I’m not sure what the full parameters of Late to the Party are; it’s not like I didn’t see ANY of Farscape when it aired. I did catch a few sporadic episodes, as it ran as their anchor series on Fridays following the retro block which I frequented (A Star Trek: The Original series, a pair of Twilight Zones, and a classic Outer Limits! Three hours of bliss!), and the show’s resurrection as miniseries was a big cause célèbre within the sci-fi fan community right around the same time as the Firefly fandom managed to get Serenity off the ground as well. Like a good nerd, I participated in e-mail bombing the network, but I never got into the series in full, in part because of the show’s serialized narrative. I don’t know if it was the Sci-Fi Channel’s first original series, but it was certainly their first big one, paving the way for the Dune miniseries and especially their Battlestar Galactica reboot, which I also missed out on and will cover in the future.

A bit of background: any children of the 90s and 00s will remember the many family-friendly Hallmark fantasy miniseries with effects by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop like Merlin and the Jason and the Argonauts remake. They were for hire on many bigger Hollywood projects as well. Farscape was shot by the same production company as a co-production with Australia, where it was also filmed and most of the cast are from. Brian Henson, the son of the late puppetry legend Jim Henson, was responsible for handing the reigns of the Creature Shop over to creator Rockne S. O’Bannon and showrunner David Kemper for a more “adult” use of their effects work, giving the Sci-Fi Channel free reign and only telling them to “make things as weird as possible.” And good Lord, did they do that.

Farscape’s narrative gets so complicated that it would take paragraphs to explain in its entirety, but in miniature, it’s something like this: astronaut John Crichton (Handsome blue-eyed Ben Browder, the only regular American actor in the otherwise predominantly Australian cast) is on a space test flight with new technology when he’s swallowed up by a wormhole and shot into a distant part of the universe. Injected with “translation microbes” to communicate, he becomes part of a motley crew of escaped prisoners aboard a biomechanical ship called Moya on the run from an intergalactic police force known as the Peacekeepers. Having no common goal and wishing only to return to their respective homes, he’s uneasily allied with Klingon-style warrior Ka D’Argo, mystic priest and healer Zhaan, deposed and disloyal former monarch Rygel (An animatronic Creature Shop creation), former Peacekeeper Aeryn, Moya’s giant insectoid Pilot (Another puppet), hyper-sexual teenage thief and con artist Chiana, crazed and manic spiritualist Stark, and more. On the antagonist side are Peacekeeper pilot Crais, who’s brother was accidentally killed by Crichton leaving him with an interstellar-spanning grudge and a psychopathic leather-clad and ice-cold monster known as Scorpius, who’s machinations in an intergalactic arms race will change Crichton’s destiny in ways he could never have possibly even imagined.

But those vague archetypes will be about all that will be familiar to most sci-fi fans, especially those of the days when Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 were pretty much the only game in town. Everything-and I do mean pretty much everything-about Farscape is utterly bizarre and completely unique. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the energy and imagination a young George Lucas brought to Star Wars, but even weirder. A quarter of a century on, and the aesthetic STILL looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. Combining puppetry, animatronics, and CGI into a cohesive whole, the show could be perceived from the outside as simply weirdness for weirdness’ sake, but it’s far more than that. There’s a strong character foundation and the world-building is fascinating. Lots of sci-fi revolves around human and rubber-faced aliens, but Farscape’s take is different, and not just because it’s unafraid of sex when so much sci-fi is chaste. You forget within a few episodes that the animatronics are puppetry at all and simply accept them as characters. Even at their most despicable, there’s a unique and perverse sympathy to villains like Crais, who turns out to be an unlikely savior, and Scorpius and the 22-episodes seasons give the show lots of room to flesh out its characters and its world.

Sci-fi fans are used to the genre’s main worlds: the dusty and anarchic post-apocalyptic punk rock futures of Mad Max, the “used” worlds of Star Wars and Firefly, Star Trek’s gleaming utopias, sterile worlds, retro-futurism, cyberpunk’s rainy dystopias, tinny low-budget spaceships, militarized fascist futures. Farscape looks nothing like any of them. The final miniseries leans towards military space opera, but despite a few genre stock plots like a hilarious take on the body-swap, the show goes its own way. This occasionally leads to missteps and experiments that don’t necessarily work, and Farscape is really better when contributing to its overall narrative than with standalone episodes. But despite these sometimes erratic shifts in tone, the show never stops experimenting even when it’s unsuccessful, and that’s to be admired. You can accuse it of many things, but certainly never of lacking ambition. By the time the show has presented several characters with cloned identities and both real and neural, it’s hard not admire its sheer audacity when whole episodes take place in characters’ unconscious minds, or when a DNA-activated ship is run through a character’s vomit.

