Farscape and Fray

[frayadjacent]

Farscape: I have just one episode left! Well, I think so anyway, I've been avoiding looking up lists of episode titles in case there are spoilers. I realize I've hardly posted about the show even though I've liked it a lot and I love love love Aeryn Sun. So here is an unsorted and unformatted selection of my thoughts.

I didn't give this show the attention it deserves and requires. I watched it over the course of something like 2 1/2 years -- I watched the first half dozen episodes of season 1, waited more than a year, watched up through the start of season 4 off and on over about six months, hated early season 4 and took at least six months to get through the first 12 episodes, and have watched the rest of season 4 this week. Furthermore, I often had one eye on Twitter or something else while I watched, which is not my normal way of watching tv AT ALL, but I developed the habit during some boring/bad S1 episodes and never fully shook it. So now I feel like there's a lot I missed, thematically, character-wise, and in terms of plot. I already feel like I need to rewatch.

I was thinking the other day about what it takes for me to fall in love with a show, and at what point in the show that happens. My favorite shows are Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, and Friday Night Lights. I fell in love with the last of these immediately, and the love uh, *almost* never faltered (coughmurdersubplotcough). Conversely, Xena was a show I enjoyed, but no more, until the final season, when I really fell hard for the Xena/Gabrielle pairing. Now I see the entire series through the lens of what the last season did in terms of their relationship (and what seasons 3 & 4 did for Gabrielle's character) and I love it all. Buffy was somewhere in between. I loved it a lot the first time I watched, but it wasn't until I started rewatching (and rewatching and rewatching) and discussing it that I got really into it.

I bring this up because I suspect that Farscape, like Xena and to some extent Buffy, will be a show that will impress me most when viewed as a whole. There has been a ton of narrative follow-through in these last few episodes. Like people told me when I started, shit *matters* on Farscape. I've been enjoying that a lot.

In terms of character, some of my favorite things include the radiant Aeryn Sun, as well as the way the show has depicted the impact of imprisonment and homesickness on the characters. I've mostly enjoyed their interpersonal dynamics. Relationships are fraught and tenuous, but for good reason. The plotlines with Crais, Scorpius, and Talyn have been interesting and I've liked them quite a bit.

However, I do wish the show was more of an ensemble, because I don't really connect to John Crichton the way I'm supposed to. I feel for his homesickness, I like his sense of humor and kindness. But I was also endlessly frustrated with everyone insisting that he was ignorant, that his ideas were bad and always went wrong, that he wasn't the hero we the audience were expecting him to be, when the narrative quite frankly kept making him pretty much exactly the hero we expect. The show put a lot of effort into telling us that John wasn't your usual sci-fi hero, but it did not succeed at showing it. Like even though he didn't earn or want it, he still spends most of the show as the most important single person in the known universe, and it just grates on me.

Also, I know this is pretty random, but remember in an early episode where there's a flashback to John's life on Earth, and a moment when he was about to propose to his girlfriend, but then she told him she was going to grad school or medical school or something instead of following him and building her career around his? And so he gets the super sads and is totally betrayed and doesn't propose and we're all supposed to feel bad for him? I cannot emphasize enough how much I fucking hated that, how close to home that shit is for me, and I think it's why I basically didn't like John for a long time thereafter. I know it's not a particularly strong argument, but the point is that so much of the show revolves around John, a character I've come to care about and like, but it took a damn long time due to some basic smart white guy tropes that the show fell into that I find particularly annoying. And I wish I'd seen more time spent on other characters, especially Aeryn (though she got a fair amount) and Chiana and D'Argo. Also I really, really liked Jool and her brattiness and ridiculous scream and super smartness. I'd have really loved more Jool.

Anyway this is not my final word on Farscape, I obviously, I know there's a lot to it that I've straight up missed and I'm looking forward to exploring it deeper through vids and some meta and rewatching certain episodes. I'm happy to take recommendations for fanworks including meta! And to know other people's thoughts.

Comments

[deird1]

Ooh, Farscape!!!

I'm glad you enjoyed it. And yes, it definitely repays rewatching.

Furthermore, I often had one eye on Twitter or something else while I watched, which is not my normal way of watching tv AT ALL, but I developed the habit during some boring/bad S1 episodes and never fully shook it. So now I feel like there's a lot I missed, thematically, character-wise, and in terms of plot. I already feel like I need to rewatch.

There's probably some stuff you missed, yes. I tried, second time around, watching Farscape while cross-stitching - and kept wondering why I wasn't getting the same emotional arcs that I'd thought were there earlier. That's when I realised how very visual Farscape is. It's the one show I can't craft in front of, because so much of it is done without words.

[jadelennox]

Oh, I know exactly what you mean about John. I feel like the show was trying very hard to do something specific with its white-male-American-attractive-young-military-English-speaking-hetero hero, but because it was written from inside the paradigm, they don't really succeed. The intent comes through very clearly: humans are chumps; the rest of the universe is in many ways much more sophisticated; human/Earth/white American ethics and morals are not necessarily the right ones. And I love them for trying, because I do get that they are trying to present that.

