Farscape and character

Farscape remains my favorite bit of filmed media. It holds that place for a few reasons, of course, and while I could sit and discuss the production value and effects (Henson’s Creature Shop at its finest) or the music (not your normal orchestral score for a TV show), or the plots (taking and working with, reinventing, twisting, and playing with a lot of the science fiction TV tropes as well as finding some new ones, I really want to talk about what the show was at its heart. The messy, bleeding, beating heart of the show: The character’s journeys.

The show has some of the best realized characters around, and the way they made it all work, through a mix of realistic backsliding and emotional honesty, as well as grasping how we find and grow friendships and romantic relationships, sets the show apart.

Everyone in the crew has trauma, and all of it is centered around them not being able to become the people they want to be. Becoming wanted criminals frees them from the societies and structures they were trapped in, and being able to start over, basically, alongside strangers, allows them each to start to do something slightly different.

They start to reconcile who they thought they wanted to be, with who they were told they should be. It stops being just a formula of “freedom = be who you want” and more an honest look at how the structures they were in shaped them for good and bad. Because it isn’t all one or the other. The worst places may still impart lessons to be used. It doesn’t make them any better of a place, of course, but at least some good can come of it in the end.

That reconciliation, which each crew member drags themselves through, is presented as anything but a straight line. There are switchbacks, false starts, dead end paths, the works, just like anyone’s real life.

The roots of each of their situations is also different, of course. Whereas Rygel’s background as a monarch allowed him to never need to grow into anything other than selfish Aeryn’s life of closed-off emotional solitude in a harsh military environment never lets the actual, caring person she is blossom and coexist with the hardened warrior she also is at her core.

Along those same lines, John’s background fascinates.

His dad being thought of as a hero, an astronaut, and growing up in the shadow of that, even with the support of his own family, isn’t something you often get to see portrayed as a bad thing. It would be, in many narratives, his fault for not forging a path, something he is indeed trying to do.

Instead, in Farscape, we get to see that his push to be his own person could be a bad thing, as it pushes his relationships with his family away. But also that society still viewed him as the “son of” more than his own person. Only by being forcibly torn away could he start to reconcile the person he wanted to be with who he was taught to be.

Looping back, the same is true of every character. That push and pull between what they thought they wanted to be vs who they were raised to be, and how for most of them the actual truth of their best selves is somewhere in-between the two, is captivating.

Again, many stories would pick a side, not find the good and bad in both realms and the reality that life is far more complicated than a simple answer could ever be.

So they all grow, with each other, despite each other, and in spite of each other.

The relationships between characters grow and change organically as well, never in straight lines, but realistically, moving forward and slipping back based on each character’s individual journey and where it positions them in a given moment, married to how they react to an external event, grounded in their personal biases and history.

It’s that intermingling between the individual and group growth s and change that reveals and illustrates an internal truth about each of them. Often, of course, other characters will see the truth of someone before that person does, and occasionally revealing it to them before they can accept it backslides them, as often as it can nudge them forward. People are stubborn, stuck in their ways, and often blind to their own deeper strengths and weaknesses.

But in the end, they grow. They change. They form new bonds and discover new ways to deal with, and think about, old ones. They may not always get there by the strictly healthiest of ways, but they fight to get there and do. They do the work, while changing and helping shape the world around them in important ways.

So yes, Farscape is about, from the very first scene of episode one to the very last scene of the show, how we relate to family both born into and found. It’s a show about how we discover and grow into who we are from who we want to be, and who the world thinks we should be.