a Many Splendoured Thing
Episode 5: Promises
Episode 6: Natural Election
Episode 7: John Quixote
Episode 8: I Shrink Therefore I Am
Episode 9: A Prefect Murder
Episode 10: Coup by Clam
Episode 11: Unrealised Reality
Episode 12: Kansas
Episode 13: Terra Firma
Episode 14: Twice Shy
Episode 15: Mental as Anything
Episode 16: Bringing Home the Beacon
Episode 17: A Constellation of Doubt
Episode 18: Prayer
Episode 19: We're So Screwed: Fetal Attraction
Episode 20: We're So Screwed, Part II: Hot to Katratzi
Episode 21: We're So Screwed, Part III: La Bomba
Episode 22: Bad Timing

The Peacekeeper Wars

Part I

Friday, July 17, 2020

Keeping Wars from Peace

Two years after Farscape abruptly concluded its fourth and final season, a pair of TV movies aired, the result of fervent demands from disappointed fans. The miniseries is essentially a condensed version of what the showrunners had planned for an unmade fifth season. It bears many of the problems in terms of story and character that cropped up in season four but it's still great to revisit the wonderful locations and effects and to enjoy the performances of a terrific ensemble cast.

The Peacekeeper Wars, Part I

We meet up with Dominar Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) showing off his heretofore unseen swimming prowess as he gobbles up pieces of a "crystalised" Crichton (Ben Browder) and Aeryn (Claudia Black) off the ocean floor. So, of course, the pair weren't really killed. This solution to what had looked like a permanent problem results in the amusing development of Rygel's body taking custody of Aeryn's foetus.

This is discovered by none other than Grunchlk (Hugh Keays-Byrne), one of the more memorable characters from the series' history who makes his first appearance since the beginning of the third season. No explanation is given for his surviving what looked like death back in season three but we can forgive this oversight when we have the man delivering lines like, "If there was a little passenger before, it ain't aboard the train no more."

Less forgivable are some of the ongoing problems resulting from pushes to get characters from point A to B without much concern for how they do so. Why does it make sense for Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) to abandon his command of a Peacekeeper armada to travel as a refugee aboard Moya again just because Crichton is alive again? Crichton was alive when Scorpius last left Moya, after all.

When D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) talks briefly to Aeryn about her baby during a gunfight, she tells him that Crichton wants the baby so bad that she's trying to want it too for his sake. It seems kind of late in the game to give her character this motive. It might also put a complicating light on the torture she underwent in the previous season if the show ever bothered to portray any lasting psychological effects from the experience in Aeryn's behaviour or in the way others treat her.

The plot about the war between Scarrans and Peacekeepers continues to get hazier, especially when a deus ex machina McGuffin is introduced in the form of a sentient race capable of influencing warring factions into pursuing peace.

Jool (Tammy MacIntosh is briefly returned in order to wear an unexplained cave girl outfit and sexily straddle and smooch Crichton--which is nice though one wonders what happened to her yen for D'Argo. She doesn't last long in any case, being obliterated with the Eidelons by a "precaution" missile courtesy of the Scarrans.

Stark (Paul Goddard) and the last survivor of the Eidelons (Ron Haddrick) confer about the psychology of Scarrans as though this factors into the peace negotiation technique but it still seems more like mind control as a disappointing shortcut for the development of relationships. Which is too bad because the Scarrans remain intriguing with fantastic makeup and costumes.

Even if their makeup, and Scorpius', looks oddly more artificial than it did in season four. I'm not sure if it's the makeup or something to do with the cameras but their faces look a bit more like masks, thicker and shinier.

I find I like Sikozu's (Raelee Hill) costume redesign a lot more now than I did the first time I watched the miniseries.

I was happy she had at least one moment talking about her relationship with Scorpius that explores her tendency to see other beings only in terms of whether they're inferior or superior.

The apparent deaths of Chiana (Gigi Edgley) and D'Argo at the hands of Ahkna (Francesca Buller) is a nice, surprising plot development though their escape is attained by the disappointingly improbable means of D'Argo somehow pulling both himself and Chiana unharmed from the explosion of his craft and floating in space, keeping Chiana alive with his own breath.

Crichton's decision to bring Staleek (Duncan Young) into the wormhole feels a little like a repeat of Crichton bringing Scorpius into a wormhole but the confrontation between Einstein (John Bach) and the Emperor is kind of neat. I liked that the situation actually seemed to compel the emperor to see reason, a much more effective development than the quick fix of the Eidelons.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

The Badness of the Timing

So here we are, the infamously premature final episode of Farscape. In some ways, a decent enough episode that returns to some aspects of the show largely absent from the fourth season, but, at the same time, it feels oddly rushed in places and some characters make oddly abrupt decisions.

Season Four, Episode Twenty Two: Bad Timing

Having accidentally mentioned birds of paradise are plentiful on Earth, Crichton (Ben Browder) now has to race against the Scarrans, who ingest the plant to prevent themselves from intellectually devolving. Who'd have thought birds of paradise would be so hard to synthesise.

