Leviathans for Dummies: The Big Blue Farscape Essay That Never Ends Part 2 (of 3 and That's It, I Swear) (Patreon)

Part One 

I Love Hanging With You, Man: My Buddy Farscape and Me

So here we are, you and me.

I’LL PAINT YOU A PICTURE.

It’s 1999. We’re in San Diego, right before I start at UCSD, in a two-bedroom North Park apartment that cost $800 a month total between me and my fundamentalist Christian yet also deeply closeted and self-loathing roommate, (facts unknown to me on move-in day), sitting on a moving box in front of a trash-ass 19-inch boxy-clunk big-butt TV with an illicit Heineken I wasn’t old enough to drink and spanakopita from the Greek cafe on the corner that’s almost still hot, nothing on the walls, termites in my bedroom the landlord was almost apologetic about, didn’t even own a dinner plate of my own yet, just so butterflies-in-stomach excited for this new thing called SciFi Fridays, a four-hour line-up, FOUR, FUCKIN FOUR BY GOD, including two, TWO, FUCKIN’ TWO BY GOD, brand new science fiction TV shows that could be about anything. ANYTHING! None of them were Star Trek or B5 or X-Files, I sure as crap didn’t have internet access at home so there was no way to even guess.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS. OF COURSE I DIDN’T HAVE A DATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT I WAS MAJORING IN ANCIENT GREEK FUCKING SOCRATES WAS MY DATE AND HE NEVER TIPS. SO EMBARRASSING.

It feels so weird to point this out now, because the rest of SciFi Friday shows are virtually forgotten, but Farscape was 100% the freaky kid who always sits in the back and no one knew what to do with in that line-up. All the ad dollars and marketing energy were behind a show called First Wave, which aired earlier and was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, which they never stopped telling us for a second, because WHOA NOW SCIFI IS FANCY YOU LIKED THE GODFATHER OR WHATEVER RIGHT?

There are days I feel like I’m the only one who actually watched all of First Wave, a program now most remembered, when it is at all, for employing a fully clothed Traci Lords as an attempt to salvage ratings, a concept which had to make it through so many meetings in which educated people truly believed that what the public truly wanted was a former underage porn star before it was even remotely socially acceptable to know out loud why she looked so familiar.

The other shows were Sliders, which was the proven veteran meant to anchor the newbies, and sometimes the new Outer Limits, sometimes Lexx, later on The Dead Zone, whatever they were trying to make stick.

And I admit, I sort of liked First Wave better on premier night, too.

Because I had no fucking idea what to do with this Farscape thing.

It just wasn’t like anything else. I mean, maybe D’Argo was sort of like a Klingon, but not really. The plucky crew wasn’t noble or high-minded intellectuals or even employed. They were a bunch of weird criminals and murderers and they didn’t have a mission or anything, they just got hungry or had bug problems on the ship or had to run away from the military instead of towards it or being it like the plucky crews did on most space SF shows ever. Everything was grungy and gross and breaking down like an old VW. The villain wasn’t this crazy galactic force (I mean, it was only S1 one, wait for it), he was just a messed-up regular guy in pain. The baddies were called Peacekeepers and that word was in the news kind of a lot in 1999, so I couldn’t figure out what they were trying to say about the UN and Kosovo?

I liked the blue lady. (It was only S1, wait for it.) And the angry leather lady. And I liked the muscley Only American in the Village solving his problems with hugs and math instead of backhanding women like Kirk, but I had a feeling the whole plot would revolve around John getting home and I didn’t really want John to get home because home is boring and space is cool, and not leaving the cool Other World is kind of a Whole Thing With Me, so was this really for me, in the long-run?

Even the theme song was…not a theme song. This was still the era of the theme song being a whole mood rather than the slick film school credit sequences we now more or less enjoy. And into the world of classical pieces and cheesy pop tunes and only Seinfeld in between came A BUNCH OF PEOPLE SCREAMING THEIR HEADS OFF LIKE IT WAS SPACE-YODEL NIGHT AT YE OLDE SWISS LASER-CHALET.

What.

I mean, YES.

But what?

From the height of 2022, I can tell you that the pilot is excellent, really so much more cohesive and dynamic than most shows are in their first episode, especially back then when half the pilots that got shot were never aired as part of their ultimate first seasons and only included as an extra on the DVD box sets that wouldn’t become a thing for another five-ish years. Well-paced, characters and conflict efficiently established, cool villain, kickass ship, new concepts that hadn’t been explored in televised SF yet already popping up everywhere, looks like a million bucks and I bet it was, even in 1999 bucks.

