I remember my friend Dennis raving about Farscape, but everytime I tried to get into it, I wouldn’t get hooked. But I found the key, if you could get to the episode PK Tech Girl, you would be hooked. Having only gotten through the series once, I decided it’s time for a rewatch and can’t wait to get through it all again, and see if I still love it as much as I did.

Produced in Australia with the Jim Henson Company there’s a wonderful combination of visual effects and practical creatures to give us a universe unlike any we’d ever seen.

The first episode, which aired on 19 March, 1999, was simply titled Premiere, was written by the series creator Rockne S. O’Bannon. We are introduced to astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder) whose craft is hit by a radiation wave and is thrown into a wormhole that throws him… where exactly?

It’s no place he’s ever seen, nor has the viewer.

His craft tumbles against, and destroys another ship, causing him to run afoul of a vicious Peacekeeper named Crais (Lani John Tupu), whose brother was in the now destroyed ship, a Peacekeeper Prowler.

John is taken aboard a living ship, a leviathan named Moya, which he finds crewed by a group of escaped prisoners. He meets a towering Luxan warrior named Ka D’Argo (Anthony Simcoe), a living humanoid plant, a Delvian priest named Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hey), and a cantankerous exiled Hynerian ruler named Rygel XVI (voiced by Jonathan Hardy). They are aided in part by Pilot (voiced by Tupu), who is joined with Moya.

When they make their escape, they find they’ve pulled another prowler in with them when they starburst (their form of lightspeed) and aboard it is Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black). She’s less than impressed to be aboard Moya, clashes immediately with Crichton.

They are thrown together. No one trusts anyone, and Crichton is completely adrift and unsure what is going on. And Crais, he’s coming for Crichton and the escaped prisoners.

The world is almost completely realized from its beginning, and the viewer, just like Crichton, has to catch up. Will this group of misfits be able to work together, and survive, and thrive? Will John find a way home? The adventure begins!

I, E.T. was always meant to be the second episode of the series, but was aired as the fourth and seventh in the U.K.and U.S. respectively. Written by Sally Lapiduss, it was first broadcast on 7 May, 1999.

Following the release Moya’s control collar in the previous episode, a Peacekeeper beacon is triggered. If the Peacekeepers can track it, they will find Crichton and the rest. So he comes up with a plan to hide the broadcast of the alarm in water, or in this case a swamp on an Earth-like planet.

Moya needs to be repaired, and have the beacon permanently disabled before Moya sinks beneath the surface completely. And hopefully, if they can repair her, she can escape the planet’s gravity well.

While the haphazard crew go to work, Crichton becomes friendly with a local family, where he is the alien. He’s seeking an element that can serve as an anesthetic for Moya so they can remove the beacon.

It plays as a bit of a riff on Spielberg’s classic lost alien tale, but also expands the characters, as we see some of the skills and the abilities of Moya’s crew. Zhaan is able to alleviate some of Moya’s pain, Rygel helps with the disarming of the beacon, and D’Argo helps out Crichton, helping elude the governing planetary forces who want to capture a real alien!

It’s fun, if not the strongest episode, which may be why is was ticked a little further back in the season when it aired.

But the adventure is underway, and I can’t wait to explore the entire series again.