But the episode begins with Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) and Sikozu (Raelee Hill) being expelled from Moya because Braca (David Franklin) has shown up with the Peacekeeper command carrier he's seized from Grayza. This leads to a couple sweet moments between Scorpius and Sikozu dining on the big Peacekeeper ship.

There's no time for Grayza to appear in this episode, though, or for Stark (Paul Goddard) to comment on Scorpius being there in the first place. Stark feels very hastily written in the episode as Pilot's (Lani Tupu) helper. I sense a lot of hasty rewriting was going on--it made sense when he was torturing Scorpius, it made no sense that he was a bioloid. Why would the Scarrans bother making a bioloid of Stark anyway?

The episode doesn't even have time to show Pilot in a transport pod navigating a wormhole, having been temporarily removed from Moya to perform a risky wormhole popping stunt Crichton has contrived. But we do get the nice scene of Crichton on the moon, bidding farewell to his father.

More bittersweet is Crichton and Aeryn (Claudia Black) on the boat, meeting what looks like their ultimate fate at the hands of a very impressive animatronic alien.

The episode also features Chiana (Gigi Edgley) finally using her power vision again, though, sadly, it's to be rendered permanently (for now) blind.

Fortunately, this isn't, of course, really the end of the series. A miniseries, The Peacekeeper Wars, follows. It is the end of the fourth season, in many ways the most generic season of the series. The relationship plot between Crichton and Aeryn revolves around her pregnancy and the identity of the father, the kind of story that would seem more at home on a soap opera. And it's delivered unevenly, from the traumatic and serious events around Aeryn's capture and torture, to the coy evasions of the subject in some scenes. The makeup and effects, however, are certainly at their strongest with the Scarrans in particular benefiting from redesigns in both wardrobe and makeup. Lacking the absorbing drama of season three and the adventurousness of the first two seasons, it's still pretty frelling good.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four

Friday, June 12, 2020

Then It's the Bomb That will Bring Us Together

Flowers are deadly serious business on Farscape, especially when there's a nuclear bomb involved.

Season Four, Episode Twenty One: We're So Screwed, Part III: La Bomba

Negotiations inevitably fall apart once again and our heroes are forced to improvise complicated plans as they go along. Things really go south when the sensor Crichton (Ben Browder) rigged for his nuke belt stops working, taking all his leverage with it.

Both he and Aeryn (Claudia Black) seem strangely withdrawn in this episode. I suspect this was intentional, maybe a comment on the inevitable emotional fatigue that may occur after years and years of torture and harrowing escapes. Still, especially in Claudia Black's case, I can't help just feeling like the actors are checked out. I wonder if it was related to any offscreen drama.

Everyone else seems very alive--Chiana (Gigi Edgeley), D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) are all as crazy and/or irascible as ever. But their parts are small--most of the episode's actual drama involves the power plays among Scarrans and Peacekeepers.

The Scarrans are certainly a wonder to behold. The Emperor (Duncan Young) actually navigating between benevolence and threats when dealing with Crichton comes off as genuinely smart. The rivalry between Ahkna (Francesca Buller) and Janek (Jason Clark) is amusing.

And, meanwhile, Braca (David Franklin) relieves Grayza (Rebecca Riggs) of duty, citing her mental instability and not her dress code. I do miss the time when a character on a tv show could show that much cleavage for no particular reason.

Really, though, it's a fair cop; Grayza was going to force the whole crew to join her in a suicide mission.

We also learn a little more about Sikozu (Raelee Hill) in this episode and her involvement with a strange resistance group. It's too bad this is only one episode away from the end of the series--I would have liked to have seen her relationship with Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) play out properly.

The Stark (Paul Goddard) who tortured Scorpius is revealed in this episode to in fact be a bioloid. Noranti (Melissa Jaffer) and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) rescue the real Stark. I don't quite see why the real Stark couldn't have tortured Scorpius.

All in all, a good episode but, again, not quite reaching the highs of pre-season four episodes.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four

Wednesday, June 03, 2020

Liars, Nukes, and Money

It's time for Crichton to put his boots right on the Scarran dinner table as Farscape adds a new wrinkle to its cold war plot. Now Crichton wants to get paid. Or so he says.

Season Four, Episode Twenty: We're So Screwed, Part II: Hot to Katratzi

Why not "We're So Frelled"? It could be my imagination but it seems like there's less of the alien slang at this point in the series, which is a bit disappointing. A more noticeable disappointment is Aeryn (Claudia Black) being completely recovered from her incarceration and torture.

The little waltz she and Crichton (Ben Browder) have on an elevator is sweet but I kept thinking--this woman just had four giant spikes in her pregnant belly. Surely that should have some kind of lingering impact, if not physical at least psychological. Okay, you could say Aeryn just happens to be really strong. But one of the great things about the show is how the lasting effects of severe trauma manifest in Crichton's personality. Why pass up a similar opportunity for storytelling with Aeryn? Remember how great Claudia Black was in "Choices" in season three, when Aeryn was dealing with the trauma of losing the other Crichton?

