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Two more raves, and a link
Feb. 1st, 2005 02:37 pmRave 2: Farscape
Farscape wasn't love at first sight for me, or even being intrigued at first sight. The first episode I caught was I, E.T., and let's just say its charms are limited. I might not have stuck with this show had not the industrious hmpf assured me of glories to come. And boy, was she ever right.
One of the words you meet frequently when people talk about Farscape is "anarchy", and that captures the quality which marks it best, imo. Its character continuity and arcs are good, though hardly unmatched - there are shows which did it better. (Babylon 5, though it's unfair to compare anything to B5 in terms of continuity and long-term arcs, but also the Jossverse shows, for example.) And you'd better forget the sci in sci-fi from the start, and please never expect it to make sense. No, the extraordinariness of Farscape lies elsewhere. It's wild.
What do I mean by this? Well, let's start small. Bodily fluids. The ultra-cleanness and avoidance of messy bodily functions in traditional Star Trek (though not in some of the later shows) has been a running gag among many genre fans, so much so that the second Next Generation movie, First Contact, contains an in-joke about this. (Zefram Cochrane asks "to take a leak", and nobody understands him, whereupon he asks Our Heroes whether none of them ever piss.) Now Farscape, on the other hand, takes a perverse and delightful pride in going overboard in the other direction. People don't just piss (on the deck, no less, on one memorable occasion), they throw up on a regular basis, and that vomit is used ever so creatively and in close up. Any FS fan will tell you just when her/his fears that the minisseries would pull punches in order not to offend casual viewers was abandoned - as soon as we saw series regular Rygel throw up two of Our Heroes (who were in crystalline parts at the time - don't ask, it's complicated), and series regular Noranti told which crystalline part belonged to whom by tasting them. Yep. Farscape was BACK.
Speaking of Rygel - he's a muppet. So is Pilot, another central character. Almost the first thing you hear from people about why they don't watch Farscape: "Isn't that the show with the muppets?" Why, yes, Ma'am. And they're not used discreetly, either. No. They're regulars like the human actors, like them, they're front and center, some crucial plot developments depend on them, and they fart, throw up and have sex with the rest of them. (They're even featured in the hero's S/M fantasies.) Oh, and they make you cry, in a good fashion. People who manage to watch The Way We Weren't without getting their heart torn out for Pilot don't have one.
Then there is the pain threshold thing. Meaning: it doesn't really exist in this show. The show's central character starts out as your typical innocent (American) abroad, full of optimism, and with an endearing geek aspect - he's prone to spout more pop culture allusions than anyone on tv outside of a Joss Whedon show. (Oh, and speaking of, he's also a Buffy fan.) This being Farscape, he gets mindraped, tortured and screwed on a massive scale before the first season is over, and kills hundreds of people in the season finale by blowing up a base. And that's just for starters When the show starts, he's not good at anything fighting and weapon-related, and appalled to have ended up in a universe where everyone shoots at everyone else by way of introduction; when the show ends, his body count - actually, does anyone have statistics of deaths Crichton is responsible for? I'm guessing hundreds of thousands, right? He's also a neurotic mess, extremely paranoid and just this side of insane at times.
Now I could delve in everybody else's pain as well, but that would give the impression we're talking about some tv version of Frank Miller here (doom and gloom all around), which would sell Farscape short. Anarchy also means wild humour. Every show sooner or later does a body switch episode, and I love most of them, but Out of their Minds, the Farscape variation, is by far the funniest, featuring as it does a double switch between the entire ensemble, not just two character. Every show sooner or later has an episode in which the entire cast is mind-controlled and/or insane, but Crackers don't Matter is the funniest here, too, despite the fact it also includes some very dark moments. Farscape humour is so efficient because while going after the dignity of every single character (well, perhaps except for Pilot and Moya), especially its hero, it never betrays said characters for the sake of humour. Meaning: you'll get Crichton being made fun of by having to wear everything from drag and garters to ridiculous viking robes to alien vomit during the course of this show, but you don't get the fact he got raped both metaphorically and literally played for laughs at any point. Same with the rest of the gang.
