FARSCAPE: THE PEACEKEEPER WARS (2004) A big, budong-sized letdown Farscape is why I keep saying that it's long past time for Star Trek's nuts to drop. It had an unashamed sexiness, a sense of humor that made me laugh instead of just smile, and its aliens actually looked and behaved alien and even the puppets were so convincing that I came to believe in them as much as I did in the humans. It had thrilling situations of terrible danger and dread where even if I didn't always believe that the characters might get killed, I did believe that they would likely come away from these experiences changed forever, and not necessarily for the "better". The characters of Farscape, thrown together by circumstance on a living ship named Moya and constantly on the run, rarely fail to remind me of the shallowness of their competition. They did not have their selves crushed out of them by Starfleet until they all became the same people with the same goals and the same methods of achieving them. They're people, not automatons, with failings and assets and relationships with each other that can still surprise long after we might think we've learned all about their natures. And there was this romance between John Crichton (Ben Browder) and Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) who have a chemistry between them that approaches nuclear, and they're put through a diabolical wringer of plot twists so bizarre that their relationship often seems less at stake than their sanity. More importantly, their ordeals are devoid of cheap, easy, sentimental schmaltz. If Ross and Rachel were put through one hundredth of one percent of this, it would've made for a pretty cool murder-suicide. But by season four, the direction and momentum of the show started to stall. The major story of the last two seasons, that of Crichton being the most wanted man in the galaxy for his knowledge of wormholes, was getting stretched out beyond its freshness. The biggest development in this story is that he's no longer just sought by the Peacekeepers (human-looking space Nazis), but by another empire who's even worse, the scaly Scarrans (who are so awful that their whole alien schtick is raping and impregnating women of every species they can find), who both overestimate his knowledge of wormholes and mistakenly believe that he can tip the balance of power between them by making wormhole-based weapons. Such a Stargate-like direction for the series (nasty villains succeeded by uglier villains with bigger ships) wouldn't have been so bad if the minutae of what made the show work so well had been handled well, but much of it wasn't. The chief villain became a shifty but disappointingly reliable crew member, replaced by a thoroughly unmenacing girly girl. The best big twist of season four - that Crichton and company get to Earth and make some waves - was handled smartly and probably the most realistically of the "first contact" stories I've seen but it didn't have a patch on season three's big twist, which resulted in about a third of the year alternating between the adventures of two different Crichtons and a split-up crew. The exhausting seven-episode arc at the end piled on revelation after revelation, most of which turned out to be arbitrary and/or irrelevant (Sizoku's a robot? Scorpius has been a Scarran spy for a decade?). It became narratively unreliable (the return of Harvey), and chickened out with its characters' dark sides (it wasn't really crazy-as-shit Stark doing those awful things, it was an evil android replica...oh, that's just insulting). There were all these plot possibilities that were conspicuously introduced and timidly dropped (Aeryn's vow at the end of "Promises"; the perils of "tormented space") and it seems obvious now that the writers never had a grip on Chiana's developing powers, or Sikozu's...anything about Sikozu. There was even a "we're still on the holodeck!" episode. Season four, while undeniably containing much of the magic that made the first three seasons so wonderful, was botched - elaborate excuses for its cancellation have been offered, but nothing quite so convincing as a simple "not enough people were watching". The climactic moment of the series: Crichton and pregnant Aeryn, at last agreeing to marry, only to be shattered into tiny plastic pieces by a new alien species that looked wacky even by this show's standards. It kind of hurt, seeing it end with such an arbitrarily unhappy fate for people I'd followed for so long, while their friends look on in horror and even the big tough guy falls to his knees and sobs with the kind of undisguised pain usually reserved for Sicilian widows. But at least there was something quintessentially Farscape about it; it didn't just suddenly stop without buildup or payoff like the original Star Trek did, or end Bruckheimer-style like Deep Space Nine. Besides, Farscape's cliffhangers are never as big a deal as they seem at the time, usually resolved in the first few minutes (even seconds!) of the next episode. I knew that Crichton and Aeryn would be fine. They'd be pissed, and they might be missing a few toes after they get put back together, but they'd be fine. I admit I contributed nothing to the movement to bring back Farscape beyond buying