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I picked up the Bluray set a few months ago and have been walking my way through Season 1 again. It's still rough as I recall but the characterization provided by the B plots help make it fully watchable. I also forgot how much longer it was before Sparky was "a good guy" compared to the rest of the crew. It's one aspect I loved about the group dynamic was their selfishness and how long that lasted. Also amazed at how quickly it was revealed that Moya was pregnant. I thought that was a whole later season.
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Aug 19, 2016 00:10
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When does Rigel turn into a "good guy", anyway? I'm fairly certain he's still peddling his brand of low-grade petty assholery in, like, Dog With Two Bones.Ape Agitator posted:It's still rough as I recall but the characterization provided by the B plots help make it fully watchable. Well that's the show's claim to fame in a nutshell, right? No matter what ridiculous rubber-faced nonsense was the plot of the week, they nailed it around the characters, so everything pivots around these people and their interactions with each other. And, most importantly, the characters are heavily serialised- if something happens to a person, it stays happened, and the show keeps building on it. It's not anything special these days, but for a Campy 90s SF Serial™ it was a fairly major achievement. RIP Campy 90s SF Serials™. Since this thread was a spin off of the DW review thread, I think it's pretty interesting to compare the two shows from this angle. One of my biggest complaints with NuWho is that, a lot of the time, it seems the show can't find the time to give its tertiary cast names, let alone personality traits. Any characterisation development there is is lavished on the Doctor and his companions, and everyone else has to suck it up as ambulatory wallpaper. The average episode of FS, by contrast, feels much roomier, and dedicates a lot more time to people just sitting down and talking. I honestly don't understand why that might be, because the two shows have similar running times, basically the same amount of poo poo happens in any given episode of either series, and Farscape has a much larger cast even before we bring in guest stars. It's not all to FS's advantage, mind. In Through The Looking Glass, for instance, there's a ludicrous amount of time devoted to Crichton just running through empty corridors in slow motion that really didn't need to exist at all. Rewatching it these days, I feel a lot of the time the show just drags.
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Aug 19, 2016 03:37
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Autonomous Monster posted:When does Rigel turn into a "good guy", anyway? I'm fairly certain he's still peddling his brand of low-grade petty assholery in, like, Dog With Two Bones. Autonomous Monster posted:Since this thread was a spin off of the DW review thread, I think it's pretty interesting to compare the two shows from this angle. One of my biggest complaints with NuWho is that, a lot of the time, it seems the show can't find the time to give its tertiary cast names, let alone personality traits. Any characterisation development there is is lavished on the Doctor and his companions, and everyone else has to suck it up as ambulatory wallpaper.
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Aug 19, 2016 05:11
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Autonomous Monster posted:When does Rigel turn into a "good guy", anyway? I'm fairly certain he's still peddling his brand of low-grade petty assholery in, like, Dog With Two Bones. Fair point, but I finished The Flax a bit ago and it was the first time he does anything inarguably in line with the crew's best interests. I will admit that I do love how fragile the crew's bond was at the beginning because it led to nice complications that didn't require coincidental plotting. Things went wrong because one crew member or another did their own thing.
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Aug 19, 2016 05:41
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Ape Agitator posted:Fair point, but I finished The Flax a bit ago and it was the first time he does anything inarguably in line with the crew's best interests.
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Aug 19, 2016 06:16
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Tiggum posted:Because new Dr Who has absolutely terrible pacing. It's constantly set to maximum speed, to give the appearance of excitement and danger without actually having to work for it. It assumes that its audience doesn't have the attention span to understand or care about character motivations. When something happens in Farscape, it's because various characters with various goals acted in ways consistent with their characterisation. In Dr Who, things just happen, don't think about it, just keep moving. Yeah, I think that's what put me off it after a season or so. They always rush through the scene setting and character introductions with a wave of exposition and too-fast dialog so they can get to whatever piece of high concept scifi rigamarole/utter nonsense they're doing that week. Then some wacky stuff happens. Monsters are fought, goofy one liners are delivered, things blow up, cardboard people die pointless horrible deaths, they throw more cheesy jokes at us, the day is saved, there's a weird twist at the end and then they all move on without exploring the consequences of any of it. Everything flies past with the pacing and aesthetics of a mediocre music video and the tone and plot coherence of lazy improv. Say what you will about Farscape and all the hours it spent on the crew repeating the same arguments and wandering through the same corridors. At least the scenes had room to breathe, at least the stories all seemed to be happening to the same people, and at least the terrible poo poo happening this week was usually connected in some way to the terrible poo poo that happened last week.
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Aug 19, 2016 08:53
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Sober posted:I think that's what I absolutely loved about the earlier (and sometimes even later) seasons, even when at times the episodes felt sluggish (the extra runtime too). When something went wrong it really was just the crew not really working together because they're all kinda just selfish SOBs until they get their act together long enough to not get themselves killed. It's so weird that this rarely happens in TV nowadays. I enjoyed how during Moya's split into dimensions that caused nausea, deafening sounds, and whimsy, it was revealed that Chiana was immune to the sickening world but refused to be left behind so everyone had to suffer more.
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Aug 20, 2016 15:48
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