Lastly, anarchy and wildness also means sexual wildness. We've talked about how certain conventions in regards to male and female sexuality still hold in most tv shows and in many films and books before. (I.e. a promiscuous male is a playboy, a promiscuous woman is a slut, in essence, and female characters meant to be sympathetic aren't shown to have sex with boys of the week the way male characters can be shown with girls of the week.) Not true for Farscape. Series regular Chiana is an immensly sexual being, both with men and women. And guess what? She's not being thought less off, let alone punished by the narrative for it. The show's central romance reverses the usual pattern - i.e. UST between the leads for as long as possible - by letting the UST become RST in the first season, and then let them become intimate in the not-physical sense. And sex is not limited to the good-looking characters, either. Everyone, from the shows main villain to the played-by-a-puppet Rygel, has it. Between S/M games involving snake hair to union of energy auras, this show tries to find as many variations to the basic principle as it can. And that's not counting what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
searose once called "the most bizarre courtship on tv", i.e. what is going on between Crichton and his nemesis Scorpius, which includes a sort-of-mutual offspring in the form of a neural clone and blood oaths.
Does the show have flaws? Naturally. Does it occasionally screw up and makes its loyal followers tear their hairs out? You betcha. But from premiere to miniseries, it remains unique. Anarchic. And Wild.
***
Rave 3) Sab
There once was... no, not a boy called John. There once was a girl who had a thing for B5 in general and the Centauri in particular, especially a fellow named Londo Mollari. A kind woman namedkernezelda pointed her towards a post about this fellow which had just been written. Our girl read, was delighted but also disagreed about some points and promptly started a debate with the fascinating creature who had written the post. And was she ever lucky to have done so.
The fascinating creature in question has been known at various times as Sabine, Sab, Makiko, Hope Of The Democratic Party and Tormentor From Outer Space. Today is her birthday. After meeting her via her Londo post, it took me a while to realize I had "met" her before, as an author of some great Farscape stories, especially this one about John, Harvey and Scorpius. It's an excellent example of her writing skill. She can write messed up astronauts and their neural clones as easily as she can, in other fandoms, tackle Cardassians and Bajorans, or West Wing's Josh Lyman, or Firefly's River Tam. (And really, convincing River voice? Tough.) She's also great with essays in her fandoms, like this one about Gul Dukat. And she can roleplay. Great Maker, can she ever.
When moonlighting aslondo_mollari over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse, I kept hoping and fearing a G'Kar would come along - fearing because writing G'Kar well is even more of a challenge than writing characters like River. Writing Londo is easy for me; G'Kar intimidates me, and I guess he does that for a great many people, because there isn't much G'Kar fanfic from his pov out there, more's the pity. Sab, though, tackled the mighty Narn head-on, and produced gems like this . With the result that I can't think of G'Kar without thinking of her now.
(This isn't an unmixed blessing, because fate has it in for her at times, and so it has been months since she could get online as a regular basis, which pretty much stalled any roleplay, with very rare exceptions. But, to conclude with a very Londonian feeling, better to have found a perfect G'Kar and lost his company, than no G'Kar at all!)
In our time, we're often prone to get cynical, or lethargic about subjects. Not so Sab. Whether she's talking about votes or fannish issues or new ways to make photos, she's always passionate and very, very alive. I feel very lucky to know her. Want to meet her as well? Hop over toiamsab and wish her a happy birthday.
***
And finally, a link to someone else's post produced by the rant/rave meme. As you might or might not know, I have a thing for the Star Wars prequels. So I was delighted to find this rant offernwithy's on a certain attitude from (some) OT purists which she sums up like this: All of us who like the prequels are just pretending to like them, or have been brainwashed by George Lucas. Or we're Hayden or Ewan fangirls who are overlooking the obvious faults just so we can watch them running around with lightsabers. Or quite possibly, we're just stupid. Or...
Oh, for heaven's sake.
Check out the rest. See, I can understand that X does not like Y. There are definitely a lot of films or tv shows which leave me indifferent, or irritate me, or which I actively dislike. But the implication that one MUST, absolutely must, hate/dislike/despise films or, see above, galls me on occasion. Luckily, Fern says it better than I could.