But at the same time, it's a science fiction show with an attractive white military hero at the center of it, and he has a romance plot with a woman who comes from a nonromantic society, which means necessarily not only is the show centered around him, but the show is centered around Aeryn changing her values to become more like his.

How do you write a television show with any level of success where the moral of the show is "the mainstream values of the viewers are different from the values of this show"? It would be really hard to have any commercial success, even at a cult level.

It actually kind of makes me wish that art-house independent film funded television projects, or public television funded cult sci-fi, or something like that. The idea of getting further away from the mainstream.

[laurashapiro]

I've talked about The John Problem a lot with friends, because of course you're right that the show centers around him and he's a 35-year-old straight white male as usual. But at the end of the day what makes me love how the show handles him is not all the "humans are stupid" stuff (which is funny and true but does not, as you point out, offset John's position in the narrative). Nope, it's two other things:

1) Although John occupies the protagonist role, he's also occupying the woman's role. He wears his heart on his sleeve; the person he loves is stoic and takes care of him. He gets rescued by his lover. He is raped, repeatedly, both mentally and literally. He falls apart mentally and emotionally, but it's never manpain he's having -- when John cries, he cries for himself.

2) John doesn't wind up back on Earth. I can't stress enough how important this is; John rebuilds himself in the image of the Uncharted Territories. John is profoundly changed; still human, but ultimately his new and true home is out there where humans are disrespected if they're known at all. A typical white male hero converts all of those around him to appreciate HIS values and beliefs, his understanding of what is important. A typical show would have had the crew of Moya becoming honorary humans, and would have had John back on Earth for the rest of his life, perhaps affected by his experiences but fundamentally unchanged. In Farscape, John's transformation is complete. He becomes the other.

Totally hear you on the girlfriend thing, though. (:

[ghost_lingering]

Farscape! <3 Show of my heart. I have a mix of feelings about Crichton as protagonist that are ultimately tied up in my mixed feelings about John/Aeryn as central to the premise of the show. As someone who is usually agnostic-to-antagonistic towards romances taking over a show the centralness of the het relationship, especially in the context of the white, straight, male hero getting the white, straight, beautiful girl is a thing that I'm not whole-heartedly in love with. And yet I do find myself loving Crichton and even John/Aeryn despite that. For me, what works about Crichton is that for the most part I find him to be a genuinely likable guy, who I'd be cool hanging out with, which is untrue of many male protagonists, and, perhaps more importantly, he comes by his angst honestly: for the most part his angst is not based on what happens to the people in his life, it's based on what happens to him. Since I have no patience for manpain of any kind — even when it's a woman having the manpain — I find that very much a relief.

(John/Aeryn still doesn't entirely work for me as the center of the show, but I like it insofar as I like John, I like Aeryn, and they both seem happy at the end, so I am happy for them. I just wish it wasn't quite as much the point as it clearly is. I also cringe at how, sometimes, the implication is that John stays with Moya for Aeryn or that Aeryn stays with Moya for John. I like the idea that he stays across the universe because he has changed and that she stays with Moya because she has changed — and perhaps even they have changed each other! — but I loathe when characters leave behind their former lives solely to be with a lover. The romance trope of "you are the only important thing in my universe so I'm leaving everything behind for you" is the least romantic thing ever to me; I get enraged whenever it happens. I don't think that's what happens with either John or Aeryn, but the pairing rubs up against the trope enough that I get frustrated.)

What you say about recoiling hard with Crichton resonates for me because, first, it's happened for me for a bunch of characters in different shows, but also because it happened to me for Aeryn and to a lesser extent Crichton and D'Argo on Farscape. The first episode I ever saw Dream A Little Dream (followed by Thanks for Sharing -- worst first two episodes to watch ever) which skewed my perspective on the show for a long time afterwards. DaLD is one of two episodes (if I'm counting right) not from John's POV. It's from Zhaan's. (And the other non-John POV ep being the tour de force that is The Choice.) Because my first introductions to Aeryn, John, and D'Argo were Zhaan's hallucinations, I had a really messed up view of who they were for a long time, Aeryn in particular, because her hallucination is so judgmental. And yet in many ways I'm glad that I saw DaLD first because it also cemented many of the things that I love most about the show, which aren't quite as prominent in other episodes: it shows Chiana (and Rygel) being ruthless for her people and it shows Moya being very much a character in her own right. It also shows just how wacky and weird the show is, which, ultimately is what I love most about Farscape: it takes chances wholeheartedly and with no expectation of success. Which is good because those chances don't always succeed; there's a lot of failure. But it's always glorious, messy failure made with abandon and I love and respect and crave that in shows. And, of course, when Farscape succeeds, it succeeds gloriously, epically, magically.