But that first Friday, there was no way to know what the show would become. So I recall, with shame, thinking that it was kind of a basic rag-tag crew premise and between Voyager being a whole mess and the recent Lost In Space movie reminding us all that “trying to get home because you got yoten into the star-boonies” is actually a pretty hard row to hoe because you have to maintain interest while obviously never getting home week after week unless it’s sweeps or a finale, and even then probably not. (For the youngs: sweeps was when they took Nielsen ratings data because it was impossible to gather and store that much information all the time before the digital age had fully settled into its big boy chair. Yes, my babies, there was a time when basic data storage was the limiting factor, and your nail polish did not, in fact, have 6 gigs of memory.) I was deeply unsure that I wanted to see someone else fail for an hour every Friday, even if the failure in question was damnably easy on the eyes.

And I’m not (only) talking about Ben Browder.

It took until episode 9 (that’s DNA Mad Scientist for you kids playing along at home) me to understand that I was probably going to watch every episode of this show and love it to death. I realize I made quite a point of telling you all awhile back that Ted Lasso did that in a few minutes. If having spent 3,000 words explaining that it was a different world when shows really wanted to stretch the episode count and thus often didn’t really get going for a whole season, (and a season was 22-25 episodes) well, I have done a bad job as a TV historian.

But it didn’t take any longer than seeing Claudia Black…just, at all, for any amount of time, just existing on screen…for me to know where I was gonna be on Fridays for awhile. And episode 9 is a big one for Aeryn Sun. The first one where I felt how deeply and honestly Farscape was going to handle repercussions and emotions, how absolutely fallible it was willing to allow the crew to be, how serious it was going to make room for all this wild goofiness to get.

Oh that halcyon North Park apartment so on-the-nose metaphorically located just outside the Hillcrest gayborhood, in which two awkward sad queer ladies who didn’t know they were queer just yet worked on figuring it out by, respectively, getting really drunk all the time, and watching Claudia Black do things every week like it was church.

Now, I’m not going to do a rundown of every character, because I want you to meet D’Argo and Rygel and Chiana and Pilot and beautiful blue Zhaan for yourselves, EVEN THOUGH I COULD BECAUSE I LOVE ALL MY SPACE BABIES. But since the whole genesis of this super fucking long essay was Claudia Black’s wonderful and heartbreaking Twitter thread, I want to say a few things about her now. 

Claudia Black played Aeryn Sun, who started out as the love interest and fairly quickly became the co-lead with Ben Browder’s John Crichton, the only human in the village. And I love me some Crichton. He’s endearing and funny and tough and yet usually solves problems with his brain as he’s a scientist first and foremost. He’s one of the great everyman SF characters. You want to love him and he makes it easy. The sheer charisma, without ever becoming a caricature of masculinity, is astonishing. That a show in 1999 even considered permitting a man who looks like he just walked out of a NASA recruitment ad except with, you know, biceps, be anything other than a caricature, let alone the absolute icon for positive, open, emotionally available, healthy masculinity Crichton is and remains even on the other side of two bonkers decades of societal growth and regression on that subject, is perhaps something more than astonishing.

But Aeryn Sun is the heart of this show, and for a lot of women like me, she was life-changing.

There were no women like Aeryn on television in 1999. None. Ivanova and Janeway and Seven of Nine and Scully and Buffy were all strong characters and game-changing in their ways, but there wasn’t anybody like Aeryn Sun because Aeryn Sun is a man’s part. Almost everything about her is coded masculine while almost everything about Crichton except his physicality is coded feminine. Their whole relationship is a gender reversal of everything American TV had spent decades telling us to expect out of hetero pairings.

I maintain they are the gayest straight couple in broadcast history, while Crichton and D’Argo are the straightest gay couple.

And I love that for them.

She’s a hardcore military pilot who’s absolutely shut down emotionally, aggressive and arrogant, a cog in a massive fascist system who, unlike most characters given that background, genuinely likes and enjoys her work, her life, killing inferior beings, and not feeling things most of the time. She is not just complicit in the crimes of her state, she was an enthusiastic participant, and at no point does the story shy away from that, excuse it, or fail to painfully deal with it as she evolves. There’s quite a few science fiction shows right now that are unwilling to deal with the morality of conqueror-cultures that honestly. Farscape was way ahead of the game on “maybe imperialism no, actually?” in a time when America was pretty high on its own supply of having “won” the Cold War a bare 8 years before, grooving on through the dotcom boom, and also swinging a red, white, and blue dick around assuring everyone there would never, ever be any consequences for that. That Peacekeeper name was clever as hell, and braver than it might seem should you be watching it for the first time today.

