I was thinking of how you could make a modern version of stuff like A Princess Of Mars that took a more realistic road instead of fantasy wish fulfillment, and it occured to me Farscape pretty much was it.
John Crichton(JC? John Carter) gets pulled through a wormhole while testing a reuseable space vehicle and plopped into the middle of a prison escape.
Rather than being hailed as a hero he is called retarded, while he can communicate just fine thanks to an injection of translation microbes his lack of knowledge about the world and his cultural traits make him a burden initially. He also never loses his annoying habit of making cultural references his companions do not get(who is Yoda?) which comes across more annoying than anything.
I thought an interesting aspect was him losing his “innocence” as far as killing and violence, they seemed to be saying if John hopes to survive in the uncharted territories he needs to drop his cultural baggage.
He only becomes a matter of galactic importance because he comes into possession of an artifact essentially rather than his own inherent superiority.
There was a lot of time spent in the series exploring how John was being changed by his experiences as well, when he returns to an Earth that has just recently experienced the events of September 11th 2001 he can’t believe his own father has become a xenophobe. He finds himself out of place on earth, even before then though he had extreme anxiety about how his return would effect his companions and lover.
I think if you take the mighty whitey wish fulfillment out of such fish out of water stories, Farscape is what you are left with.
How could Farscape possibly be any MORE wish fullfillment? Here is this dumbass wisecracking human who inexplicably ends up on this spaceship full of aliens going on crazy adventures throughout the universe.
His best friend is a giant sword/gun weilding alien warrior (why do advanced space-faring races always use 100 year old Earth weapon technology?).
His girlfriend is a hot-ish (if somewhat butter-facey) female humanoid alien super-soldier.
The other female aliens are all humanoid and pretty easy on the eyes (if somewhat oddly colored) while the other “male” aliens are a toad and a bug tied to the ship.
They conveniently have some sort of Babble-fish tech that lets them communicate flawlessly (except for profanities…which never translate and they all speak with Aussy accents).
Rather than hopelessly clueless about every situation they end up in, Crighton basically wise-cracks and ass kicks his way through everything in typical “let me show you dumb aliens how we do things on Earth” fashion.
Ironically, much of his actions throughout the series would (and actually are IIRC) considered attrocities on various planets.
Ok let me change that ahem, is Farscape a deconstruction of escapist stuff like POM while still being a fun show
Actually John was a famous astronaut in the US space program(which is a few decades more advanced than reality) with a fiancee and friends, from all we see John had a very comfortable life on Earth. Certainly better than being a criminal fugitive on the run, he self medicates with drugs to deal with his life in space to the point of addiction.
Crichton is a non-violent guy, his girlfriend had to teach him to ass kick. I repeat the alien love interest is the ass kicker.
John is a feared criminal, he muses on this at one point when he realizes he is taking a nuke into a peace conference. This is far, far from the usual human guy wins admiration of all and becomes their king.
Farscape was just plain space opera with no particular subtext. Crichton was your typical space opera hero, and the aliens were pretty much standard space opera aliens. There were minor variations, but the main characters are straight from John Carter:
Crichton = John Carter
Aeryn Sun = Dejah Thoris
D’argo = Tars Tarkus
In addition, Zhaan is an amalgam of Troi from STTNG and Ficus from Quark; Moya/Pilot is very akin to “The Ship Who Sang.”
This isn’t a critique of the show, which was first-class up until it jumped the shark in Season 4. But Rockne O’Bannon and the writers were just reusing standard space opera tropes.
Princess of Mars is arguably the first space opera. It is, at any rate, the first Space Romance*, where you have your earthman (or -men) traveling to alien worlds and having exotic fisticuff-laden adventures with the colorful locals nd with interesting alien beasts. As is often the case, you have a Dying World, non-human science (often far advanced from ours), and anachronistic weapons. After Burroughs, everyone started copying, and we had Ralph Milne Farley’s Radio Planet series, Philip Francis Knowlan’s Anthony Rogers (who became “Buck” Rogers in the comic strips, and later serials), Ritt’s Brick Bradford, and, the big Kahhuna of these things, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. The last of these were clearly “space opera” by anyone’s definition, but they efectively started with Burroughs.
*Actually, it was technically Edwin Arnold’s Gullivar Jones that started all this, but Gullivar wasn’t all that big a hit, and was especially unknown in the US until Ace Books republished it as Gulliver (sic) of Mars in 1964. Marvel picked it up as a comic as a counter to DC’s revived John Carter comic in the early 1970s, and Alan Moore stuck him innthe second run of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But Jones was a pretty dull sand ineffectual adventirer, who sorta fell into situations and never resolved anything. The sword-swingin’ , Warhoon-beating, successful action-adventure hero John Carter, Warlord of Mars, on the other hand, was a hoot and a critical success.