the DVD's, believing it likely to be futile, possibly even catastrophic in its own way - Star Trek's third-season return was due to fan lobbying and that, to put it politely, choked on a load. I'll concede the first point: I was massively wrong, toweringly wrong. The Farscape fans worked harder than hell to make a proper finish happen. When I'd heard that a miniseries was going to be made, I smiled. The Farscape fans who actually worked for it must have came in their pants, and they earned it. Was I wrong on the second assumption? My fears started with that title, which implies big battle scenes, effects-heavy spectacles that Star Wars does right, Star Trek makes dull work out of, and Farscape for the most part just avoided. One of the things I liked most about Farscape is that the ship on which it was largely set had no weapons, eliminating such crutches and forcing the writers to think of more inventive ways out of scrapes. In those rare situations where there was such a conflict, the rules were simple - if the shield was up, it would protect them. If the Peacekeepers sent even their smallest ship, they would be overpowered easily. None of this exploding panels, "Shields down to thirty-seven percent!" shit. When they finally did introduce a ship with a gun on it, it caused more problems than it solved. Did I really want to see a Farscape battle epic? You've gotta have some faith, I thought. I balked when my favorite band said they were going to cover a Simon & Garfunkel song, and that turned out great. The people responsible for four seasons of Farscape know what they're doing, and wouldn't stick us with a lot of explosions, shouting, cheap heroics and slow-mo shootouts at the expense of the things that kept me watching and buying in the first place. Would they? The Peacekeeper Wars is an obvious (though uncharacteristically sentimental) love letter to the fans. While many old plot threads are left hanging and forgotten, the mini's story is mostly concerned with tying up loose ends left over from the series, and it can't hurt to have as much background as possible going in. Conversely, it is what I feared it would be in execution - a pandering sop to well-worn space opera convention, I can only assume in an attempt to pull in the sci-fi-equals-laser-battles crowd that the TV show died failing to court. It is said that the plot of PKW is culled from plans for the aborted season five, but considering the haphazard plotting of season four, I'm not sure how much I believe season five was planned out. As a result it's a baffling mix of approaches; I felt dumbed down to as a Farscape fan, and people who weren't fans in the first place may well give up on it long before the three hours (plus ads) are over. PKW picks up about where we'd expect it to, with Crichton and Aeryn still crumbled into tiny plastic bits. We see this in flashback while a comatose Crichton with dialogue echoing in his head passes for the wraparound story. Turns out their getting blasted was a mistake made by a xenophobic species who likes to stay hidden (the words "cloaking device" are meticulously avoided in favor of "concealment canopy" and "invisibility shield"). Froglike Rygel - a puppet voiced by Jonathan Hardy - is swimming along the bottom of the sea, carrying up the pieces in his stomach to regurgitate them for later re-assembly after which John and Aeryn are fine, with one exception. Rygel never ralphed up the fetus, so it's still in one of his stomachs where it proceeds to develop (no word of an umbilical cord, placenta, anything). Unlike the rest of John and Aeryn, it never got "decrystallized", which seems like a minor oversight if you recall that Rygel once ate a piece of Aeryn's arm, so the baby is probably digestible to him. But never mind. Aeryn and Rygel's relationship is probably the most antagonistic on the show (at least D'Argo once admitted that he had much to learn from Rygel), and this situation makes for some funny exchanges between them, for a while. These are also the only good Rygel moments in the mini - soon enough, the "Rygel's pregnant" joke is flogged to death and then beyond to the level of Arnold Schwarzennegger in Junior, as the hormone swings cause him to start crying for no good reason. And the one thing he wanted over all four seasons he more or less gets thirty minutes in, in a throwaway scene which adds nothing to anything, and obtaining it doesn't even have anything to do with his nature or his actions. The uncorruptably oversexed Chiana (Gigi Edgely, always a delight), who spent much of season four going blind after using her special power (ho, ho) has had eye transplants and doesn't have to worry about that anymore. No points for guessing that these powers (now seemingly limited to being able to see through walls) will come in handy exactly once. Chiana brings along Stark (Paul Goddard), a man driven to batshit insanity by a lifetime of absorbing parts of dying people's souls. There was a chance at the end of season four to make him into something formidable, but for whatever reason the makers of Farscape elected to make him harmless, and certainly in this miniseries, he's a little unreliable and prone to babbling and cowering but lacks any trace of the madness that once