Farscape 1.01
Jun. 22nd, 2010 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxSo, okay, I'm bored. Nothing is on TV. And, having seen several mentions of Farscape on my f-list recently, I decided to indulge some nostalgia and rewatch parts of the series.
Farscape 1.01 - "Premiere"
"Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. “Close Encounters” my ass..."
Generally I find a lot of Season 1 Farscape to be the show trying to find itself. I don't think it began as a fully formed creation but more as a pastiche of ideas and references, which isn't to say that I don't love it because I do. Season 1 is like a baby. It's a little soft and pudgy, but quite cute. And, you only get a hint of what it's going to become even though the main parts are already there.
That said, I think that the premiere does a lot of hard work. It sets the stage, and it does so best with Crichton.
Poor, innocent John. Look at him claiming to be a scientist and not a soldier. Look at him dressed in white. Classic hero...or Alice before she fell down the rabbit hole. And, having seen the entire series multiple times, I appreciate innocent, idealistic, dressed in classic hero white John because I know that he'll be broken, tortured, and pushed to -- and over -- the edge of sanity so as to one day become the haunted, black leather clad, slightly mad, increasingly desperate fugitive that we love.
The opening shot of the series is John looking at the shuttle at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Australia doubles for Florida nicely here. This gives grounding to what is going to be a far-out show. The same is true of John's scene with his father.
What's nice about that scene is that it tells us a great deal about John.
Jack Crichton is an old school astronaut from the days when people actually knew the astronauts' names. John sees his dad as a hero, one that he both respects and, in the way of many sons, perhaps resents just a little. He feels as though he lives in the shadow of his father's importance. It's John and Jack's scene that always sets up John's hero's journey for me:
Hero's journey, right?
So John heads off to his mission on the shuttle with his Farscape module and everything goes disastrously wrong. As the series title credits tell us, he got 'sucked through a wormhole'... and through the looking glass, and over the rainbow
And into an asteroid field that reminds me of Star Wars. He isn't responsible for killing Crais's brother, though.
The advantage of a rewatch is that I can appreciate character growth from a different perspective. I can appreciate how this works into Crais's character arc, and it's a tribute to Crais that in retrospect Crais's reaction makes even more sense.
Crais is in guilt-filled denial and desperately looking for someone -- other than himself -- to blame. Crichton, being in the collision, is an incredibly convenient target. So John's ship colliding with Crais's brother's ship, leading to Crais's brother's death, is actually a more pivotal moment for Crais than it is for Crichton, which I think is as it should be.
Crichton is then swept into the escaping ship of prisoners. Not many prisoners as it turns out. Just a handful, Dominar Rygel XVI (who is sort of Yoda's quasi-evil cousin), Zhaan (the female anarchist priest), and D'Argo (who has some overlap with the Klingons I think, at least in his introduction. But, it's somewhat complicated by the revelation that in his race's terms, he's more or less just out of adolescence, and because as we grow to learn about D'Argo, we find that he isn't just a warrior but also a romantic and a farmer. He's more than what he first appears to be).
It being a rewatch also works in that it makes Rygel's, Zhaan's, and D'Argo's treatment of Crichton make sense. As far as they're concerned, Crichton is a Peacekeeper, the species that has held them (and tortured at least two of them) as political prisoners for years. John appears to be part of the group that they are trying to escape. So they toss him into the brig where he's met with...
Well, hindsight allows us to say that he's tossed into the brig with the love of his life, only neither Crichton nor Aeryn realize this yet. He's just relieved to see another human face, and she's content to beat the crap out of him and demand name, rank, and whatever is the Peacekeeper equivalent of serial number may be. Hee! Of course it'll turn out to be true love.
Let me admit it, I have a straight-girl's crush on Aeryn. She was a fighter pilot trying to apprehend the escaping prisoners who got caught in their escape. I like that Aeryn is a kick-ass soldier who schemes hers and Crichton's own escape from the prisoners. And the pilot episode works almost as much to launch her storyline as it does to launch Crichton's.
Having been captured by the prisoners she had been sent to retrieve, she manages to escape, and heads to the closest planet to meet-up with her military unit. This is where she runs afoul of... not really the Peacekeepers exactly because I don't know that anything she's done thus far actually violated any rules, though Peacekeepers have a lot of them. It's really more that she's run afoul of Crais's guilt-laced vendetta against the man who -- Crais needs to believe -- killed his brother.
