Along a similar Farscape vein, i dare anyone to watch the Season 2 Ep 5 episode “The Way We Weren’t”, and not feel something for Pilot, yes, he’s about as close to a nonhumanoid character in recent sci-fi as you’re likely to get (4 arms, crusteceanlike exoskeleton, permanently bonded to Moya so he’s unable to leave the Pilot’s Den), but after TWWW, you won’t see him as a Henson animatronic, he is a real character, with hopes, dreams, fears, and regrets…
yes, he is a bilaterally symmetrical lifeform and has the standard “human-ish” facial structure of 2 expressive eyes (admittedly on short stalks) above a “beaklike” mouth, but he’s one of the more “alien” recurring characters in 'Scape
'Scape again…
Season 2, Ep 20 “Liars Guns and Money part 2; With Freinds like these…” in this episode, Moya has been invaded by Karak Metalites and they’re eating her from the inside out, the only effective cure is to flood the affected areas with a combustible vapor and ignite it, burning the afected areas and killing the parasites (1/9th of her entire body), you can feel the pain Moya’s in, it’s palpable…
S2; E22; Die Me Dichotomy; the first camera views fly down Moya’s burnt and scarred interior, it’s heartbreaking and sickening…
Okay, I think I understand Brain Glutton’s response now – he was objecting to my calling V.I.N.C.E.N.T.'s initial image “believable”.
His statement is only explicable if he’s never seen the movie. VINCENT and OLd Bob are unbelievable not merely as robots, but as any piece of working hardware. I’d personally assassinate any designer who came up with that design and forced me to live aboard ship with it for an extended period of time.
By the by, note that in The Black Hole “Good” robots have eyes, and “Bad” robots don’t. Even the chief bad robot didn’t really have eyes, just a Gort-like slit.
I think they went wrong by having Pilot and Za’an portray Moya’s anguish *for *her. It made me feel for Pilot and Za’an, not for Moya. But this takes us back to how do we communicate pain/emotion/etc. without a face. But I’m not convinced that was what was asked in the OP. I still posit one can have a face and not be humanoid. Dogs, for example, are highly expressive and non-humanoid. There have been some great movies starring dogs.
I think what people are trying to come up with is a hero who is completely and utterly non-terrestrial, unfathomable and unrelatable. And yes, that might be, by definition, hard to relate to. So the answer to whether or not it’s possible for a completely unrelatable non-terrestrial to be a movie/TV character of a sizable role and long duration is obviously not often (although I think my lamps and Serenity both meet even this more limited rubric). But I think that’s strayed very far from the question in the OP.