inspired him to show Jool something that would make her cry forever. Meanwhile Chiana's on-again-off-again Luxan lover D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) has been supervising the re-assembly of Aeryn and Crichton. D'Argo is, superficially, this show's Worf or Teal'c - the big honorable warrior guy, differing mostly in that he has a youthful cluelessness and sensitivity other such characters wouldn't dare admit to. He has issues with his estranged, half-breed son Jothee (now played by Nathaniel Dean), and while the kid's a little more tolerable now than he was when we last saw him, I always took amusement in his season 3 declaration that one day he would return and prove himself worthy...and that by the end of the show's run, we were still waiting. Now it's not funny anymore, and I miss the funny more than I like the kid. A slightly unsettling subtext is suggested when the full-blooded Luxans under Jothee's command excuse his leadership thusly: "He's got brains, the rest of us just like to fight." Pilot, the four-armed puppet creature that pilots Moya, has one hard decision to make but otherwise does little. Three-eyed Noranti (Melissa Jaffer), for whom drugs are the answer to everything, arbitrarily leaves early on and that Scorpius wanted his hands on her in particular (a conspicuous question from his last scene in the series proper) is forgotten, and I don't think she even gave anybody drugs. Which brings us to that more-or-less villain, Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), who's like Mr. Spock and Hannibal Lecter in one unsettling, fetish-suited package. He looks like a villain, and talks like a villain, and usually acts like a villain, but his motivations are intelligent and understandable; that much has not changed, for the first half of the mini anyway. Sikozu (Raelee Hill), who's so mysterious that she's actually not mysterious at all, is still slinking around him even though we'd last seen her apparently getting killed for outliving her usefulness, as indeed she had. So against orders, Scorpius sics the Peacekeeper fleet on the Scarrans but abandons his fleet and takes off to find Crichton as soon as he finds out he's still alive, still confident that John would sooner share the wormholes with him than with the space rapists who kidnapped his girlfriend and threatened to boil their baby. Scorpius presumably finds out John's still alive because he has an operating link with the "neural clone" Harvey, a sort of Great Gazoo in John's mind, left over from a big microchip that was put in John's brain years before. But since the hardware was removed, how is it that Harvey can communicate over light years with Scorpius? PKW continues season four's rich tradition of the writers counting on the fans' speculations to pave over the plot holes. Crichton and company discover that the xenophobes are Eidolons, who have a latent but atrophied telepathic ability to influence people to be open to peaceful negotiation, and he wants to help them re-acquire this skill so they can broker a peace between the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans. The Eidolons have a baptism/chanting scene which the Farscape I know might or might not have mocked but certainly wouldn't have played as reverently as this does. The Eidolons re-acquaint us with red-haired Jool (Tammy Mackintosh), who was often a little annoying during her season on the show, unable to forge the slightest bond with anybody except for a (throwaway) last-minute proto-romance with D'Argo. Here she's grown up a little, she gets a scorchingly sexy re-introduction, and what little story time she has is unexpected and unsentimental, as I have come to expect from this show. She is the only character in PKW for whom the pleasure of her screentime met or exceeded my expectations. Part one has a few tacked-on scenes which I can't help but suspect were put there at the insistence of some suit who complained of a lack of action. The scene where Moya is boarded by mercenaries is conspicuously useless, and the action is pretty pedestrian at that; there are some cute gymnastic-fighting moves from the girls and, incredibly, a slow-motion shot of John leaping through the air while firing his pistol (ugh), but in staging, stunts and circumstance, it's bottom-rung stuff. Another scene, where Scarran War Minister Ahkna (perennial guest Francesca Buller, in bitchin' hat and KISS boots) surreptitiously tries to have Rygel killed for no reason at all, evokes a similar clueless desperation. So I wasn't blown away by the first half of PKW, but despite my reservations I was mostly pleased, especially considering that the bulk of its plot picks up from the least of Farscape's multi-parters (early season four's What Was Lost). By the end of part one, Crichton and Aeryn have conspired to inflict an unsettlingly serious injury on Stark which looks like it promises to drive him to new depths of insanity, and they end up in a cliffhanger predicament so dire that Aeryn unblinkingly tells him "You've ruined my life." Despite a few missteps in the dialogue (line-for-line echoing of previous episodes, reminding me of the fanboy-tickling exchanges in The Chronicles Of Riddick), the characters at least sound like