And it’s not just imperialism—one of my favorite things about Farscape has always been that humans aren’t treated as extra special wonderful space cinnamon rolls with precious traits no one else in the known universe possesses. Even Star Trek can’t help itself in lionizing homo sapiens pretty much all the time. In Farscape, it’s completely explicit that we are a minor species who kind of sucks, C- at best. Two stars. Not the worst, not the best. Exactly the place it makes our monkey brains sad to be, and I LOVE it. We don’t have to be arch-evils or special snowflakes! But probably we will not be as capable as species who have more going on in their face-area and/or have been at this space gig for a lot longer. It’s honest. It makes sense. One of my all-time favorite scenes involves the gang proving that human eyesight is garbage. Simple, but SO different than ANYTHING being put on film at that point in the 90s. Humans were either noble and generous and past their troubles or space-trash or simply the only species out there. This was new.

And while Peacekeepers look human, they are not, and that tension is worked for every drop of tension it can provide.

Aeryn is, at almost every point in the show, the tank that comes in to save the day. D’Argo, a Luxan warrior who seems set up to take that role, is certainly strong and driven by honor and loves to fight, but he gets super distracted by his emotions pretty much all the time. And that’s why we love him. (Sidebar: it’s also a dramatically honest portrayal of the Klingon “type.” Because Klingons pretend to be the very model of a modern Y chromosome and will tell you how stoic and unaffected by silly sentiment they are even when nobody asked and we’re all on fuck planet Risa so stop moping around and doing a terrorism to stop people having fun, WORF. But in reality, Klingons are the most emotional species in Star Trek and practically everything they do is because their giant hearts got hurt and they have zero coping mechanisms. D’Argo is that, but doesn’t pretend otherwise, and is a Snuggly Growly Boi who, unlike Worf, is an excellent wingman.)

(Ahem.)

But Aeryn never wavers. She punishes her feelings for happening to her whenever she can. It’s a hell of an arc from that to the person we love and care about so much by the end, the person who loves and cares so much in her own right. But so, so importantly, this isn’t a nasty little Bell, Book, and Candle thing (it’s a movie, you know how to use the internet) where she has to give up her strength to have feelings or vice versa. The arc happens without losing her strength, her ability, her history, herself. She doesn’t get to be forgiven just because she made some friends, and she doesn’t get relegated to the background and softened into mush the moment she engages romantically with a male character, WORF AND JADZIA. Which is what usually happens to female characters who step away from the power structures that allow them strength, even in shows that consider themselves very progressive.

In some ways, Aeryn Sun is SF’s David Rose. (Bear with me).

Farscape handles sexism and misogyny by creating a world in which it functionally does not exist. The idea that a woman might not be suited to anything at all, or a less advantageous fighting buddy than a man, is simply not a part of anyone’s mindset.

I suppose Crichton tries. Once.

Now, that’s as it should be, especially since none of the women in this show are human so any consideration of whether or not human women are as physically strong as human men is beyond irrelevant. But that’s not how it is, not even now, with a few exceptions. The Orville has an unnaturally strong female character and they bent themselves into pretzels to give a long-winded reason her species would be that way, practically waving their arms at the audience and yelling it’s not weird for a LADY to be STRONG, guys! Her planet has a lot of gravity! Don’t be scared! She is super nice and feminine otherwise!

Aeryn would never tolerate that shit. She’d pick up a whole-ass pylon and keep moving. But again, it is so hard for me to explain to you how rare that was at the time. Even Delenn fades from the action as the pace of Babylon 5 picks up and she marries Sheridan. Nothing was gender-blind in 1999, and the most dangerous thing a Strong Female Character could do for her long-term script progress was sleep with another main cast member. (Scully never explicitly did, which is perhaps why she got to stay Scully so long.) We are talking not even two years post-Ellen coming out and everyone still had their pearls clutched in their frozen claws about it.