I do think it does a nice bit to establish Aeryn in that the Peacekeepers have very, very fascist overtones. The art direction for them definitely leads us to think of this sort of thing. But we're shown Aeryn protesting with her superiors that Crichton is not a threat.
Aeryn: "I don't believe that he is brave enough or intelligent enough to attack one of our Prowlers intentionally..."
Maybe John could have wished for a defense that wasn't quite so insulting. :) Still, we are introduced to Aeryn in a way that leads us to at least think that she does not blindly follow the orders of her fascist military culture. We're encouraged to think there's better in her, which leads me to the moment that I love.
I haven't watched the episode "The Way We Weren't" in a while, but I seem to remember there being a connection between that episode and the premiere in that it harkens back to Crichton's reaching out to Aeryn in this episode.
Like Crichton, Aeryn loses everything, including her world, in this episode. Crichton is ripped through a wormhole. Aeryn is labeled a traitor, branded as being 'irreversibly contaminated' by herdefense association with lesser lifeforms, and D'Argo informs us that such a sentence means death for Aeryn. She protests. She can't believe it. As she says, it's her life, her breeding, it's everything that she is. She is losing everything here, and Crichton says to her:
Crichton: "You can be more..."
Aeryn has a journey to make too.
So she joins the escaping prisoners. They're all wanted now. They are all cut off from their homes and in danger. And it makes a pretty good premise for the show.
Not all the bits are in place. We're missing Chiana and Scorpius, who it's difficult to imagine the series without. But the premiere did a fairly good job of kicking things off, and I appreciate that even in retrospect I can see where it stands as a pivotal moment in Crichton's, Aeryn's, and Crais's lives. I have to admit that I appreciate the character development aspect of it the most.
Farscape 1.01 - "Premiere"
"Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. “Close Encounters” my ass..."
Generally I find a lot of Season 1 Farscape to be the show trying to find itself. I don't think it began as a fully formed creation but more as a pastiche of ideas and references, which isn't to say that I don't love it because I do. Season 1 is like a baby. It's a little soft and pudgy, but quite cute. And, you only get a hint of what it's going to become even though the main parts are already there.
That said, I think that the premiere does a lot of hard work. It sets the stage, and it does so best with Crichton.
Poor, innocent John. Look at him claiming to be a scientist and not a soldier. Look at him dressed in white. Classic hero...or Alice before she fell down the rabbit hole. And, having seen the entire series multiple times, I appreciate innocent, idealistic, dressed in classic hero white John because I know that he'll be broken, tortured, and pushed to -- and over -- the edge of sanity so as to one day become the haunted, black leather clad, slightly mad, increasingly desperate fugitive that we love.
The opening shot of the series is John looking at the shuttle at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Australia doubles for Florida nicely here. This gives grounding to what is going to be a far-out show. The same is true of John's scene with his father.
What's nice about that scene is that it tells us a great deal about John.
Jack Crichton is an old school astronaut from the days when people actually knew the astronauts' names. John sees his dad as a hero, one that he both respects and, in the way of many sons, perhaps resents just a little. He feels as though he lives in the shadow of his father's importance. It's John and Jack's scene that always sets up John's hero's journey for me:
Jack: I talked to Pete Maxwell and the others at Control. They're going to take real good care of you while you're up there. [silence] I heard that you went AWOL from the Rat Cage this morning. Man, in my day, if I'd ever broken quarantine like that they'd... Son, you got rattlers in your stomach?
John: I've been up on the shuttle before, Dad. Twice.
Jack: Didn't matter how many times I went up. Every time -- rattlers. First time I walked on the moon--
John: I'm not walkin' on the moon. I'm just running a little experiment.
Jack: An experiment to prove your own theory. Do you have any idea how proud that makes me? That's something I never did. All the guys in the collars and neckties got to use their brains. All I ever got to use was my--
John:[perhaps just a little irritated] Guts and [imitating his father] 'the seat of my flight suit!'
Jack: Son, I can't help being who I am -- who I was.
John: It's not who you are, Dad. I love who you are. It's being the son of who you are... Look, I can't be your kind of hero.
