Farscape - Peacekeeper Wars
I watched part one last night and part two tonight. I feel so emotionally drained. Though it has by no means affected me as much as the Angel 5 ending, it has exhausted me and made me tumble into another slump... Hopefully the lovesickness will keep at bay (though it is cheaper to feed me when I am depressed).
The "miniseries" (two part feature length special surely? Miniseries just reeks of self-depreciation and not aiming high enough) was definitely a rollercoaster ride of characters coming back (from the dead naturally) and fading away, locations revisited and actors recycled. I felt like playing Farscape bingo- Diagnosan? Check! Jool? Check! Jothee? Leviathon! So there was a sense of whirlwind as old characters appeared and new characters vanished (bye bye Noranti) and also cringeworthy coincidence (it's a small galaxy). A whiff of BADness about it. And incidentally, where did Jool's kiss for Crichton come from? I thought it was D'Argo she had a fling with...
But friends reunited aside, there was a great pace and drive to the three hour epic voyage for peace. And along the way Rygel showed himself worthy of the title Dominar, Chiana accepted a homemaker status for D'Argo's sake, Stark found a use for himself (apart from keeping out of the way), Jothee overcame a mountain of discrimination... it amazed me how perfectly the characters had evolved since the first season. It was a strange little force dedicated to universal peace but it worked. A group that never trusted eachother at first (and it was this that drew me to Farscape) was suddenly placing their lives and the lives of their unborn in eachothers' hands without questioning whether the Hynerian slug or Nebari tralk could handle it. And I believed it. It is far from a couple of school kids deciding that killing vampires and saving the world might be a good thing to do to break up the monotony of the school day.
So they did at long last what they should have spent season 4 doing (what did they do in season 4? What were they thinking?!). This would have worked a lot better with a few episodes to support it, getting Crichton and Aeryn back to life in a rather more plausible way (but hey- I didn't mind too much. Of all the rushed ways they could have done it in I am sure they did it in the best!) and spending some quality time with Jool looking at the history of the Sebacean (genetically enhanced humans!) race. But they really did the best they could do with the three hours they had.
At last John stepped up to the challenge of securing peace. I don't care about his reasons for doing it- I have just spent years imagining such a thing in a "local kid does good" kind of way and so am now very glad that the entire galaxy owes its safety to a man from Earth. Yeah, because Earth is the best. And the way he did it... by making mistake after mistake until finally, in a trial and error kind of way, it worked was pure Farscape and why I love the show...
So now it is getting rather late and I can't think straight about what I just watched! But I have to comment on that "trial and error". I was talking to Sus/skit earlier about how the stories in Firefly were simple and predictable, things you would expect to see in SG1 perhaps. But Firefly would always do a class job on it with their exceptional characterisation, humour and writing. But you see Farscape was never like that. Farscape would always do the stories you would never see anywhere else. It was experimental in ways that Firefly is not. Firefly is a perfect job but Farscape would often fall flat on its face with ideas that just don't work. And Farscape wouldn't care and neither would the people watching as it was just so much fun... So that is why Farscape is better. It has the characters. It has the humour (oh boy does it have the humour...). It has the writing. And it also isn't afraid to go way off track and get everything wrong. And as a consequence, it rarely does. And I will miss it... it doesn't sound as if they expect to do any continuation, this was their encore. And it doesn't look like there will be anything to fill its shoes as Farscape was unique. And beautiful.
The best moment in Farscape The Peacekeeper Wars was when the opening credits first appeared and the worst moment was when the final credits stopped rolling.
Except for the fact that I had some delicious extras including deleted scenes to watch...
posted by keppet @ 11:04 PM