The Peacekeepers are entirely gender-blind in their military structures, many leaders of colonies and other organizations that we see are women, and they are good or bad on their own individual merits, not because they are women, just like the male leaders. We never encounter a culture that asks her to be less just because she’s a woman, until we hit Earth. When the gang rolls into a culture that’s perfectly set up for that plot, with princesses and arranged marriages and obsession with reproduction and not being able to choose what happens to your body, it’s Crichton who’s slotted into the feminine role of the maiden forced to marry into a throne. It’s brilliant, and it’s still pretty fucking unique. It’s also why Farscape simply has more female characters of any type or quality than any other speculative show of it’s time and a whole lot of them afterward. It’s a beautiful rural Canadian town where somehow, magically, no one is a homophobe.

In space.

I will say that Claudia Black is heart-attack-inducingly beautiful, not because that matters so much, but because in the late 90s, her kind of beauty was more or less relegated to villains only. She is severe, long black hair, deep voice, very, very little obvious makeup and overly sexualized clothing, to the point that it’s almost funny how hard any current service would shut down a female lead having such a neutral non “sexy” look. Aeryn would have a permanent catsuit and god’s own winged eyeliner in a reboot or my name is Dominar Rygel the Seventeeth.

She was perfect. She was flawed. She was powerful and when she softened, it was only to be better at science and connecting with others, not to be a better wife for a man. In fact, late in the series, when she steps out of a ship with a blowout and eyeshadow, our hearts are meant to sink because we know something is horribly, horribly wrong.

And as much as I care about women/femme-presenting characters in media? All of that is perhaps less subversive than the male lead being given the warm, loving, caretaking, self-deprecating, intellectual, bumbling, emotionally available traits we’d expect more from a potty-mouthed Counselor Troi than a NASA beefcake American bro. Whose relationships with the men on the ship are almost more romantic than his relationship with Aeryn. There’s a reason Farscape always had a baller shipping culture, I am telling you right now.

However, even so, John and Aeryn are just about the hottest will-they-won’t-they in the history of television. I was a teenage girl in the age of Mulder and Scully and I am telling you for a fact that no het SF couple has ever had the chemistry of John and Aeryn, or a storyline that so fundamentally justifies them staying not-a-couple for as long as they do, or, when they finally do get together, is more #goals for any of us.

And it’s so much better than the Mulder/Scully decade-long cocktease nonsense we had to put up with. They actually hook up pretty early (though only in the Australian edit, the American aired version of the episode cut the scene WHAT, CALL CRAIS I NEED TO GO HUNTIN’) and with reasonable frequency. The reasons for their angst come from real conflict and tragedy, the kind of thing actual relationships suffer (plus clones) not coy writerly tricks. And I say that as a RANK PURVEYOR OF COY WRITERLY TRICKS. They’re so good that Stargate just straight-up hired them both and hoped they’d do the same with different characters after Farscape was cancelled. It’s literally insane that they both didn’t become massive stars—but an SF series just wasn’t the way to do that, then. Another thing that’s quite hard to explain nowadays, when Oscar winners will happily take a Marvel role and get bigger because of it. When most actors know very well how safe an eternal paycheck starring in a beloved science fiction series is. Back then, it was a death sentence for any kind of leading-man/lady career.

And so much of what Aeryn’s character gave us is down to Claudia Black’s performance. It is so grounded, it is so natural, so loose—which might seem like a weird word for such a steely character, but she is just so organic there’s never a moment where she looks so much as slightly uncomfortable sobbing over a puppet. Her perfomance took the material so seriously no matter how mad it got, and it got cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Like Patrick Stewart, she brought a gravitas to SF that made it all feel so true, and valuable, a story worth telling, and more importantly, worth experiencing. But Patrick Stewart was never loose. Would never have been so game to look so silly so often while never being silly, because none of this is silly for the people living it, and at every moment, every actor on Farscape pretty much seems to be seamlessly living it. Acting styles evolve, too, and this was heading into the grimdark clenched-jaw era, but had enough of the 90s left in it to get goofy and joyful on the regular. There was so much cheeseball nonsense at the time, and here comes Black Widow in space, showing us what it actually meant to take speculative fiction at face value, at its word, to believe in the world around you and never smirk or roll your eyes or obviously wish you were doing something, anything else.

That vibe is extremely key to the success of Marvel, by the way. Everyone up there (mostly) looks like they want to be there, so we want to be there with them, and for a long time in SF and fantasy, many, many actors clearly were paying for a new roof and hated every minute of the job.

In fact, I would posit that there is no Black Widow without Aeryn Sun—and without Farscape, contemporary science fiction would be unrecognizable.

