Farscape S1/E1 Premiere

Farscape, aka Space is Full of Australians. I love this show so much. It has my heart good and solid, and it’s one of the great Henson Company shows that isn’t really talked about much anymore, but should be. This and Bear in the Big Blue House, one of the greatest children’s shows of all time.

Here we are in the premiere episode, cleverly called Premiere, starting on Earth, where we won’t be spending much time in the next five seasons and a movie. John Crichton and his attitude are off to spend a three hour tour in space, doing a McGuffin in order to get the plot started (an experiment on using the Earth’s gravitational field to...sorry, I dozed off there). He’s a jerk to his astronaut father, who is very Sam Shepherd-y, and played by One Adam Twelve himself, Kent McCord, then off he goes onto the plot.

He is sucked through a wormhole to another part of space where everyone is Australian or puppets or both, though he doesn’t know that yet, all he knows is that there are lots of surprising spaceships and Cape Canaveral is no longer on the radio. He is startled, as anyone would be in his situation.

Crichton is brought aboard a ship and there are weird aliens, and little robots that fortunately inject him with a Knowing All Alien Languages doohickey. There’s a battle, which the good side wins and thus escapes, and we are introduced to the main cast. There’s Ka D’Argo, who is a big, weird-looking warrior dude with a temper; Zhaan, who is a very sexy bald, blue female priest; Rygel, a floating puppet dignitary who doesn’t seem trustworthy: Pilot, another puppet, who is steering Moya, the Leviathan, who is the ship herself, a living ship, as will later be heard in the credits in a whispery voice; and Aryn, who is one of the other side, a Peacekeeper, who got caught up in the wake of the ship when they escaped by starbursting, this show’s version of jumping to light speed. There is also the baddie, Crais, who was on the other side of the battle as our gang was escaping, and whose brother Crichton accidentally killed when he came through the wormhole and thus has a really good reason to chase Crichton through five seasons and a movie.

And that’s the cast for now, as Chiana, Scorpus, and my absolute favourite, Stark, don’t appear until halfway through this season.

So now that we have met everyone, on to plot. Moya, in escaping, lost something that she needs to go quickly, so they stop at a planet to get some. While they are negotiating, Aryn and Crichton escape, then Crais captures everybody, including Aryn, who has probably been contaminated by the unclassified alien, aka Crichton. Things move very quickly in this episode, everyone is constantly being captured, escaping, and then being captured again. So they escape again, taking Aryn against her will, but if they leave her she will killed because of the contamination. The Peacekeepers are after them, but they use plot to escape! Meaning, that boomerang thing with the planet’s gravity that Crichton was doing at the beginning of the show, they do it again to escape, all working together, including Aryn, because she is a pilot.

Then almost everyone individually threatens Crichton and he makes a tape letter for his father that he’ll never be able to send him, but at least we, the audience, get to hear his thoughts. What would be do without that gift?

Love you, Farscape! Mean it!