User Reviews

When Moya comes across an unexpected asteroid field it looks like a blessing as a Peace Keeper ship is scanning for them but the asteroids help then remain undetected. It soon becomes apparent though that what they saw wasn't an asteroid field but a swarm of space dwelling creatures, the Draks, and it isn't long before they are aboard Moya where they need heat to reproduce. They are only found when the temperature starts increasing; while this is uncomfortable for most of the crew it is potentially fatal to Aeryn as Sebaceans can't regulate their body temperature; if they don't solve the problem soon she will suffer heat delirium and ultimately a living death. It soon turns out that the Draks have a strange ability; they can take a DNA sample of any living creature and create an identical duplicate so the crew have to find a way of identifying themselves from the copies. Eventually they manage to communicate with the Draks and arrange a truce while the Draks complete their reproductive cycle... that is until the Peace Keepers find and board Moya.

This was an entertaining stand alone episode; in some ways it felt like the type of story one would get in 'Star Trek: TNG' although this had far more humour that one would expect from that series; I'm sure you'd never see a member of the Enterprise crew rip the arm off an apparent comrade even if it is only a replicant! There were a couple of minor plot holes; firstly it wasn't explained why they couldn't just put Aeryn in one of Moya's pods and at the end Crichton uses the replicants to make the Peace Keeper commander thing he can make copies of himself and tells him to report that fact to Crais; I don't recall this being mentioned again in later episodes... I guess we must assume Crais thought his man was suffering from Space Delerium!

Farscape launches out of its pilot episode with a rollicking, action-packed monster-of-the-week episode whose alien "menace" and Star Trek-like peaceful resolution are as well-executed as the forced chemistry between Crichton and Sun is poorly.

Part The Thing, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Henson touch is again the true marvel of the episode. Ornate set design continues the clever blend of grotesquely biological with futuristic. A living spaceship - part animal, part machine - becomes infested with highly intelligent beetles that are themselves both sophisticated diplomats and goop-spraying vermin. Combining meat with mechanism, sapience with slime, is a recurring dichotomy throughout the episode in the finest tradition of high-weirdness sci fi genre that Farscape otherwise seems to merely flirt with rather than embrace.

The flirtation between the "human-ish" characters is not so well-executed. The writers have elected to try Crichton as a swaggering, pop-culture-belching, wisecracking loaf who is somehow a competent boxer and a technical dunderhead, leaving us wondering if the prodigal scientist from the premier has somehow already been body snatched at the beginning of the episode. Sun's warrior prowess is nowhere to be seen, lost to a convenient species trait so impractical it forces us to believe that the Farscape galaxy lives under the tyranny of delicate snowmen who can be wilted by minutes of AC downtime.

This is episode 2. Characters are still finding their footing. I am glad to see that some recurring plot points will continue - an arc of tension between Crichton and the Peacekeeprs is kept alive, weakly, by the gratuitous sudden presence of intruding peacekeepers who vanish with as little plausible explanation as they appeared. But even as a stand-alone monster of the week it is a great success. The story is complex but efficiently told, the writers' clear familiarity with the source material of their cinematic ancestors pervades the script, and the Henson charm succeeds wildly in both the verminous alien cockroaches and our first closeup with the ship's mysterious pilot. If only the humans could stay out of the way for the aliens (and their fans) to continue dominating the best parts of the episodes so far.