I agree with the OP. If you think about the classic “fish out of water” type Sci Fi stories from earlier like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, those heroes step into a totally alien situation, start to kick ass, take names, and are hailed as heroes, even take charge over the current culture because they’re the heroes. Chriton is pretty much a burden for just about the whole first season until he gets the hang of things and when he finally starts to integrate into the gang on Moya, he’s still considered a backwards dope from a backwards planet.
So John is the character the audience mostly identifies with and should identify with. He’s the human. I think that really adds to the believability the way they did it – what would you do if you found yourself on an alien space ship with wierd aliens and a jackbooted alien commander hounding you? You might find a quiet corner and sob to yourself.
I really like the arc between Chrichton and D’argo. They didn’t like each other at first, but they warmed up and even became best buds over the years.
I think there are some good points here, and its always a good idea to have a farscape thread anyway.
It took a couple of seasons before the crew accepted Crichton at all. They were very dismissive of him at first, even when he did come up good ideas (such as teaching them how to do a slingshot around a planet in the first episode) he got no credit for it at all. Aeryn saw him as an inferior species and wouldn’t give him the time of day, Dargo spent more time hitting him than hanging out with him and Rygel would regularly steal his stuff.
He basically spent the first couple of years being ignored, beaten up or tortured. It probably wasn’t a whole lot of fun for him.
It’s true. There was a touch of deconstructionism the first season or so. The “heroes” are escaped criminals, a disgraced “cop” forced to keep their company, a prostitute… they aren’t trying to overthrow a dictatorial empire, just survive and so on. It was Firefly before Firefly. Then it became a series of surreal hallucinogenic trips in space.
Slight aside, I’ve had my username for so long, that I’ve only just remembered that it originally came from this show. Unfortunately, the site I referenced for the spelling got it wrong, but I stuck with it anyway.
As there is no sign of Derridean analysis going on here, I take it you mean “parody” when you say “deconstruction.”
Anyway, surely the trope in question was already preemptively parodied back at the very beginnings of Science Fiction, when H.G. Wells wrote “The Country of the Blind.”
I don’t think Chiana was ever a prostitute. She was a thief who liked to sleep around, and wasn’t above using sex to gain an advantage during a heist, but she never did the lay-for-pay thing.
I have no idea what that means honestly, however I had always taken deconstruction to mean a work that is aware of the tropes and cliches of the genre and comments on them and tries to apply some real world logic to them, it does seem close to satire or parody.
The Venture Bros is often called a deconstruction of adventure cartoons and comics like Johnny Quest, in that it tries to apply real world logic to the absurd situations(at one point Rusty is in a self help group for former boy adventurers, all psychologically damaged to the extreme by their childhoods).
The idea for Farscape actually started when Brian Henson took over Henson Enterprises following the death of Jim Henson. He was looking for a show that would showcase the work of the Henson Creature Shop and would allow Henson Enterprises to be associated with more “adult” programming as opposed to just things like Sesame Street.
His actual inspiration was the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars and wanted a show where he could have a large number of alien creatures each week. He contacted Rockne O’Bannon who came up with the actual show.
So the show was really just a big demo reel for Henson Enterprises.
((Trivia: The original planned title for the show was Space Chase. The show was originally to be on Fox, but Fox dropped the show and replaced it with Space: Above and Beyond.))
I still think one of the best moments of the series was when they were trying to give an advanced shuttle to the nations of Earth so that we could learn from it and be more prepared for the Skarrans, but the Americans didn’t want to share it with the other nations.
Crighton’s Dad: “You’re not seeing the big picture”
I always thought Farscape was about Phillip Fry finding himself on a spaceship with Delenn, Ivanova, Worf, and an unholy cross between ALF and Zachary Smith.
I have often joked about what I see as the Buck Rogers phenomenon, because that’s where I first noticed it, of a guy thrust into a new world demonstrating that his (our) way of thinking and doing things makes him quickly dominant. It probably arises out of a colonial mentality that was still going strong at the time that science fiction was emerging as a genre, though it turns up in fiction from our presumably more enlightened age.
Although, feel free to cite an earlier example, but you could argue that the existence of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court belies the colonial interpretation, because this is explicitly the theme in that book – Hank claims to be no better than any guy you could have pulled off the street in modern times (unlikely), but this difference in his modern ways of doing things made even a relatively quotidian person of his age a powerful man in the medieval period.
And also I myself would suggest that just the nature of having a human as the hero privileges humanity, and will make it hard to avoid the impression that Humans added something special to a multi-species mix that made it possible for them to be the heroes where others have failed.
Kyle Munkittrick argues that the ability of the video game medium in Mass Effect to give more attention to alien species (because they don’t require hours per shoot in a makeup chair, and can even be non-human in form – an advantage also partly taken by Farscape), actually enforces a diminishment of human ego. Actually, I still see Mass Effect as coming down to human exceptionalism point of view, though maybe I’m projecting. But here, because the protagonist and PoV character is human, you don’t get anything like you get in Farscape or Babylon 5, where there important parts of the story that are beyond the radar of all humans.
