I'm watching Farscape S01E01 for the first time since original UK airdate! Excited about this decision!!

This hits the ground *sprinting*, it's very, uh, confident to expect a new audience to take on so much at such velocity

We cross the border into faerie. We are immediately, indirectly responsible for the violent death of an unseen character. This event will exert an influence across the whole length and breadth of the story being told here

It would've been less heavy lifting for them for our outsider to burst into the lives of a pre-formed Enterprise type crew - in fact, he bursts in on a seconds-old marriage of convenience between escaped convicts

Every member of the regular cast is almost as out of their depth and trying (failing) to get a handle on their shit as Crichton is

To say that this holds up visually doesn't cover it, this literally looks better than Star Trek Discovery

Designs, realization of those designs, direction, boom, boom, boom, how does *1999* CGI look this good

lol episode 2 and we are getting into the weeds a bit, some very unconvincing space cockroaches, and the decision to capitalize on the ep1 momentum with... a shipbound bottle episode... is certainly a decision

Though that's worth digging into a bit - it's such an eccentric cast, it makes sense to spend some quality time with them before we touch down on some weird alien planets.

It's just a bit wasted on me, here, 21 years later, who already loves these chaacters

On THAT note, the makers of this show would not have been able to conceive of this culture we have where we run episode into episode, like, they obviously never intended for anyone to watch the first two eps without a 7-day gap in between

There's so much leather, such a fucky show.

Not horny. Star Trek is horny. Farscape was fucky.

The thing I remember most about these early seasons as well, the sense of stakes. It felt week after week like genuinely bad and fucked up shit could happen to the heroes.

It made such an impression when we saw identical copies of the leads brutally slaughtered in the second episode, so portentous.

Death, or a corruption/perversion of life so complete as to be comparable to it, hang over this universe like a shroud

idk if this is a contrarian take or not, but the unintentional S4 cliffhanger where the leads are murdered by total randomers was far truer to the spirit of the show than The Peacekeeper Wars was

The creation of mlw ships this good is a lost technology, like the manaufacture of Damascus steel

Crichton x Aeryn has been canonized in my memory as one of the great slow-burns but in fact, as early as ep 2, he is tenderly caressing her flushed cheek when she falls poorly and she is entrusting him with the responsiblity for euthanizing her if she succumbs to Living Death

Update: Both the second AND third ever episodes of the show force the audience and the heroes themselves to watch ersatz mirror images of the main cast being brutally slaughtered https://twitter.com/AdamAttley/status/1276305737673777152

Episode 5 the first 5-star ep, the gang discover the equivalent of the Marie Celeste floating in space, some of those good H.R. Giger haunted house vibes, and a guest star love interest for Crichton who Star Trek has conditioned you to 100% expect to be fridged, but no!

Trek is horny, 'Scape is sensual. Elaborate on that. No.

'Scape feels like it was made by folk who have mutually fulfilling hookups, Trek feels like it was made by intern gropers.

It is interesting to revisit this show during this period of snowballing interest in abolitionism, *most* of the regular cast are suffering with acute PTSD from long-term incarceration.

This week we get an insight into Rygel's damage - for all his airs this kid's been being moved between institutions for 130 years, the first of which was this dead ship they've found.

Finally summoning the courage to board this birthplace of his trauma, he discovers the corpse of the warden, who ultimately took his own life.

In a very Farscape and very Rygel moment of cathartic release, he leers 'You lose...!" and gobs onto the exit wound, nice.

This is not an insightful tweet at all but Claudia Black... I loved Aeryn as a character but my palate at age 11 was too basic bitch and MTV-fed to realize quite how she is, the t-shirt and braces combo in this ep is driving me out of my tiny mind.

This is D'Argo in real life, I guess!

D'Argo's joined a sex cult in Ep6.

In the same year that The Matrix offers a very similar image, we have a wiggy monster larvae tunnelling into Crichton through his belly button.

Most interesting thing this ep is Pilot's imposter syndrome? For all that Moya has a vast database of scientific know-how, Pilot still has to pull all-nighters trying to *study* that data, he doesn't automatically know everything Moya lnows and it's a source of great insecurity

The dialogue of Pilot's confession even seems to hint at some kind of dyslexia-type learning disorder, and his furtive opening up to Aeryn really lands

Aeryn x Pilot an underrated 'bro' ship, especially all the Talyn stuff coming down the line

Cannot stress enough how *good* this looks for 1999 network TV, can count the number of ineffectual VFX so far on one hand.

Fucking *Lexx* was airing in double bills with this, just to put it into some kind of perspective

Ep8 and the wheels have come off in a big way!

We pick up with Crais, nominally the main antagonist at this point, a full six episodes after we last saw him (frankly forgot agout him a lil bit). And he's run himself ragged trying to find Moya, big sweaty gooch energy.

The baddie here is an even more annoying version of Q from Star Trek, if you can conceive of such a thing, an evil wizard called Maldis, the fucking guest star is *out of control*, titanic Aussie ham sandwich.

Dreadful teleplay where everyone reverts to their D&D character class, with the time spent fleshing out Zhaan's baloney, £15 crystal healing sessions religion particularly egregious.

Hacky, woolly *fantasy* tropes being shoved into this nicely cooking sci-fi universe. SAD!

MVP in this mess is Ben Browder, managing to inject a bit of life into even these vapid Kirk-lite lines.

Lucked out with that casting, but. All you really need in that role is a cute himbo to contrast the weirdness with, but Crichton a genuinely compelling, real-feeling hero

That paradox of this person who is highly ideologically driven, highly intellectually curious, but also (crucially, because this is how he survives at all) doesn't take himself too seriously, tricky to walk that line

Tumblr user @/themetamorphic on why watching Farscape (100% does!) feels like reading fanfiction

The Clifton quote tossed in there is a vivid way of describing the show's relationship to its parent show, I've always read Farscape as 'The Anti-Trek', as 'Mordred Trek'

It would be very easy to trip into a headass take of 'this m/f ship is queer rep, actually!', but Crichton x Aeryn really is a very singular phenom, not only for a project of Farscape's nature, but gets at greater profundities than a lot of the canonical HBO telenovelas

The writers, directors and performers involved were really saying something with their chest

Ten down and Ep 9 is my favourite so far, Namtar the pervy DNA splicer the best baddie we've had by a mile, characteristic excellence from design and production teams in realizing the look, with an insidious, frightening performance worthy of it

deus ex conclusion where he gets stuck with a shrinkdown syringe leaves you feeling a bit short changed, genuinely feels right up to that point that our heroes have encountered a foe beyond their capacity to defeat or outwit. It's the nature of episodic TV that saves the day

Namtar responds to being tortured by rerouting his pain receptors into his pleasure banks so that it becomes hot for him, which is both really grim and so quintessentially this show

Ep 9 is a threshold!

If I was watching this show go out for the first time now, the violent assault three of our cast perpetrate against the gentle, generous Pilot of their ship out of sheer self interest would quite possibly have been my peace out moment

Zhaan is a character I've particularly misremembered over time, there is a boiling cauldron of spite, rage and loneliness behind that serene fata morgana