John Chrichton and his childhood friend 'DK' set out to prove a theory; that ships can use the planet's gravity to 'slingshot', reaching incredible speeds and making interstellar travel possible. During the experiment John is sucked into a wormhole, spitting him out far from home and in the middle of an alien space battle.
He is clipped by an alien fighter, which spins off into a nearby asteroid before being brought aboard an alien ship, where he has encounters with the aliens Zhaan, D'argo and Rygel. The crew are trying to break off the ship's control collar and escape, which D'argo does - but only by ripping apart tubes, meaning that they need to replace essential fluids. With the collar gone, the ship starbursts (jumps) away
"Pilot, does Moya know where we are?"
"Yes, of course...we are somewhere else. I'll get back to you with the details."
John is knocked out and put in a cell, along with a pilot captured just before they starburst. The pilot is a 'Peacekeeper' - and looks totally human, causing some confusion as she immediately assumes that John is a Peacekeeper - and some kind of dropout, at that.
"This one...[Crichton] has some kind of higher brain deficiency"
The Peacekeepers catch up with the crew while they try to buy more barrels of fluid for the ship. Crais decides to execute John for killing his brother and Aeryn, for 'irreversible contamination', i.e. being too long amongst aliens. John, D'argo and Aeryn escape and return to Moya, but are unable to escape Crais' Command Carrier until John works out how to slingshot Moya away, uaing the local planet. The attempt works and the crew are safe.
Observations: As soon as the show began I noticed something totally different - the music. Most shows tend to go for something epic and orchestral, but Farscape went electronic - a pretty unusual choice, but one that fits the show's exoticism.
Why is it that aliens often talk in a more clunky, verbose style? You'd think that a military race would have a short, clipped cant for speech, but they fall into the usual trope of talking like characters from a Shakespeare play.
The sets are lovely. I love the colour palatte for Moya's internals.
The look on John's face when he sees that Aeyrn is an attractive human-looking woman is amusing given that she then kicks the snot out of him.
The shot when John finally realises that he's somewhere else game me a little chill of awe. Interestingly, the shot of what he sees (below) is a pretty standard sci-fi image - a built up cityscape with floating behemoth and flying traffic.
The set was also impressive - lots of alien masks and puppets, a real attempt to make it look like part of a living environment.
I also noticed that John doesn't quite understand everything (and tends to get called an idiot for it), which is a nice touch - at the end, for example, he calls Pilot a blue, see-through creature, which of course refers to Pilot's hologram. It's a nice touch as most sci-fi shows, being viewed by humans, tend to make humans sound wonderfully superior to everything else out there. Of course, it's still the human who saves everyone else's bacon...or whatever they have out there.
Overall, it was a bit strange, but it made an effort- for example, translator microbes are used by the galactic civilisation to allow communication and they explain why John will be able to undserstand stuff after that, it set up the conflict and kept on moving. As a pilot it showed the usual uncertainty, but it looks so strange and well-put together I think I'm going to enjoy this.
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