Also, can I just say: MOYA. In many ways Chiana is my favorite Farscape character, but Moya gives her a run for her money and Moya's existence is probably the thing I love best on the show. Having a living ship, for starters, is something I love, but even beyond that, the fact that she was given character arcs of her own is <3<3<3 for me. Her story is one that is full of common tropes for female characters: forced pregnancy, her child being stolen, being cast as the mother figure to a group of wayward aliens, acting as support for a variety of male characters (Pilot, Crichton) … these are all storylines that are coded as being for women and they're common tropes female characters are forced to act out. But in this case they're also very unique because Moya isn't a character that one would immediately think of as a woman and certainly not a woman who is sexualized, as is often the case with these kinds of storylines. And I think that's fascinating; looking at Moya through the lens of stories about female characters is fascinating. There is a part of me that wants better storylines for Moya, kinder and with less gendered violence, but there is another part of me that marvels that Moya went through that and still has such capacity for love and forgiveness.

[beccatoria]

FARSCAPE. SHOW OF MY HEART.

Okay so first - just to check, when you say you have one episode left do you mean the final episode of series 4 or the mini series that follows? I would recommend the mini series because it finished the story after the cancellation but it was made a while later and, well, I'm glad it exists but I think it has some flaws. Some brilliant, perfect moments, but...also some clunky ones. (Huh, like season four in general I guess?)

But I'm SO GLAD you like it. I know what you mean about shows where the ultimate payoff is what makes them overall worth it. That wasn't the case for me with Farscape, but then, it was one of my first serious fandoms when I was 16 and was just so awed by the beautiful puppet world they'd created. I grew up as SUCH a huge Henson fan it was like Christmas. Like my childhood came back but hilarious and twisted and gross and funny and dark.

I do suspect that if you watch it with more focused attention (though I empathise with not doing so; I can be terrible about that these days) you'll pick up more. There is a lot of nonvisual stuff in there. I think John and Aeryn particularly convey a lot through body language and what they don't always say or do.

Thinking about my experience watching it is interesting because it basically spanned my, well, growing up I suppose. Both in human and fannish terms. We're talking 16 - 22, and discussions about the show certainly helped with my education on fan culture stuff, feminism, media representation, etc.

I do remember some fairly interesting meta about why there was really not that much slash in the fandom, comparatively speaking, considering how, well, kinky it was. Like I'm not saying it was nonexistent, but even John/Scorpy was...not really a thing? I have never been much of a guyslasher so I don't think I'm qualified to offer an informed opinion but I wish I could find some of the meta from that time. I know that some people argued that the gender dynamics of John/Aeryn replicated the slash dynamics much more closely than many straight couples of the era. But...as I said, I'm not sure how accurate others would think that is.

For myself, I think the reason I loved John (because Aeryn was my favourite, but I do love John) had a lot to do with the excellent reasons given by laurashapiro. I understand completely why it's not enough considering he's still a white male lead who gets the girl and saves the world, who is "chosen". But I think that his "humans are chumps" thing is far less important in the way the show does narratively undercut those tropes than his emotional arc. Because the comedy and the dismissal of his importance essentially just make him a lovable underdog and later become a tool he uses to make others underestimate him.

On the other hand, his emotional arc? Wow. It's this classic, recognisable, "I must learn to kill to survive. I must become hard and dangerous." And even though I want to say "but it shows the cost!" it is romanticised. I think the difference, though, is the way it's romanticised. The way it's rendered dramatically fascinating.

The simplest way to explain it, I guess, is that he gets a more traditionally feminine exploration of these issues. Or at least one that at times actively undermines the masculinity you might expect from it. Like in the second season when he starts acting more and more "crazy cool" and out of control and then there's this sudden revelation that he is actually losing it, he is actually suffering from hallucinations and he's terrified. Like the way the third season ended with a white wedding fantasy from his perspective. The way every time he runs around screaming about pop culture references, there's this powerful undercurrent that he is doing this as a desperate coping mechanism so he doesn't fall apart and start crying, not because he's having such a great time thumbing his nose at authority.

Which is an undercurrent that feels far less false because we do see him crying. For himself. Because he's scared and lost. Not angry tears because ~someone took his property~, you know?

It means that when you get to that part at the end, that speech about the nuclear bomb in a field of flowers? The destruction and spectacle and surreal contradiction? It gives it space for Ben Browder to offer a performance that genuinely doesn't come across as manpain. It comes across as reflective and sorrowful.

Plus, of course, the fact that he leaves Earth. And that it doesn't take him going home to realise that's what he'll be doing. When he finally gets back he's already decided he's not staying.

Gah, sorry, I went on a bit of a John tangent. tl;dr I think that even though they gave John a tradition Man Becomes Violent arc, they were more honest, or at least less aggressively masculine, about showing the emotional cost.

(Finally I feel sort of like a dork recommending my own fanworks, so I won't, but I mostly wanted to warn you off the first Farscape vid I made because it was actually my first vid ever and it sort of shows... I mean it IS still on my website if you're deathly curious but yeahhhh. The other two are better, I think!)