Farscape Renaissance

[castalia]

So, yeah, there's this show that is quite possibly my greatest fannish love of all time, even though I fell in and out of love with it at times and missed episodes during the original run due to work and then rediscovered it just in time for the race to the finish line and then angst for a few years until the miniseries. A show that gave me a het romance I actually love, buddies to beat all buddies, a Southern character who for once isn't a caricature, and muppets. All of which thrilled me, moved me, and broke my damn heart.

Yes, Farscape. Duh.

Just before I left Wales I started watching the eps from the beginning, meaning to sit down and watch the entire series all the way through - something I hadn't done in forever, if at all. I mean, despite seeing various eps a million times or more, there were some I hadn't seen in years, some I'd only seen maybe once so long ago I didn't quite remember them. Like somehow I always managed to catch parts one and two of Look at the Princess, but rarely part three. Stuff like that. I felt the need to reconnect.

Made it up to A Bug's Life before coming home, and then things happened and I didn't get round to watching more for a while. Then Rome happened, and a new season of Dr Who, and Slings and Arrows happened, and other shows I just had to have, right then. My renaissance got put on the back burner.

Not so, now. The timing has to be right to watch certain shows, I feel, and now is just the time for Farscape. In the past few weeks I've watched as fast as I can dl, and have spent far too much time at the local Dairy Queen taking advantage of the free wifi. I'm up to the Self Inflicted Wounds trilogy now, and just wallowing in how much I love my show, and how much I've missed it. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of the "Season of Death" and all the angst to come; it's really quite enjoyable, knowing exactly what's coming and how much it's going to hurt. Heh. Maybe I'm just in the mood to cry over something, or indulge in shippiness, or maybe just enjoy the pure cracktastic JOY for a while. God knows there's nothing else on tv that gives me quite the same dose of crazy genius.

Speaking of, y'know I love having Ben Browder and Claudia Black on SG-1, and it's great that Claudia has so much great material to work with and can really shine as Vala. And I do love Cameron Mitchell as a character, I do, but damn, someone needs to give Ben something he can really work with so he can emote again. I miss the crazy and the tears and those moments of soft, brilliant pathos.

Anyone else got any Farscape memories to share? Any favorite scenes, lines, character bits, etc? I want to wallow in all of it. Share!

ETA: One thing I only mentioned briefly and would like to comment on in more detail is how much I respect and admire Ben Browder for bringing Southern characters of merit to my TV screen. This is something you don't see very often on American television. What you usually see are the stereotypes we still can't get away from - the "Bubba" character, the Bible-thumper, the Steel Magnolias type of Southern Belle, or the rich plantation owner business tycoon who insists on wearing cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. We all live in trailers with cars up on blocks, we don't wear shoes, we all chew tobacco, and there's always someone roaming the woods with a gun. It still pisses me off that a Southern person, especially a poor (usually white, sometimes not) Southerner, is almost the only ethnic group in the US that is still permissible to mock and disparage outright even in a polite or professional setting, and their treatment in film is typically as violent, racist, sexist monsters. Even saying so usually gets one jumped on by any number of people, especially in relation to any racial discussions. Business professionals from the South actively make the effort to try and get rid of any regional accents due to the near-universal perception that a Southern accent makes one sound ignorant and ill-educated. And people wonder why the North-South divide is still so great.

Most of the celebrities who are from the South seem to go to extreme lengths to hide the fact. Johnny Depp is originally from Kentucky, but you'd never know it. Samuel L. Jackson was born and raised twenty miles from my hometown, in Chattanooga, TN, but I'm not sure many people know that. I'm told Kyra Sedgewick is a Southern character in The Closer, but I haven't caught that show yet to see how positively she's portrayed. Probably in that "quaint" Steel Magnolias manner. Abby Sciuto is from New Orleans, but her presentation is mostly as a goth character rather than a Southern one, though I do love her penchant for giving everyone hugs.

Everyone remember that episode of the X-Files, Home, which gave us an incestuous family sporting horrific Southern accents along with all the usual redneck stereotypes, despite being set in Pennsylvania. Yeah. What otherwise might've been a good episode really turned my stomach. shanola22 made me suffer through an episode of La Femme Nikita, set "20 miles north of Chattanooga", which brought out the stereotypes in full abundance in a strange "small, Appalachian town" that looked nothing like this area. We won't talk about those accents, nor the replacement character in later seasons who was supposed to be from Atlanta.

So what (to get back to the topic of Farscape) other than the bleary red-eyed crazy look, the sharp blue eyes, and the way his ass looked in those leather pants, draws me to John Crichton and Ben Browder in general? He's a Southern boy and not ashamed of it. Ben doesn't tone down his accent (born in Memphis, TN and later raised in North Carolina - he's still got a Western TN accent and has said NC will always be "home" to him), even when TPTB writing his characters give them non-Southern backgrounds (still wondering why on Earth they made Cameron Mitchell be from Kansas when he sounds nothing like a mid-Westerner). Crichton hails from South Carolina and mentions many times during the series that he's from the South. And he's smart. FS gives me a rare Southern character with intelligence - he even has a PhD in science. He quotes his grandmother and talks about buttermilk biscuits and remembers truck stops in Macon, GA, and uses recognizable Southern slang without being mocked, or shown as simple. John Crichton is so the Southern character of my heart and I will forever adore Ben Browder for bringing characters like this to my TV screen. We need more of them.

Comments

[wishfulaces.livejournal.com]

I kinda did that, a couple years back--I scrounged up as many video tapes as I could find that had Farscape on them and attempted to watch them in order (it was a bit difficult, due to my mother's and my lack of coherent organization). And yes, I was finding all kinds of things I'd never seen the first time through, watching episodes I hadn't seen since they aired, and it was exquisite watching it all unfold. Ben Browder blew me away at the end of the second season when going absolutely starkers (I'm terrible with episode titles).

Also, the bodyswap episode is probably always going to be my favorite. (It's my sci-fi kink, it really is.)

[castalianspring.livejournal.com]

*nod* That scene at the end of the Liars, Guns, and Money triology, where he's playing with the chess pieces and D'Argo comes in and he's just gone, and he asks D'Argo to kill him and D'Argo just cradles John's face in his hands...gah. It still breaks me every damn time. Ben certainly has a gift for playing crazy. I love that they went there, that they let their male lead suffer so much and then actually have the emotional and mental breakdown afterwards.

Hee. I love the bodyswap, too. Such a cliché plot but they took it so much further. John in Aeryn's body...*snerk* Another instance of "omg, I can't believe they went there!"

[wishfulaces.livejournal.com]

It is such a cliche plot, but you can always tell how much fun the actors get out of it.

I love that they went there, that they let their male lead suffer so much and then actually have the emotional and mental breakdown afterwards.

I know. John never fully recovered from all that, and the toll it must have taken on Browder and the other actors going *through* that...egad. That was a group of people who did not believe in holding back.

[castalianspring.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine the emotional feedback issues that must come with the task of keeping up that sort of intensity, not to mention doing it on the insane shooting schedule Lani Tupu described at the FS Q&A panel at D*Con. So much overlapping to the point of craziness, and he told us how he had to keep little folders for each episode so he could keep the arcs straight and so he'd know where each scene fit into the emotional arc of both Crais and Pilot. With so much MORE for Ben to do, I can't even imagine the stress.