Farscape wasn't love at first sight for me, or even being intrigued at first sight. The first episode I caught was I, E.T., and let's just say its charms are limited. I might not have stuck with this show had not the industrious hmpf assured me of glories to come. And boy, was she ever right.
One of the words you meet frequently when people talk about Farscape is "anarchy", and that captures the quality which marks it best, imo. Its character continuity and arcs are good, though hardly unmatched - there are shows which did it better. (Babylon 5, though it's unfair to compare anything to B5 in terms of continuity and long-term arcs, but also the Jossverse shows, for example.) And you'd better forget the sci in sci-fi from the start, and please never expect it to make sense. No, the extraordinariness of Farscape lies elsewhere. It's wild.
What do I mean by this? Well, let's start small. Bodily fluids. The ultra-cleanness and avoidance of messy bodily functions in traditional Star Trek (though not in some of the later shows) has been a running gag among many genre fans, so much so that the second Next Generation movie, First Contact, contains an in-joke about this. (Zefram Cochrane asks "to take a leak", and nobody understands him, whereupon he asks Our Heroes whether none of them ever piss.) Now Farscape, on the other hand, takes a perverse and delightful pride in going overboard in the other direction. People don't just piss (on the deck, no less, on one memorable occasion), they throw up on a regular basis, and that vomit is used ever so creatively and in close up. Any FS fan will tell you just when her/his fears that the minisseries would pull punches in order not to offend casual viewers was abandoned - as soon as we saw series regular Rygel throw up two of Our Heroes (who were in crystalline parts at the time - don't ask, it's complicated), and series regular Noranti told which crystalline part belonged to whom by tasting them. Yep. Farscape was BACK.
Speaking of Rygel - he's a muppet. So is Pilot, another central character. Almost the first thing you hear from people about why they don't watch Farscape: "Isn't that the show with the muppets?" Why, yes, Ma'am. And they're not used discreetly, either. No. They're regulars like the human actors, like them, they're front and center, some crucial plot developments depend on them, and they fart, throw up and have sex with the rest of them. (They're even featured in the hero's S/M fantasies.) Oh, and they make you cry, in a good fashion. People who manage to watch The Way We Weren't without getting their heart torn out for Pilot don't have one.
Then there is the pain threshold thing. Meaning: it doesn't really exist in this show. The show's central character starts out as your typical innocent (American) abroad, full of optimism, and with an endearing geek aspect - he's prone to spout more pop culture allusions than anyone on tv outside of a Joss Whedon show. (Oh, and speaking of, he's also a Buffy fan.) This being Farscape, he gets mindraped, tortured and screwed on a massive scale before the first season is over, and kills hundreds of people in the season finale by blowing up a base. And that's just for starters When the show starts, he's not good at anything fighting and weapon-related, and appalled to have ended up in a universe where everyone shoots at everyone else by way of introduction; when the show ends, his body count - actually, does anyone have statistics of deaths Crichton is responsible for? I'm guessing hundreds of thousands, right? He's also a neurotic mess, extremely paranoid and just this side of insane at times.
Now I could delve in everybody else's pain as well, but that would give the impression we're talking about some tv version of Frank Miller here (doom and gloom all around), which would sell Farscape short. Anarchy also means wild humour. Every show sooner or later does a body switch episode, and I love most of them, but Out of their Minds, the Farscape variation, is by far the funniest, featuring as it does a double switch between the entire ensemble, not just two character. Every show sooner or later has an episode in which the entire cast is mind-controlled and/or insane, but Crackers don't Matter is the funniest here, too, despite the fact it also includes some very dark moments. Farscape humour is so efficient because while going after the dignity of every single character (well, perhaps except for Pilot and Moya), especially its hero, it never betrays said characters for the sake of humour. Meaning: you'll get Crichton being made fun of by having to wear everything from drag and garters to ridiculous viking robes to alien vomit during the course of this show, but you don't get the fact he got raped both metaphorically and literally played for laughs at any point. Same with the rest of the gang.
