Sunday, May 27, 2012

I, E.T.

Farscape was never the runaway smash hit its creators hoped it would be.  Perhaps part of the blame for that lies in the uneven tone of the first series.  It's standard practice for TV shows to take a little time to find their footing, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to watch.  All the goodwill engendered by the tense and efficient premiere episode is frittered away by this lifeless second outing.

The crew discover that a Peacekeeper beacon wired into Moya is broadcasting their location far and wide. Their quest to disable the beacon leads them to a backwater planet where the inhabitants look vaguely like 1940's/1950's Earth farmers, but with alien prosthetic makeup because, well, they're aliens.

The script tries to draw some parallels between the alien mother and her son, who discovers Crichton hiding in their barn, and Crichton's own situation (they are both new to alien encounters), but beyond remarking on the superficial similarity, it doesn't really go anywhere with it.

The story also unwisely splits up the Moya crew.  At this point, we don't really know them that well, so taking some time to see how they interact would probably be a good idea, but instead they are all shunted off into separate subplots that don't really amount to a whole heck of a lot.  D'Argo gets captured, then fairly quickly freed.  Zan and Rygel attempt to disconnect the Peacekeeper device from Moya.

All in all, a most unsatisfying and rather listless episode.

Jargon watch: "What in hezmana is going on?"  Interestingly, Aeryn has the line: "I'm new to all this escaped prisoner crap".  No "dren" yet!

No comments:

Post a Comment