Farscape the PeaceKeeper Wars - Review

I can't think of a subject title. About to pour - so am eating at desk again, and forgoing a walk through the mucky air. It's not the heat, it's the humidity, folks. The rain will be a nice release. The built up pressure in the air has been making me a bit crazy.

Finished watching the Farscape series last night - with the mini-series The Peacekeeper Wars - which aired approximately two years after the series was cancelled. The mini-series unlike the Firefly feature film, actually takes place immediately after the final episode of Farscape and works beautifully as a series end. It resolves all the themes, sub-plots, and character arcs.
While imperfect, it does a fairly satisfactory job of brining closure. It may well be the best series ender that I've seen done or at least the most satisfactory. And the ending for me, at least, was a happy one.
( cut for length and vague spoilers )

I wrote this quickly during my lunch break. So typos, errors, abound. Not edited.

(no subject)

That writer meme going around flist? I got some interesting results. Copied chapters from my completed novel - and apparently the first Chapter is Stephen King, but the rest is like Raymond Chandler. The eulogy I wrote for my Grandmother, along with my Buffy/Spike fanfic No Regrets?
I write like James Joyce. Flattering that. And my Evil Fanfic? Is like Dan Brown.
Rather like the fact that my novel is Chanderlesque - it was what I was going for. While my poetic prose style is Joycian.

Watching Farscape interviews - the current one is one Zhan. Finished the Behind the Scenes of the Peacekeeper Wars, and Farscape Undressed - the special they did between Seasons 2 and 3, to get people caught up and bring in new viewers. The extras are uneven. Some are quite interesting, others dull.

The show fascinates me - it's structure, themes, and how it created compelling female characters.
Browder's Crichton who should annoy the hell out of me, I fell completely in love with.
And well, Aeryn is my favorite female character. What also struck me is the show employed a range of people in size and shape.

Work difficult. Weather better now that it has rained. But the heat wave is continuing.

You Just Can't Go Home Again, Dorothy - (Constellation of Doubt and Terra Firma - Farscape S4)

The premise of Farscape - when it first aired, way back in 1999, turned me off - because once again it was a tv show about someone who got trapped somewhere and was spending the entire series trying to get home. I could see the whole story - we'd have him almost get there, then not. Basically The Wizard of OZ motif - where Dorothy spends her entire time in OZ hunting a way home. It's hardly a new motif - Quantum Leap - was about Sam finding his way back, The Fugitive - about getting the one-armed man, Incredible Hulk - about finding a cure. Basically the hero is searching for the proverbial carrot that he can't have and along the way helps a bunch of folk. In the first season of Farscape - or rather the first six-seven episodes - the story is about a bunch of lost souls stuck together and hunting a way home. It culminates with episode 16, A Human Reaction - where the hero or protagonist actually gets home or so we are lead to believe.

Episode 16, A Human Reaction is when the series literally changes its focus. It's the episode - that I tell people to keep going until they get to it. If you don't like Episodes 16-22, you may not like Farscape. The story stops being about Dorothy getting home, or the niave view that you actually can get home by just clicking your shoes together, after having a bunch of funky adventures, and being chased by the Wicked Witch. And John Crichton is a bit like Dorothy - in the Premiere episode, he is an astronaut, innocent of violence, skilled in science, wearing a white helmet, white astronaut gear, and no weapons, doing a test drive. When the spatial equivalent of a twister shoots him up and into a strange universe with strange alien creatures who are in the midst of a prison break. His module accidently collides with a proller (plane) that is pursuing the prisoners - and the pilot is instantly killed. Crichton's module is then sucked into the ship, which it turns out is a living ship with alien creatures (none that are the same species) all held prisoner on it and attempting to escape with it. The dead proller pilot's brother turns out to be a military commander or proverbial Wicked Witch - and becomes increasingly obsessed with seeking vengeance on the man he holds responsible for his brother's death - John Crichton. Sound familiar? Crichton's sole purpose from this point on is to find a way home and somehow survive until he gets there.

That is, until, A Human Reaction - which you don't quite appreciate until after you've seen the entire series. Farscape unlike most tv series is not episodic in nature, each episode is a chapter in it. Building to the next one. The first four-six episodes are perhaps the only ones that can more or less stand alone. The weaker ones certainly can. At any rate, a reference point on the whole OZ bit - Australia's nickname is the Land of OZ. This is where the show was filmed. (I happen to know this because my parents moved from Kansas to Australia after I graduated from college for about a year and a half. We joked about how they left for OZ and like Dorothy had to come back to dull Kansas again. Sigh. Truer words were never spoken. Having spent a month in OZ only to come back and go to school in Lawrence, KS - I felt much like Dorothy myself. )

( major spoilers for A Human Reaction, Constellation of Doubt, Bad Timing (just the bits about wormholes and earth), Kansas and Terra Firma - some major plot spoilers )