Oh, and Holly.
Fortunately, David Kemper started being the creative force and turned it into a real show.
I thought he was being kind in his description, especially by the end of the series.
Just curious, but where/how did it JTS in your opinion?
As far as Pip goes, remember, we’re viewing her antics and judging her behavior (the "tralk"iness) through a Human perspective, I’m sure Nebari culture would find human culture just as fweakin’ insane…
Where it jumped for me was around the end of Season 3, where John figures out how to deal with wormholes and does nothing with that knowledge. OK, yeah, he still has personal issues to work out in the Uncharted Territories. But why can’t he pop through to Earth, drop a line to his dad that he’s OK and that oh, by the way, Earth should prepare for an alien invasion, and then pop back to Moya to try to work things out with Aeryn?
The change of villains didn’t help, either. The first season, they were building up Crais as the Big Bad, and that worked. Then they had Scorpius casually squish Crais like a bug, to show how much more of a badass Scorpius was, and that worked too. But then they tried the same thing again with what’s-her-name with the cleavage squishing Scorpius, and it just felt like they were going back to the well.
Combine those two, and it’s enough that I still haven’t gotten around to finishing the series.
No, remember, from the point of view of Nebari culture, she’s insane, too. That’s how she ended up on Moya to begin with.
Two of my favorite Pip clips actually came from the much maligned Season 4…
The “Karen Shaw” scene from the episode “Kansas”
[spoiler]To those unfamiliar with the show, first off, Chiana is madly in love (and lust, let’s be honest, this IS Pip, after all…), and would give anything to be in a relationship with him, I think she’d even be willing to limit herself to just him, she cares for him that much.
I think one of the reasons she’s so enamoured with him is because John treated her with respect from the day she arrived on Moya, even though everyone else considered her a dangerous criminal at first, and a tralk later, sadly, John for the most part sees her more as a kid sister, he’s too madly in love with Aeryn anyway, personally, I always thought Pip was a better match for John anyway
Second, it was established early in the show that John list his virginity to Karen Shaw In the back of his Dad’s four wheel drive, John never elaborates on Karen Shaw, beyond stating that he lost his virginity to her… so we have no idea who KS could have been
Third, during this scene, it’s Haloween, so John just thinks KS is a normal woman in a particularly cool costume
Pip realizes that this is probably her only chance to be intimate with her beloved Crichton, and in true Pip form, she goes for it with all her heart and zeal
I forgot where I heard the quote, I think it was Gigi Edgly herself that said “Chiana gives her body freely, but not her heart” and it’s clear to longtime 'scapers that she has given her heart to Crichton, even when she was in a relationship with D’argo, her heart belonged to her beloved Johnny[/spoiler]
Just watch her expression in this clip from the ending of the final episode Bad Timing at around 3:06 in, her expression goes from jovial, to happy, to sad within seconds, as she realizes that John is finally happy, but realizes that she will never be able to be in a relationship with John herself
And this unaired clip from A Constellation of Doubt
Pip doesn’t seem overly tralky in this one, in fact, I feel a little chill up my spine with the way she delivers “but this place overdoes it…” It’s just the way she delivers that line, funny, but with a hint of sadness and foreboding, like she’s seen it happen before…
If you’re going to go to all that trouble to help people not be confused, MacTech, you might want to point out that Pip and Chiana are the same person. I knew it had been a long time since I’d seen the series (and I never saw season 4), but I didn’t remember a character named Pip. Only after looking it up did I vaguely remember Crichton calling her that.
I was only ever a casual fan of Farscape, I watched it off & on, enjoyed it, but never was compelled enough to watch the series straight through (and therefore have some gaps in my knowledge of the storylines.) But I always suspected that the origins of the series were lifted from the pages of the X-Men comic book.
Specifically, I have always noticed some very close similarities between the Moya crew and the occasionally appearing group of space pirates the Starjammers.
For those unfamiliar with the Starjammers, some history: the superhero team the X-Men would sometimes get into adventures in the far-off galactic empire of the Shi’ar galaxy (long story, but X-Men leader Prof. X had an on-again/off-again romance with the sometime empress of the Sh’iar Lilindra.) These storylines typically involved them teaming up with a group of space pirates known as the Starjammers.
The Starjammers’ leader was Corsair, who had been Christopher Summers - a cocky, all-american bush pilot in Alaska, whose plane was abducted by a Shi’ar scouting ship and brought back to the distant galaxy. He was thrown into slave pits, where he teamed up with some rebellious fellow slaves who got together and stole a starship. (In Farscape, John Crichton is a cocky, all-american space jockey who winds up in a distant galaxy where he is thrown into slave pits, teams up with some rebels and steals a starship.)
Ok, so far this is typical space opera stuff - as reminiscent of Flash Gordon as it is of Farscape. And true, there are differences between Corsair and Crichton (Corsair had a wife who was murdered, and two grown sons - Cyclops & Havok of the X-Men.) But here’s the more suspicious similarities:
The other members of the Starjammers included:
Mam’zelle Hepzibah, a cat-woman, like Chianna
Ch’od, who was reptilian rather than hairy, but had a long prehensile tongue he could use to lash at people like a bull-whip (much like I’ve seen D’Argo do.)
Raza, a cyborg with a face plate covering half his face (I don’t know the Farscape characters’ name, but I know I saw a few episodes with someone with a Raza-type helmet of face-plate.)
Waldo, an A.I. pilot for the ship who was built directly into the central core of the ship and served as pilot - much like the Pilot on Farscape was.
And while the Starjammers ship was not alive or organic, one particular X-Men / Starjammer storyline had the X-Men kidnapped by a race of evil insects called the Brood, whose starships were (you guessed it) giant leviathan space whales who could naturally fly at warp speeds. In fact, the Brood storyline heavily revolves around one of these space whales being pregnant and about to give birth to a baby (much like on ongoing plotline with Moya, the living Leviathan starship in FS.)
The Starjammers ship was also frequently depicted as crawling with small, insect-like servo-drones such as the chief medical officer Sikorski, an irascible flying green-skinned insect creature with a bad attitude (Rygel?)
To be fair, the above-mentioned Brood from the X-Men comic were themselves suspiciously similar to the Xenomorphs from the “Alien” movies, so it’s not like the X-Men creative team could complain about people ripping them off (though I imagine writer Chris Claremont would anyway), but I do think the parrallels are close enough that it couldn’t be an accident.
Well, I’m not familiar with the rest of your examples (not a big enough x-men fan to have read those comics), I’d just like to say Crichton doesn’t really do any of that. There aren’t any slave pits or rebels. What happened was he was shanghai’d by a group of convicts while in the midst of stealing the prisoner transport vessel they were on.
Interesting theory, but I would say any resemblance between Hepzibah and Chiana, or Raza and Stark were only superficial. Both Hepzibah and Raza were warrior types, where as Chiana was a messed up fugitive with loose morals, and Stark was a schizophrenic spiritual energy being sort of thing. I suppose you could draw a parallel between Chod and Ka D’argo, but how many sci-fi programmes don’t have a tough warrior type amongst the crew?
I’ve never seen Chod do the tongue thing? Is this a rarely exhibited power?