Much Ado About Everything

I started watching Farscape – a sci-fi TV series that aired a few years ago.  It’s certainly entertaining and I’ll keep watching it (yet again, being able to rent from zip.ca is great).  It’s not perfect by any means though – there are certainly a fair bit of classic sci-fi trappings present here.  Starting with the theme music for the show – it’s not bad but it’s generic to a fault.  So are many of the plots.  And it suffers from “show of the week” problem, which is shared by vast majority of western shows; meaning, there is no overarching plot and each episode can stand on its own.  The benefit of this is only to casual viewers, which perhaps TV studios think we all are.  However, if I don’t care about show strong enough to watch all the episodes, then I usually have better uses for my time anyway so I don’t bother with it at all.  This may not be how majority of people watches TV but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s watching preferences; when I invest my time, I expect return that is meaningful to me.  At any rate, so far (up to episode 10) the show doesn’t have a real story – it only has a premise.

However, the way stories (one-episodes ones that is) are developed seems intelligent enough in its better moments that it reminds me of Star Trek: the Next Generation.  Not all episodes are like that; at least half are run-of-the-mill generic ones without any appreciable return, save for character development.  Which actually is the strong point of the show.  The acting is excellent.  And that is very rare in sci-fi shows.  The acting is so good that it makes the show interesting to watch even when it’s being generic.  And the acting manages to get the most out of what character development is there, so in the end you do feel like your understanding of characters has gone up a bit after watching each episode.  I do have to say that sometimes it ends up in a contradiction (character acts out of his character, no pun intended, and perhaps even seems to permanently change their outlook on a certain aspect of life), which doesn’t seem to be carried over to following episodes.  I hate that.

Therefore, I can only say that so far Farscape is entertaining.  Which however is good enough considering the current sci-fi show climate.