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Like many fans of FARSCAPE, I've only now started turning in my old recordings of the show for DVDs now that we are finally getting acceptably priced copies of the show. Although there have been other TV series that have appeared in overpriced editions-THE X-FILES springs to mind-FARSCAPE was the only one in its original edition that could be said to be prohibitively so. I'm not sure about other fans, but there was simply no way that I was able or willing to pay for a set that listed for well over a hundred dollars. One could make some complaints about the new Starburst edition-for instance, I'm still not clear on why they have to dribble these out two discs at a time, instead of releasing an entire season at once-but two things one cannot carp about: the cost and the number of extras. As to the former, I've been about to find each disc in the Starburst so far from various resellers listed on Amazon for no more than $16 apiece. As to the latter, each of the three sets making up each season is stuffed with a variety of special features. Some of the special features feel a bit like filler, but a number are substantive. Three of the seven episode feature commentaries and there are video profiles of Virginia Hey (who gets my vote for the most beautiful fifty-year-old woman in the world), Anthony Simcoe, and Rygel and his team of puppeteers.
Although I love every season of FARSCAPE, the series completely matured, I believe, in the final third of the first season, with the addition of Chiana and Scorpius to the cast. Both of those characters changed the chemistry of the show dramatically and took it in entirely new directions. The episodes in this set, therefore, are the last in what one could call the early days of the show, the last ones featuring the original core crewmembers. To a degree that surpasses the episodes on the first Season One set, Moya's crew become more and more a team, committed to helping one another and bonding to form a genuine team. "That Old Black Magic" therefore shows Zhaan revisiting her dark pages in order to help John escape the clutches of the remarkable villain Maldis, a sorcerer of sorts who acts as a vampire on people's fear and anger. It is also the episode where the foundation for the eventual humanizing (sebaceaninzing?) of Crais, as he and John are summoned by Maldis to struggle against one another. Yet the guys immediately regress to every-man-for-himself in "DNA Mad Scientist," in which Zhaan, Rygel, and D'Argo struggle to find a route back to their home worlds, while Aeryn is the object of a devious genetic experiment. The scene in which the three mentioned above remove one of Pilot's arms is one of the more disturbing moments in all of FARSCAPE. The episode also features one of the more compelling aliens in the title character, a strange creature who walks on goat like legs. Yet the next several episodes find them thrown closer together both by circumstances and by inclination, as they discover not only that they need each other but that they have come to know each other in ways they hadn't before, even to the extent of learning some of the secrets that they carry with them. In particular, we learn a great deal about Zhaan and D'Argo, of her violent past and her efforts to overcome her own propensity to violence by becoming a priest and his marriage to a Sebacean, her murder, and the child they had together.
Fans of the two BABE films unquestionably recall Mrs. Hoggett, played by the remarkable comedienne and actress Magda Szubanski. She appears as a guest star in "Till the Blood Runs Clear" as a mechanic on a planet that could come straight from DUNE, albeit she is almost unrecognizable in her baggy overalls and make up. I have, in fact, shown this episode to two other people who know BABE, and neither recognized her at all. This episode is followed by the very fine "The Flax," in which John and Aeryn get stuck in an invisible outer space net in one of Moya's transports. The highpoint--and the moment that confirmed what we knew all along: John and Aeryn have the hots for one another-is unquestionably John and Aeryn, convinced that they are about to die, showing what they would do if they knew they had only a few minutes left to live. D'Argo interrupts them just before things get too far along and although they later claim that their moment of passion was either the heat of the moment or a lack of oxygen, no one can doubt that this would be their last such moment.
All in all, these are another strong group of episodes in one of the most innovative series to appear on TV in recent decades. But as strong as these episodes are, the ones that come immediately in their wake are even better.
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