TV: Sci-Fi

The season premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise aired this week, continuing my disappointment with this series. This episode highlighted my major problem with the show: good ideas, poor execution.

Okay, there's a temporal war being waged. One side is trying to preserve history, the other side (sides?) is trying to alter history to create a favorable (for them) future. And Enterprise and her crew, caught up in the middle of it, have been sent back in time to 1944 to prevent aliens from helping the Nazis win World War II.

That sounds interesting and dynamic on paper. So how did it become so lame and boring on the screen?

The action was poorly staged. The acting was mediocre to horrible, especially from the Noo Yawk mobster cliches. Character, as it always has been on this show, was secondary to whatever outlandish plot machinations the writers could throw out.

I mean, this is, what, the fourth season of the show? And I still don't give a shit about Hoshi or Mayweather. They're total ciphers. Give 'em red shirts and kill 'em off already. As for the others -- Reed: he's hot-headed, but he cares. Tucker: he's hot-headed, but he cares. Archer: he's hot-headed, but he cares. And he likes water polo. T'Pol: she arches her back a lot, plus she's all hot-headed and horny, despite the fact that she isn't supposed to have any emotions. Also: she cares.

The alien Nazis came off as absurd, rather than menacing. The visit from Daniels, the time-traveling good guy, would've been interesting if not for the actor's hammy death throes. "I have something important to say... CHOKE!!! GAKKK!!! GLARGLE BARG!!!" And this is all on top of the fact that after last year's season-long Xindi hunt, the crew (and the audience) weren't allowed any closure before being thrown into another long (hopefully not quite as long) diversion -- they never even got back home before getting zapped back in time. It's a poor reward for an agonizingly long investment of time.

And yet, I still watch.

On the other end of the spectrum is a show I never watched the first time around, but have been catching up with in repeats: Farscape. The Sci Fi Channel has been airing a marathon (8 episodes every weekday) of all 88 episodes of the show's four seasons, and I spent a great deal of last week catching up on the series. I've seen the 1st and 2nd seasons via DVD rentals, and for the first time this Sunday I watched some of the 3rd season. And man, that is some entertaining sci-fi right there.

The most amazing and immediate way you can tell this isn't just another Star Trek is the vast and impressive array of creatures. This was a Henson production, so there's a lot of elaborate puppet work, which may make you think "Pigs in Space" from The Muppet Show. Not at all. These aren't little furry blue Grover and Cookie Monster muppets, these are huge and unique and fascinating creations, real and believable characters. Take Rygel, for example: he's greedy, he's cowardly, he's pompous, he's vicious, he's charming, he's duplicitous, he's funny, he's supremely self-interested and yet can be helpful when it suits him. He's a far more complex character than anyone on Enterprise, let alone the personality-less drones Hoshi and Mayweather. And he's a fucking rubber slug.



When you see a new alien on this show, you stop and marvel. You don't just go, "There's another damn alien with a different bump on its nose."

The storylines are more far-reaching, and have more impact on the characters, than in Trek, or most other sci-fi TV I've seen. Enterprise spent a season fighting the Xindi. Farscape took John Crichton, its lead character, and spent a season driving him slowly out of his mind. Now that's a character arc. (Which, truth be told, also led to a great deal of scenery-chewing from actor Ben Browder; he's funny and charismatic, and he can be riveting, but he can ham it up with the worst of them.) Plot details introduced in season one continue to be developed in season three (and presumably beyond). And the show's not afraid to throw out the status quo and turn everything on its ear.

The characters aren't all on the same moral scale, and they won't always do the right thing. D'Argo spent two seasons looking for his son, Jothee; when he finally found him, Jothee immediately began sleeping with D'Argo's fiancee. Happy father's day! Yes, there's sex, and infidelity, and love; relationships, grudges, and all kinds of conflict -- not the toothless Trek kind of conflict ("I disagree, but darn it, I respect you!"), but more along the lines of "I'll do what I want, and I will pummel you bloody if you don't like it." In short, the good guys -- while they can be, and usually are, heroic, brave, self-sacrificing, noble, clever, etc. -- still aren't all good.

The villains are compelling, too, especially Scorpius, the hideous madman with the silky smooth and charming voice. The bad guys get their own stories, and are allowed to develop and change, and sometimes even do good things, much as the good guys are allowed to do bad things.

The only sci-fi series that's anywhere comparable in complexity and scope, in my eyes, is Babylon 5. And much like Babylon, Farscape was planned as a five-season story. Unfortunately, it got cancelled after the fourth season, and ended on a huge cliffhanger (so I've heard -- again, haven't watched that far). But the Sci-Fi channel will be airing a new mini-series, starting this Sunday, which should resolve the cliffhanger and move the story forward, closer to where they hoped to go with the final season. I don't know if I'll be all the way caught up by then or not (there are 40 more hours of old episodes I'll be taping this week, all of which are new to me), but I'll be TiVoing it for sure. It's good, good stuff.