Farscape did everything the exact opposite of what I usually like, and they did it beautifully. The animatronics were a wonderful antidote to the over-use of CG. The Creature Shop should do more big productions. Their stuff starts off looking just a little silly, but the style sinks in very quickly and you see the genius of it. I was always really miffed that the puppet characters weren't in the credits. I want to know who works Pilot and Rygel! They're actors too! Anyway, the visuals of the show looked like they were trying to replicate the aesthetics of low-budget TV sci-fi (TOS, old-style Dr. Who), but with a real budget and with great technology.
There are a couple of things I really loved about the writing, too. Almost all of the 'alien of the week' episodes re-enact a very old SF cliché, but then there will be a twist about 1/3 of the way through, and then maybe another near end. Sometimes. The result is that you really never know where an episode is going, when it's going to go with the cliché, and where it's going to deliberately mess with the cliché.
The other thing was how much they pushed the fact that these aliens, regardless of being bipeds with basically human bodies, were aliens. They had totally different value systems, unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world. Crichton was truly a stranger in a strange land. Part of the point of thing was to make you also realise that Crichton is the real alien. He's the one who doesn't understand this place, the one from somewhere else, the one spouting off wierd references to things no one understands (which is partly why everything thinks he's crazy). Instead of the aliens being stand-ins for certain nations or cultures on Earth, a very useful device in things like TNG or B5, on Farscape the aliens are just plain alien, and the human doesn't know his ass from his elbow.
Posted by orion at May 10, 2005 12:57 PM