A huge part of what I’ve spent almost 10,000 words trying to tell you here is that if Farscape aired ten years later, it would’ve been massive. Six seasons and a movie. Spin-offs. Talks of a big cinematic universe franchise. Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Anthony Simcoe, Gigi Edgley, Lani Tupu, Wayne Pygram, and Virginia Hay would be household names who went on to big careers. You’d be able to get Farscape costumes at any shitty Spirit Halloween store in perpetuity, because that’s how far its reach would be.

But it didn’t. It was just the wrong time.

Although, in terms of influence, it is massive. Perhaps none more so in the 1st century, and certainly not in the 00s.

I’m Your Daddy: The Far Reach of Farscape

We’ve gone over how good this show looks, how the practical effects and puppets have kept it from aging into something that’s very hard to convince people to stick with, and I’m not just saying that because I’m bitter about how few people I can talk into a bit of Bab5. We’ve talked about the naturalistic acting style and the amazing character choices that were such a risk then.

But the star of this show, the absolute protagonist, is the writing.

I’ve told that to many people whilst trying to talk them into watching it. What often happens is that they watch a few of the first episodes and go: you sure bout that?

So here’s where I make a few brief apologies before I get to the weepy rave part so no one yells at me on account of how being woke for 1999 is a wildly different beast than being woke in 2022. Just ask Dave Chappelle.

I am not saying Farscape was perfect. I MIGHT AS WELL HAVE TITLED THIS ESSAY ‘LOOK, IT WAS THE 90s OK?’

Expectations for TV writing were pretty freaking different. The word showrunner was almost a term without meaning. Everything was much more invisible and collaborative, you didn’t have rockstar director/creators who got courted by studios the way film auteurs did. Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, and to a lesser extent Larry David were really the first to become household names the way they did, and in 1999, even Whedon hadn’t really become Whedon yet. Who was the Golden Girls showrunner? How about good old Brady Bunch? (Shut up, I know one of you knows off the top of your head BECAUSE YOU’RE MY PEOPLE but normal randoms living in Minneapolis or wherever didn’t, and didn’t care). Seasons were anywhere from 20-28 episodes long, timeslots were 42 minutes and not a second more because hey, baby, we got California Energy Crisis commemorative plates to sell! Editing and pacing belonged much more to the old world norms of half-hour and full-hour classics that established their style and visual language before I was born. It was this whole transitional phase, and that’s without taking into account the tug-of-war between serialized narrative and what amounts to a procedural structure.

There are some rough spots in season one, is my point. They could have done better with representation, though I’m hard pressed to think of a show even now with more indigenous actors in it. If it were a 2022 show a whole lot of queer subtext would just be text. And the less said about Jeremiah Crichton the better, to be honest. Although, for all its faults, and boy howdy, it’s kind of a useful episode to understand what’s going on in S1.

Most of the episodes take a very basic SF stock plot that just about every show has done already and Star Trek’s done at least three times, then turn it around and do it better, more honestly or at least differently. It’s just that the stock trope here was always rotten. Jeremiah Crichton is the Kirok episode—Crichton lands on a “primitive” planet and Dances with Space Wolves his way through an indigenous culture and it does try to do better than Trek but oh god I can’t keep going. It’s easily the worst episode of the whole series and it’s aged like fine poop. It will make you cringe into another dimension. But good news! That’s as bad as it ever gets, and for a worst episode that didn’t age too well, I can think of many, many bigger offenders.

Including The goddamned Mandolorian, who did the same episode with blue “native” clothes instead of pink twenty years later without learning very much at all.

Most of the other S1 episodes are similar. There’s a first contact episode, a space cult episode, a time loop episode, a ‘back to 20th century Earth for the lulz’ episode, a fake distress call episode, the whole nine. It’s basically a speed-run through TNG’s greatest hits while we get to know our characters and the world around them. The main villain (Scorpius) and a main crew member (Chiana) are introduced quite late given their eventual importance, and it’s not clear they will stick around as long as they do (in part because both were meant to be one-offs and were so amazing they didn’t let them out of the building). Relationships are forged and we are set up for the rest of the series, while baking in the core postmodern sensibility of the manner in which these stories were all going to be told for the next three seasons and a movie.

Season one is as traditional as Farscape ever gets in terms of episode structure, season structure, character and world building, and narrative goals. Not every episode is a banger, but it gets to a place where the real shit can begin.