Jack: No, you can't be. But each man gets the chance to be his own kind of hero. Your time will come and when it does, watch out. Chances are, it'll be the last thing you ever expected...
Hero's journey, right?
So John heads off to his mission on the shuttle with his Farscape module and everything goes disastrously wrong. As the series title credits tell us, he got 'sucked through a wormhole'... and through the looking glass, and over the rainbow
And into an asteroid field that reminds me of Star Wars. He isn't responsible for killing Crais's brother, though.
The advantage of a rewatch is that I can appreciate character growth from a different perspective. I can appreciate how this works into Crais's character arc, and it's a tribute to Crais that in retrospect Crais's reaction makes even more sense.
Crais is in guilt-filled denial and desperately looking for someone -- other than himself -- to blame. Crichton, being in the collision, is an incredibly convenient target. So John's ship colliding with Crais's brother's ship, leading to Crais's brother's death, is actually a more pivotal moment for Crais than it is for Crichton, which I think is as it should be.
Crichton is then swept into the escaping ship of prisoners. Not many prisoners as it turns out. Just a handful, Dominar Rygel XVI (who is sort of Yoda's quasi-evil cousin), Zhaan (the female anarchist priest), and D'Argo (who has some overlap with the Klingons I think, at least in his introduction. But, it's somewhat complicated by the revelation that in his race's terms, he's more or less just out of adolescence, and because as we grow to learn about D'Argo, we find that he isn't just a warrior but also a romantic and a farmer. He's more than what he first appears to be).
It being a rewatch also works in that it makes Rygel's, Zhaan's, and D'Argo's treatment of Crichton make sense. As far as they're concerned, Crichton is a Peacekeeper, the species that has held them (and tortured at least two of them) as political prisoners for years. John appears to be part of the group that they are trying to escape. So they toss him into the brig where he's met with...
Well, hindsight allows us to say that he's tossed into the brig with the love of his life, only neither Crichton nor Aeryn realize this yet. He's just relieved to see another human face, and she's content to beat the crap out of him and demand name, rank, and whatever is the Peacekeeper equivalent of serial number may be. Hee! Of course it'll turn out to be true love.
Let me admit it, I have a straight-girl's crush on Aeryn. She was a fighter pilot trying to apprehend the escaping prisoners who got caught in their escape. I like that Aeryn is a kick-ass soldier who schemes hers and Crichton's own escape from the prisoners. And the pilot episode works almost as much to launch her storyline as it does to launch Crichton's.
Having been captured by the prisoners she had been sent to retrieve, she manages to escape, and heads to the closest planet to meet-up with her military unit. This is where she runs afoul of... not really the Peacekeepers exactly because I don't know that anything she's done thus far actually violated any rules, though Peacekeepers have a lot of them. It's really more that she's run afoul of Crais's guilt-laced vendetta against the man who -- Crais needs to believe -- killed his brother.
I do think it does a nice bit to establish Aeryn in that the Peacekeepers have very, very fascist overtones. The art direction for them definitely leads us to think of this sort of thing. But we're shown Aeryn protesting with her superiors that Crichton is not a threat.
Aeryn: "I don't believe that he is brave enough or intelligent enough to attack one of our Prowlers intentionally..."
Maybe John could have wished for a defense that wasn't quite so insulting. :) Still, we are introduced to Aeryn in a way that leads us to at least think that she does not blindly follow the orders of her fascist military culture. We're encouraged to think there's better in her, which leads me to the moment that I love.
I haven't watched the episode "The Way We Weren't" in a while, but I seem to remember there being a connection between that episode and the premiere in that it harkens back to Crichton's reaching out to Aeryn in this episode.
Like Crichton, Aeryn loses everything, including her world, in this episode. Crichton is ripped through a wormhole. Aeryn is labeled a traitor, branded as being 'irreversibly contaminated' by her
Crichton: "You can be more..."
Aeryn has a journey to make too.
So she joins the escaping prisoners. They're all wanted now. They are all cut off from their homes and in danger. And it makes a pretty good premise for the show.
Not all the bits are in place. We're missing Chiana and Scorpius, who it's difficult to imagine the series without. But the premiere did a fairly good job of kicking things off, and I appreciate that even in retrospect I can see where it stands as a pivotal moment in Crichton's, Aeryn's, and Crais's lives. I have to admit that I appreciate the character development aspect of it the most.
