Farscape 1
I saw Farscape, a TV show, late. My guess, perhaps ten years after release. As a midday TV show. Farscape aired first near 1999. I stumbled across it by chance, didn’t share with anyone. I’d caught up with some kind of syndication. At the time, I saw a few episodes, not all of it. Enough to get the gist. I revisit—my girlfriend and me have reached the end of series one and two.
Let’s get something straight, from the off. Farscape was pitched as SciFi, and debuted on SciFi channels and I’m not arguing with that, this is the TV and film definition of SciFi. Farscape is adventures in space—think to some extent Dr Who, then Star Trek and the steady support and production of later and similar TV series. What I need to straighten out is that this is not my definition of science fiction—I make science fiction as plausible science, not space travel, and I have a a bundle of speculative fiction categories to go with that. Farscape’s ‘worm‐holes’ are no more plausible than ‘matter transportation’, ‘time‐folds’ and the other conveniences of story that may as well be Dorothy’s whirlwind. But I also want to say that there’s no adverse criticism in this. I make this kind of ‘’SciFi’ as an adventure story in a space‐fantasy landscape. I can be fond of it.
Even with that said, there are many odd and off things about Farscape… they are difficult to list. The most upfront is that it’s not clear if it’s a kid’s show or not. I don’t have access, but guess from interviews that it was watched by young adults, twenty and thirty year olds. The box sets of hard media is rated at ‘18’, so that’s clear—‐an adult sale. Yet the ambiguity remains. I’m fairly sure I saw episodes scheduled into midday TV slots, and the show sometimes behaves as a kid’s show—it substitutes expletive language, it avoids gore in violence. Even now it’s impossible to find anywhere a full description of Farscape’s oddities. The show was somewhere described as, ‘bonkers’. But, you know what, I’ll try.
Some of the tension between kid and adult in Farscape may come from the origin in the Jim Henson Workshop—they made The Muppets, which were intended as adult entertainment. Then The Muppets became a fully‐fledged TV series deliberately aimed at children, Sesame Street. Which show then became a vortex of research and discussion about media production for kids.
Henson puppet work is recognisable, it’s been a global brand for over half a century. So any work is bound to be associated with ‘Sesame Street’ and so kids. For viewers, it’s a given. I’m not going to say Farscape ‘suffers’ from this. Farscape has it’s own identity. I say only there is an ambiguity here, and some reviews of Farscape struggle with that.
And the Henson Workshop is not the only possibility for child/adult tension in this production. Because production of Farscape is credited to a somewhat short‐lived entity—‐ten years—called Hallmark Entertainment. Hallmark… known for their stationary range which at it’s worst offers grotesque common sentiment. Hallmark would have nothing to do with something wild. Whether this is the reason, I will never know. But Farscape substituted most expletives and bad language with words like ‘frell’. Sure sign of a kid’s show, right? Hallmark or not, this ambiguity is not even consistent in Farscaoe. Because at the end of Series Two the character ‘Rigel’ says,
The blue bitch….
So why hide bad language until then—although the comment is very funny and a surprise true—or did something change?
Henson, Hallmark or producer pitching, the tension runs deeper than the substitution of foul language, Because the drama is stubbornly supportive of common virtues like standing by friends, being fair, understanding people by their troubles, and so forth. Even the most ‘evil’ guy, ‘Scorpius’, has a miserable history to explain and a solid reason for his pursuit of ‘John Crichton’… and what he wants from Crichton—‘wormhole technology’—is clearly shown as reason that leads him to decisions that do immense damage to human values. So, down deep, Farscape is a ‘safe’ production. Don’t expect to see exploration of suffering, misery or consequences or loss. Many would react instinctively to this too, so say Farscape is for kids. Whatever the causes, from what I’ve pitched so far, we’d call Farscape as a light‐hearted romp through outer‐space scenarios. Which I’ve never seen it described as, but I think some may accept. But hold up. I’d like to go sideways…
Farscape created outer space and some alien landscapes using computer graphics—I guess—and camera tricks. But most of these landscape extrapolations are brief, and outer‐space has little influence in Farscape—story goes where it wants, people here and there wear spacesuits or meet a big spaceship. The rest is real and expensive‐looking sets, and for sure puppets. But in the age we are talking about, the production of film effects was changing. Eight–ten years earlier films like Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and Toy Story introduced computer‐generated imagery to mainstream feature film with progressively greater involvement, and made computer graphics into key actors like the ‘T‐1000’, ‘veloceraptprs’ and ‘Woody’. This was clearly the future, as the imagery could become visually lifelike and, cost aside, anything could be done. So where would model‐makers and puppeteers, like the Henson company, stand? Likely, nowhere or, as a puppeteer from Jurassic Park said, “extinct”.