the same characters. Part one might not have been on a par with prime Farscape, but it wasn't half bad. But almost everything that seemed to be building up to something good in part one gets fucked up with total abandon in part two, testing the limits of how much I could stand to see Farscape's good name so sullied. From hereon in, a degree of spoilers cannot be avoided; if you want nothing further spoiled for you, I'll say only this: it's sentimental, pandering shit unworthy of even the worst Farscape episodes. I'm thinking Vitas Mortis and Jeremiah Crichton. Of the second half's few successes, it must be said that in terms of the larger plot mechanics, it delivers exactly what Farscape fans have asked for. The wormhole thing, the Harvey thing, the Scarran/Peacekeeper thing, are all obviously going to be dealt with. D'Argo and his son get some closure. We also finally find out why Peacekeepers look just like humans. PKW wraps up just enough from the series to satisfy what the fans were clamoring for the most loudly, though it does so with about as much invention as a bad piece of fanfic, at any rate far less than what we're used to from official Farscape. Still, new open-ended wrinkles are added anyway, possibly in confident hopes of further future Farscape. Scorpius's replacement villain, Commandant Grayza (Rebecca Riggs), is visibly pregnant with a baby we're probably supposed to suspect is John's (don't ask) and this goes nowhere. When we knew of her, she was not visibly pregnant, but she was forcibly relieved of command and under sedation - now, she's shacking up with Peacekeeper #1 and whispering Lady Macbeth advice in his ear, and we have to get to the second half before we discover that she's still an active Commandant, though she does almost nothing. The Peacekeepers are ordered to treat Scorpius as hostile, but I don't think they ever did. There's a question at the end regarding Harvey and the baby, suggested only in the most far-reaching hypotheses of the fans, but maybe no less valid for that; it's a nice addition to a fan wishlist, but it still amounts to approximately nothing. New (non-) twists I can hack; PKW rewriting the Farscape universe and its characters into something crappier - even the events that occur only within itself - now that bothers me. Stark, more insane than ever and having run away to hide in the dark, necessitates an all-padding scene where people go to look for him only to find he's gotten over his catatonia without a problem, rendering moot John's hollow-ringing (and sentimental) regrets about putting him in that situation. Indeed, it turns out that this was the best thing that's ever happened to him, like in his whole life. Scorpius, who'd endured a head injury that looked pretty delicate (indeed, a galaxy-renowned surgeon was the one who installed the machinery there), is totally fixed, though he's become an idiot retroactive to an unspecified time that's apparently our job as fans to guess at. Scorpius has, since he explained himself in season three, unquestionably wanted nothing to do with Scarrans beyond killing them. It is even said in this very miniseries that "hatred of the Scarrans is Scorpius's sole consistent trait", and yet he ends up smiling with satisfied elation in that scene where the Scorpius I know would be pissed. Granted, much of season four had me yearning for the more dastardly Scorpius of the first three seasons (Scorpius put his butt on the line for John a few times). It was not a trend I wanted to see continue. And if he knew who the spy among their ranks was the whole time, why did he continue to allow that spy to send transmissions to his enemies, knowing that it would (and indeed did) only bring them down on him, killing his soldiers and endangering the only person whose safety he wanted to secure? His excuse, "long enough for you to service my desires", is moronic - both in that it's ridiculous that Scorpius would so willingly call so much trouble upon himself and Crichton for no apparent gain, and that its vagueness of the treachery's history is yet another hint (as if more were needed) that the writers had no idea what they were doing with this "spy" angle, leaving it to the fans to guess. Now, that's part of the fun of being a fan, I understand that. Part of the problem of being a fan is trying not to take it personally when lazy writers rely on your fanboy musings to cover up their failings. If Scorpius let me down, then Sikozu at least has the benefit of me never holding very high expectations for her. After all the whiplash-inducing revelations at the end of season four about her anatomy instead of her motivations (she's Kalish...no, she's a Scarran in disguise...no, she's a robot...no, she's Kalish again?), PKW sheds little light on exactly what she is. She can still run around on ceilings like all Kalish, but is she a robot? Does she still have super Scarran killing power, which would've come in handy when she was surrounded by all those Scarrans? More problematic still is PKW's failure to grasp WHO she is. Sikozu does nothing here other than slink around Scorpius and when her "true" identity and motives are revealed, they're pathetically stupid, especially in light of how smart she was laboriously made