Lastly, anarchy and wildness also means sexual wildness. We've talked about how certain conventions in regards to male and female sexuality still hold in most tv shows and in many films and books before. (I.e. a promiscuous male is a playboy, a promiscuous woman is a slut, in essence, and female characters meant to be sympathetic aren't shown to have sex with boys of the week the way male characters can be shown with girls of the week.) Not true for Farscape. Series regular Chiana is an immensly sexual being, both with men and women. And guess what? She's not being thought less off, let alone punished by the narrative for it. The show's central romance reverses the usual pattern - i.e. UST between the leads for as long as possible - by letting the UST become RST in the first season, and then let them become intimate in the not-physical sense. And sex is not limited to the good-looking characters, either. Everyone, from the shows main villain to the played-by-a-puppet Rygel, has it. Between S/M games involving snake hair to union of energy auras, this show tries to find as many variations to the basic principle as it can. And that's not counting what
searose once called "the most bizarre courtship on tv", i.e. what is going on between Crichton and his nemesis Scorpius, which includes a sort-of-mutual offspring in the form of a neural clone and blood oaths. Does the show have flaws? Naturally. Does it occasionally screw up and makes its loyal followers tear their hairs out? You betcha. But from premiere to miniseries, it remains unique. Anarchic. And Wild.
***
Rave 3) Sab
There once was... no, not a boy called John. There once was a girl who had a thing for B5 in general and the Centauri in particular, especially a fellow named Londo Mollari. A kind woman named
kernezelda pointed her towards a post about this fellow which had just been written. Our girl read, was delighted but also disagreed about some points and promptly started a debate with the fascinating creature who had written the post. And was she ever lucky to have done so. The fascinating creature in question has been known at various times as Sabine, Sab, Makiko, Hope Of The Democratic Party and Tormentor From Outer Space. Today is her birthday. After meeting her via her Londo post, it took me a while to realize I had "met" her before, as an author of some great Farscape stories, especially this one about John, Harvey and Scorpius. It's an excellent example of her writing skill. She can write messed up astronauts and their neural clones as easily as she can, in other fandoms, tackle Cardassians and Bajorans, or West Wing's Josh Lyman, or Firefly's River Tam. (And really, convincing River voice? Tough.) She's also great with essays in her fandoms, like this one about Gul Dukat. And she can roleplay. Great Maker, can she ever.
When moonlighting as
londo_mollari over at theatrical_muse, I kept hoping and fearing a G'Kar would come along - fearing because writing G'Kar well is even more of a challenge than writing characters like River. Writing Londo is easy for me; G'Kar intimidates me, and I guess he does that for a great many people, because there isn't much G'Kar fanfic from his pov out there, more's the pity. Sab, though, tackled the mighty Narn head-on, and produced gems like this . With the result that I can't think of G'Kar without thinking of her now. (This isn't an unmixed blessing, because fate has it in for her at times, and so it has been months since she could get online as a regular basis, which pretty much stalled any roleplay, with very rare exceptions. But, to conclude with a very Londonian feeling, better to have found a perfect G'Kar and lost his company, than no G'Kar at all!)
In our time, we're often prone to get cynical, or lethargic about subjects. Not so Sab. Whether she's talking about votes or fannish issues or new ways to make photos, she's always passionate and very, very alive. I feel very lucky to know her. Want to meet her as well? Hop over to
iamsab and wish her a happy birthday. ***
And finally, a link to someone else's post produced by the rant/rave meme. As you might or might not know, I have a thing for the Star Wars prequels. So I was delighted to find this rant of
fernwithy's on a certain attitude from (some) OT purists which she sums up like this: All of us who like the prequels are just pretending to like them, or have been brainwashed by George Lucas. Or we're Hayden or Ewan fangirls who are overlooking the obvious faults just so we can watch them running around with lightsabers. Or quite possibly, we're just stupid. Or...Oh, for heaven's sake.
Check out the rest. See, I can understand that X does not like Y. There are definitely a lot of films or tv shows which leave me indifferent, or irritate me, or which I actively dislike. But the implication that one MUST, absolutely must, hate/dislike/despise films or, see above, galls me on occasion. Luckily, Fern says it better than I could.