Except for one feature of puppets which CGI has not yet, nor will have for a long time—it is physically there. A friend pointed this out—CGI effects are increasingly capable, but often banal. Characters and immediate scenery are constructed from virtual outlines with textures overlaid. Close up they flatten out and smear. And computer generated effects have less effect too, Computer introduce the capability of easy repetition. Here is not the place to go too far into this, but 2000 CGI warriors, as every writer has known since the seventeenth century, can not match one human story or, come to that, the story of one rubber puppet. End result, my friend proposed, Farscape has a visual impact that is physical. The puppetry also offered some creative possibilities that early and current CGI efforts can not match (there’s always Jurassic Park…). Even in high definition, when a viewer can see the cracks, puppetry is not illusion destroying, it’s part of the fun—seeing the creation, like watching the originals of King Kong or Thunderbirds again.
Speaking of reality and sarcasm, since the Eighties the Henson company had developed a curious and unwholesome fantasy outlook with the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Was this because they’d always had an adult angle, or because they saw the end? Anyway, though by the son and not the father, Farscape gave us a natural end. In Farscape, the character ‘Rygel’ is a puppet. And he’s about as ‘bad’ a character as a Hallmark production could carry. Rygel is not malicious or violent, but he is greedy, self‐serving, correspondingly disloyal and a liar. His redeeming features are slim—he has insight, especially about bad people, and he is very good at abstract strategy. With Rygel, the Henson company achieved something they had always played with, even back with Sesame Street, a cute puppet who is obnoxious, but this time in a full fantasy context. The joke never wears thin, indeed, Rygel is not unlike a modern Punch, framing the grotequery we otherwise deny. ET, go home!
How we tackle Farscape’s oddities from here is any way you look. For example, there was a decision to film Farscape in Australia. American film has long bled the small‐but‐active Australian industry for skills. Why this production went in the opposite direction is and will remain a mystery to people without resource like me—maybe it was cheaper, and a SciFi channel cared less about control? But it’s not hard to see effects. Most obviously, it gave access to a depth of solid acting—aside from the central character, most of Farscape’s cast is from Australian and New Zealand. This gives a slight edge to the man‐adrift‐with‐the‐aliens plotline. I’m not for discussing actors much—others are bothered, I’m not. They’re part of the scheme. And in Farscape, they obviously good and going for it.
I can only hazard, but maybe Australian production is also the reason Farscape looks the way it looks. The actors are dressed in outlandish affect, no more so than the character ‘Zhaan’ who is coloured light blue with a hue shift in shadow towards purple, which between the prosthetics and shaving caused the actress to quit the show early. I can’t prove this, but suspect. It’s a got‐to of Australian film—self‐decoration, tattoos and outlandish dress. Think The Cars That Ate Paris and Mad Max, soap operas abouut delinquent teenage gangs, and more. The outlandish dress and character features are throughout Farscape. The character ‘Scorpio’ is dressed in bondage gear, which I’d never credit but for the wilder side of old SciFi. Though you may like to factor in the need to blend puppet with human actors, and the Henson workshop would have had the gear and skills to create a stream of damaged or bubble‐skinned aliens.
Ever since SciFi got onto film, it has had a tendency to stress realism, and so be sombre. The purple blobs of Star Trek were soon substituted for the pristine surfaces of 2001, then the battered metal of Silent Running. And it’s been that way since. Not so with Farscape. Farscape echos with sound effects—groans, whooshes, roars and gurgles. Greenery is vivid, buildings crawl in organic shapes… when scenery gets sober, there’s a dramatic point. So Farscape abandons realism—outer‐space is silent, recall? But that’s no adverse criticism, because Farscape is fantasy, not realism. Farscape brings back the times when space fantasy meant Venus was populated by flesh‐eating hallucinogenic orchids.