Farscape was reacting to SF as it stood at the time, taking it apart, taking it seriously (or not seriously at all), and taking the piss out of all of it. There is a moment in almost every episode of the first season where the traditional plot pauses and Crichton straight-up talks about how he’s seen this on TV or in the movies. There are jokes about Shatner doing Priceline commercials, my friends, and they are delivered by Satan in BDSM gear wearing a hawaiian shirt on top and screaming about margarita shooters it is literally so good. The sensibility is WHOLLY genre-aware and postmodern. I’m pretty sure it beats out Joss Whedon for pop culture references, especially because at one point John cites Buffy as one of the things he misses about Earth because HE’S ONE OF US, GUYS. Crichton sometimes even solves problems because of his genre-awareness. It was insane at the time, and still feels fresh, in part because it’s that Marvel quippy sense of humor, except far, far smarter and after higher-hanging fruit.

I’m going to use the word honest a lot, because honesty is what makes Farscape so different. It IS honest. It allows people to be people, not idealized paragons. Yeah, if you suddenly swap bodies with your secret crush, you’re probably gonna have a peek, whatever gender you are. But that plot has been done a hundred times and nobody ever acted human about it. And these aliens are the most human aliens you’ll ever see. Everyone gets to be honest. Honest, weird, dirty, horny, messed up, selfish, fallible, not all the way together, needy, desperate, not always as brilliant as they need to be, beautiful frelling people. It was so real and so refreshing and so bloody fun. And then a few episodes later everything would be deadly serious, and the whiplash was PART of the fun.

(Seriously on his horniest day, Riker never was half as down to clown as the crew of Moya. Even that was WILD for 1999. I remember sitting up straighter when Zhaan said oh, is nudity a taboo in your culture? fully naked whilst giving zero shits if it was, but neither shot nor acted in a remotely exploitative way. This was going to be different.)

Thing is, most of the episodes are at least a little insane. And some are a LOT insane. I don’t know how to explain to you that whatever you think of the first season, an episode is coming that is entirely, from first minute to last, done in Looney-Tunes animation, with pratfalls and goofy sound effects and 900 of the yards.

But it is. Coming, I mean. In addition to every other way Farscape pushed so hard on the limits of the hour-long drama structure, experimenting with the barest bones of storytelling to see just how weird they could get. Which is very weird indeed. It’s so daring and so fascinating and only in recent years have other shows started doing the same, once streaming removed the limitation of commercials and mandated airtime.

I could go on about all my favorite moments; the most honest discussion of 9/11 I’ve seen in televised fiction, the crazy-ass episode where Zhaan is a psychiatrist, when Aeryn meets Kermit, when they all switch bodies and AGAIN it’s the most honest version of that plot you’ll ever see, KAREN F’ING SHAW, Furlow, PILOT, The Locket, the…look I don’t want to spoil it but mpreg may make an appearance at some point and not in a fanfic either, Talyn, Harvey, all of it, even season three, which is the most realistic view of clones I’ve ever seen anywhere, and will rip your heart out so many times it should be require viewing for screenwriters. As I said at the beginning of this BEAST, I still have a hard time watching it, all these years later.

But I want you to watch it. I want you to experience these moments for yourself. I want you to learn to thrill to the sound of the space-yodel. I want you to laugh and cry and care so fucking much about puppets you can’t stand it. And I want you to realize how much influence this show has actually had, even though its own network treated it like nothing.

Because all this mad scientist DNA is so incredibly present in modern SF. The experimentation with structure, the humor, the genre-awareness, indigenous representation, frank sexuality, the honest examination of how all these space opera tropes would actually go down, actually alien aliens, as far as the limits of makeup and prosthetics could go, even Kiwi and Australian accents scanning as humorous and science fictional—this is the first place we all saw that! Farscape is the birth of the golden age of SF. It just happened a decade and a bit too soon to get the credit.

I remember listening to the director’s commentary on BSG when it started in 2005, when science fiction on TV was still so eager not to be seen as science fiction that the selling point for Battlestar Galactica was how gritty and real and not SF it was. And Ron Moore and gang were congratulating themselves on the Six-in-Baltar’s-head schtick, saying it had never been done in televised SF before.

Reader, I yelled at the screen. HOW FRELLING DARE YOU TALK ABOUT HARVEY LIKE THAT? YOU KNOW, THE SHOW THAT ENDED LAST FUCKING YEAR ON YOUR OWN NETWORK? NO, SIR. I WILL NOT SIT DOWN.

Even a year after Farscape ended, people were already retconning it out of the canon of the greats.

And I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT.

Part 3: Each Man Gets The Chance to Be His Own Kind of Hero: What Happened to Farscape and How It Made Me the Writer I Am