Astronaut and scientist
John Crichton is blasted through a wormhole to the other side of the universe, where he makes an uneasy alliance with a motley group of escaped prisoners.
(First aired in the U.S. on March 19, 1999)
Written by Rockne S. O'Bannon
Directed by Andrew Prowse
GUEST STARS
Kent McCord - Jack Crichton
Lani Tupu - Capt. Bialar Crais
Murray Bartlett - DK
Christine Stephen-Daly - Lt. Teeg
Damen Stephenson - Bio Isolation Man #1
Colin Borgonon - PK Weapons Officer
Lani Tupu is also the voice of Pilot.
There's no voiceover explaining the premise in this episode's opening credits.
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WHAT HAPPENED
Dawn, Cape Canaveral. A man watches the sun rise over a
space shuttle ready for launch. His name is John Crichton, and he'll be going up in that shuttle in a few hours.
Later, he suits up and checks the
weather conditions. "DK," a co-worker and longtime friend, is enthusiastic about the upcoming mission, but Crichton has had a strange feeling about this mission. a feeling something big is going to happen.
Crichton's father walks with him towards the launch pad. An astronaut himself, Jack Crichton is proud of John's scientific experimentation, but wants to know if his son has that "rattlers in the stomach" feeling.
The younger Crichton tells his father the only thing that makes him uncomfortable is being the son of a hero. Jack replies, "Each man gets a 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.."
Jack then gives his son his own
good luck charm, which was given to him by Yuri Gagarin.
The shuttle launches. As a voiceover describes Crichton's experiment -- he plans to dive through the atmosphere and overcome its resistance to impart an exponential gain in velocity to his ship -- the shuttle releases a smaller craft, Farscape One.
Crichton is piloting Farscape One, and he inserts the tiny shuttle into a close orbit. As the atmospheric turbulence increases, a strange electromagnetic wave builds up around the ship.
In mission control, Crichton's friend DK notices the energy wave, and both he and Crichton's father frantically warn Crichton to abort. It does no good -- Crichton can barely hear them, and he loses control of the ship.
A strange wormhole opens, and the tiny shuttle plummets through it. When it emerges, Crichton is somewhere else, and he's flying right into a space battle . . . (more
spoilers)
ANALYSIS
Farscape's first episode is fast-paced and well-produced, but otherwise fairly ordinary.
The characters and situations are painfully familiar. The escaped prisoners concept escaped from Blake's 7, and astronaut/scientist John Crichton is a typically amiable can-do American hero.
Aeryn Sun is a less hoary stereotype, but there's nothing about her Ellen Ripley or Susan Ivanova would find unfamiliar. As for the aliens, there's a big scary warrior, a spiritual priest, and a comic relief rascal.
Living ships and symbiotic pilots are rare -- at least on television -- but the "obsessed pursuer" cliche more than makes up for their relative novelty. The sum of the parts is stunningly unoriginal.
Can you feel the love?
It doesn't help that aside from Crichton, none of the characters make a good first impression. They're angry, desperate, almost vicious.
What particularly stands out is their complete lack of cooperation. That's shaky even in the later episodes of the season, but here they're at each other's throats.
Strip away what we learn about them as the series goes on, and you're left with a rather dislikable bunch.
Laying the foundation
Most of that changes over the first year. While the characters do some awful things in later episodes -- ripping off Pilot's arm in "DNA Mad Scientist", for instance -- they tend to behave better after the premiere.
As the season progresses, we start to see them at their best moments as well as their worst. None of their heroic moments is inconsistent with the personalities established in the beginning -- D'argo's tremendous courage, for instance, is simply another aspect of his warrior nature.
Their ability to cooperate steadily improves, thanks mostly to Crichton's influence. Even in the premiere, he pushes them a tiny step towards teamwork by combining his equations and Aeryn's piloting to escape the Peacekeepers.
Again, there's nothing unusual or new about this slow progression from six squabbling individuals to the family of the season finale. What's exceptional is how well it's presented.
The performers take a lot of credit for this -- all the actors give strong performances from the start, even the Muppet members of the cast. The characters may be broad, but they're presented vigorously.
The show's lightning pace and colorful look also helps. The story never stops moving, and the characters constantly do and see interesting things.
With presentation this good, it's easy to stick around and let the characters grow on you.
There's a final benefit to this approach. Any more conflict, and Moya's family would have never grown together; any less and they would have become as saccharine as the Brady Bunch by the end of the season.
In retrospect, the tone of the premiere turned out to be just right.
WHAT WE LEARN
D'argo is 30 cycles old, has been imprisoned for eight cycles, and has seen two battle campaigns.
REALITY CHECK
A variety of things in the premiere firmly establish Farscape 's preference for rollicking adventure over scientific accuracy. Among them:
Although slingshotting around planets to gain velocity a basic part of orbital mechanics, doing so in atmosphere leads to braking rather than exponential velocity. Crichton may have had a revolutionary theory, but it overturns most of the laws of physics.
Helium is a highly non-reactive gas and is unlikely to be produced -- even as waste -- by a biological system.
It takes about a minute for blood to circulate through the body, but the translation microbes are somehow able to reach Crichton's brain and set up shop in about ten seconds.
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK
Rerun season continues. The Sci Fi Channel follows up with "Durka Returns" -- the first appearance of Chiana -- then begins the run-up to season two with "A Bug's Life", the fifth-to-last episode of the season. All-new episodes start March 17.
What do you think? Send your comments to the reviewer or editor.
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