Sure, "Hot to Katratzi" is fun. It is fun watching Crichton play chicken with a nuclear bomb. The Scarran puppetry and makeup effects are fantastic, too. And I do like the return of Stark (Paul Goddard), torturing Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), and I found Scorpius being a frustrating masochist about it even more amusing. But mostly these episodes feel like just an echo of the great "Liars, Guns, and Money" three parter.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Staying In Scarran Space

It's a quarantine lockdown on Farscape on a Scarran space station in a plot that finally makes something more of Noranti than a walking gag.

Season Four, Episode Nineteen: We're So Screwed, Part 1: Fetal Attraction

We have a chance to meet more Kalish, Sikozu's (Raelee Hill) people who are subjugated by the Scarrans and running the border station on which the episode takes place.

When it turns out the ship carrying Aeryn (Claudia Black) is about to leave in thirty minutes, Noranti (Melissa Jaffer) hastily concocts a strategy that involves provoking a relapse of a highly contagious disease Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) had at some point in the past, when he was Dominar. This buys some time as the station administrator is forced to call a lockdown, detaining the Scarran ship. Since Kalish and Sebaceans aren't immune to the disease, Noranti has to work quickly to cure Rygel.

Melissa Jaffer is a good actress--she'd been on the show previously as a dying Luxan in season two and she would go on to have a small role in Mad Max: Fury Road--so it's good to see Noranti being more than the omniscient, mysterious healer or the old lady who likes to gross out the young people. You can see her frantic as she tries to hold onto her identity as the mystic with all the answers, fronting a confidence as she digs through herbs and potions. Inevitably she has to face the fact that her solution for saving Aeryn results in the deaths of uninvolved Kalish and Sebaceans.

It also gives Rygel an all too rare moment to reflect on his time as a Dominar in a way that shows him as more than caricature. As a ruler, he too, had to make decisions which would inevitably cause people to die with never any certainty that an alternative wouldn't be better. But Rygel concludes by saying, "Welcome to Moya" and, indeed, one of the nice things about Farscape is that it doesn't shy away from putting its characters in difficult positions.

Physical as well as philosophical. Poor Aeryn endures more in season four than in the other three seasons put together. I suppose she hasn't quite caught up to all of the involuntary surgery and mind rape Crichton (Ben Browder) has been subjected to, though. Not the kind of competition you want to win.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Aeryn's Resistance and Crichton's Reluctance

Farscape dips its toe into the realm of torture porn for a particularly cruel episode. Certainly it's one that affirms the severity of the threats facing the crew of Moya, even when those threats come from among their own ranks.

Season Four, Episode Eighteen: Prayer

We join Aeryn (Claudia Black), held captive by the Scarrans, and apparently talking to herself. She explains how the Sebaceans once had a deity, a sadistic or uncaring goddess, whom Aeryn, in her desperation, now resorts to praying to. One can hardly blame her when she's placed in what looks even more like a gynaecological exam chair than the one from the season two episode "The Ugly Truth".

Claudia Black is quoted by the Farscape wiki as saying it reminded her of something from Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg's movie about deranged twin gynaecologists played by Jeremy Irons. That movie also concerns pregnancy though it indulges in no scene as explicit as the one in "Prayer" where a Scarran heat ray visits a slow and painful death on a foetus.

This was censored in U.K. broadcasts. Speaking as someone who doesn't believe in the usefulness of trigger warnings and who enjoys Eli Roth movies I don't personally object to the content though I find it amusing that, according to the Wiki, David Kemper and production staff felt better about the scene because it's later revealed to be a sham. It was staged to coerce Aeryn into believing her fellow inmate is not a spy. This is surely a rarefied trick of the mind. Regardless of whether Morrock (Sacha Horler) was really pregnant or not within the confines of the story, the violent late term abortion is of course fake. It's a TV show and the foetus is a puppet and any trauma or moral offence incurred seems unlikely to be mollified when the fake violence is revealed much later in the episode to be fake fake violence.

Meanwhile, Crichton (Ben Browder) and Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) are on a mission that's more Saw than Hostel, visiting an alternate reality where they find they must kill alternate versions of Moya's crew in order to find a clue to Aeryn's location. John knows the timeline is fixed, that these people are going to die anyway, but the episode is ambiguous enough on this detail to present a conundrum more thought provoking than the shallow torture puzzle of Saw (I like the Hostel movies much better). It's also great seeing Raelee Hill playing the Stark/Sikozu amalgam. She does a pretty good job imitating the real Stark's mannerisms and ticks.

The episode reminds the viewer of the brutal and unforgiving nature of the galaxy on Farscape. For Aeryn's story, in which she prays Crichton will come and rescue her, it ironically links a more traditional story form--the hero rescuing the damsel in distress--with forsaking religion. In this, there's an interesting echo of "John Quixote" earlier in the season. One wonders if this was part of a planned overall theme for the fourth season from the beginning.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Season Four