out to be throughout season four. This might, I stress might, be forgiven if she still looked great like she did in season four - Jool was a total airhead in season three but all she had to do was bare that midriff and I didn't care anymore. But Sikozu, who once had the coolest hair in the galaxy, here has ugly painted-on eyebrows and a dull-colored butch cut which evokes more than anything else second-season Felicity. And Crichton, good old John Crichton. Over the years, Crichton has endured torments and indignities that perhaps only Ash from The Evil Dead can appreciate. He has it pretty easy in PKW, though he does make an emotionally exhausting decision or two that leaves him with that red-eyed "I just saw everyone I ever cared about get eaten by wolves" look I wouldn't trade for anything. The coma/flashback angle of the first half is entirely abandoned in the second, and we don't see John in a coma again until the end of the episode where the resolution is so schmaltzy, so disgustingly sentimental, so painfully unworthy of Farscape that I stared in the most unpleasant, stomach-lurching awe this show has ever held me in. If you're looking for the worst moment in Farscape history, look no further. Aeryn's problems are mostly centered on that baby; first getting it out of Rygel and into the right womb, then having to deliver it under some pretty stressful circumstances. There's more than one attempted wedding scene, and I'm glad the first (schmaltzy) attempt was interrupted. I'm not sure what more I can say on this subject with a minimum of spoilage, but I'll say this: the one that really matters in the second half is one of the few good moments of the second half, with all of the love and none of the cheap sentimental cack that otherwise plagues this miniseries. As you've probably heard, there is a death at the end of PKW, as one of the longtime leads makes the ultimate sacrifice to save everyone else - longtime leads knowing no other way to die. On the heartwrenching poignancy scale, if Spock's was a ten and Data's was a one, this would be about a four - not without an element of palpable grief, but like Data's, pretty calculated, arising from what would contribute to a big dramatic finish, instead of from the natures of the characters (which Farscape regular would not have done this? Other than Rygel). Also, one can't help but remember the many times our heroes went through incredible trouble to deliver each other from danger, and this time, they give up on one of their own awfully easily. Considering how much I liked this character while alive, I knew something was going drastically wrong when the death evoked so little in the way of the intended emotions, overshadowed by the sense of hollow manipulation I felt at the end of Star Trek: Nemesis. The biggest pooch screwed in PKW has to be the once-mighty Scarrans - immune to pulse pistol fire for three seasons, they're complete pussies here, and we see no fewer than six Scarrans die from a single shot each. Despite this mini even making an issue of "the amount of firepower it takes to drop a single Scarran", nobody seems to notice the discrepancy and otherwise it is, along with simplified and less impressive makeup, taken for granted. The season-four destruction of the here-unmentioned flowers on which they were dependent might be explanation enough, but it doesn't change the disappointing fact that the scary, galaxy-raping Scarrans have become wimps and now really are nothing more than late-season Stargate villains (i.e. uglier aliens with bigger ships). We repeatedly witness this (one is even beaten to death by the only character less physically imposing than Rygel!) in an extensive battle in a ruined city, which so far as battles go, offers nothing we haven't seen hundreds of times before, set basically on a big ugly junkyard set with our heroes fighting "Scarran insurgency teams", which seems like an unnecessary effort on the part of the Scarrans when, as they demonstrate earlier in the mini, they can easily destroy these cities from orbit anyway. And in orbit, the wormhole weapon inevitably gets assembled and deployed for what is supposedly the climactic moment of all Farscape thusfar, in the mistaken impression that this was something the fans have been waiting to see. News flash: this already happened, season three. It was quick, elegantly devastating, and had a wicked punch line from Stark that never gets old. This one is an entirely different kind of wormhole weapon; basically a drawn-out FX orgy with lots of hollow (sentifuckingmental!!!) moralizing. Is it churlish of me to complain so about the series that I could have contributed to (at least helped bring about), but did not out of nothing better than pessimism? Maybe, but I wouldn't have wanted to have been even partly responsible for this. After two long ass-numbing, fidgety sits through The Peacekeeper Wars, it is as obvious to me as the tentacles on D'Argo's head: this was not representative of what made Farscape great. The magic is not here. Instead, there is pandering, sentiment, and cynicism - not the epitaph I wanted for Farscape, but now I hope it stops here before it gets any worse. BACK TO THE F's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE