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How We'd Give Farscape a Battlestar-style Reboot, and Make a New Hit
After chatting briefly with the extremely nice (and still-ultra-hunky) Ben "Farscape" Browder at Comic-Con, I realized what society needs most right now: A reboot of 1990s space opera Farscape. Supposedly the Sci-Fi Channel is airing 10 Farscape webisodes, but those have yet to materialize and besides they are not enough. There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did. And with all the good alien ensemble dramas evaporating from TV (later days, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate), now is the time to strike.
Coolness of the old Farscape:
What made the original Farscape interesting was its vision of a human stranded among aliens. Unlike your typical ensemble space opera, humans were in the minority and we had a lot of chances to explore weird alien worlds. With Brian Hensen's production house behind its alien creatures, Farscape pretty much always had lovely concept design. We see this world through the eyes of John Crichton (Ben Browder), an astronaut accidentally sucked through a wormhole and deposited on the far side of the universe among warring alien factions. He takes refuge on a sentient ship called Moya, among escaped convicts.
How to Reboot:
A rebooted show could play up the criminal backgrounds of Moya's crew. Who can be trusted? Have alliances shifted? The tut-tutting little puppet Rygel once ruled 600 billion subjects of the Hynerian empire, but was sold out to the evil Peacekeepers by his cousin. Maybe we could give him a more ambiguous history — perhaps he was a cruel dictator, and we can see his cousin's side of the story. Meanwhile, we know the zen yoga lady Zhaan assassinated her lover because he helped the Peacekeepers take over her home planet. Let's make her more of a ninja assassin type: Let her use those powers of invisibility more, and do more explosives work. And let's make the anarchist thief Chiana into more of a Warren Ellis-style character who spouts political opinions between bursts of ass-kickery...
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