After creating various narrative pieces in the first two seasons, the show hits its stride in the third, weaving these disparate strands together into a complete storyline which sees foes become friends and tests loyalties in other ways as well. As mentioned above, Farscape is remarkably unafraid of sex, even running it through some storylines-good luck getting Scorpius’ S&M trysts out of your head-while others involve neural “clones” in the wildest settings you can imagine. As the crew become caught in a gigantic interstellar war, the secret knowledge of wormholes that an ancient race of aliens put into Crichton’s brain may be the key to salvation or ultimate destruction. Along the way, there are political machinations, interstellar war, trips to Earth and back, time-travel, and dark secrets for everyone. The various cultures the show introduces are all given their own looks, cultures, and customs, from the warlike Luxans to the monstrous lizard-like Scarrans to the mind-cleansing Nebari.

The characterization and world-building on the show likewise lead in all kinds of different directions. At first, we’re simply dropped into the world to figure out its weird rules for ourselves, but gradually, the show reveals hidden depths; even the monstrous Scorpious gets brief moments of sympathy in his terrifying origin tale, and we slowly learn of the characters’ pasts and the worlds in which they resided, we’re given fleshed out backstories, sometimes heartbreaking like Aeryn’s breaking of her own brainwashing and her devastating attempts to face her own monstrous mother or Crichton’s wrenching decisions to choose between his return to Earth and his friends in space complicated by his fraught relationship with his father. Others are totally unexpected-like the tale of Moya, a pacifist starship who’s mothering to her vicious child Tayln. Sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, sometimes touching, and almost always compelling, it’s never afraid of weirdness, even for its own sake, like a trip inside Stark’s mind where our characters are mysterious knights. You’re even attached enough that a few character deaths prove moving, one of the best signs of effective storytelling. Unlike Star Trek, the characters can be greedy, selfish, and disloyal, and one of the show’s great joys is watching everyone become an odd makeshift family. I’d be genuinely curious how much was planned out from the start or made up as the creators went along, because its ability to combine these storylines works well enough that you’d never know. It’s funny as hell too. Crichton’s constant stream of pop culture references and the others’ total ignorance of them are a frequent source of humor, but the dialogue never feels as artificial as Whedon-speak or descends into sitcom squabble, and it’s invention of sci-fi profanity is marvelously catchy.

Though it probably wouldn’t cater an episode of Game of Thrones these days, the show’s budget at the time, reportedly over $1 million per episode-and alleged declining ratings, despite the Sci-Fi Channel’s notorious tendency for erratic scheduling-led to a premature cliffhanger cancellation at the end of the show’s fourth season. Outraged fans bombed Sci-Fi’s offices with e-mail and strong sales in the then still-relevant DVD market convinced the network to resurrect the show and wrap it up with a miniseries. While I’m sure that this didn’t let the creators get everything they had planned for a fifth season, and sadly the ratings weren’t good enough to keep the show around, we at least got an ending. Was it satisfying? Largely, yes.

The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries resolves the various loose ends of the series with spectacular production values. It’s a bit padded, and one wonders what would have become of the show had it gotten a proper fifth season with much more room to breathe. One major character death in the miniseries feels like a shock-value misstep (I’d be curious if the actor wanted out or something; it seems too arbitrary not have been influenced by outside motivations.), and some plot machinations seem to go against previous continuity (Why can the previously almost unstoppable Scaarrans suddenly be felled by a few blasts?), but it retains the show’s best hallmarks: hilarious dialogue, camaraderie, strong characterizations and world-building, and dazzling visuals. Farscape goes out on a strong note, if quite not the highest one it could have.

So to conclude, it’s no surprise at all that I love Farscape. Fans hoped that the ratings of the miniseries would keep the show around, but sadly, they weren’t strong enough. The sets were struck, the masters unfortunately felt got chucked (Tragically, with the exception of the miniseries, all that’s left are PAL videos.), the cast moved on (Browder and Black became Stargate: SG-1 regulars), and despite Brian Henson’s attempts for over two decades now, the show hasn’t seen any resurrection. Still, it maintains a fierce following, hopefully ever-growing on streaming, and remains a trailblazer, paving the way for shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica to break with the Star Trek formula and take the genre in new directions. In a way, even in the age of franchises and IPs, it’s still probably too damned weird to take a chance on. And God bless it for that. So if you’re already a fan, I’m jointing your ranks, and if you haven’t, then hang the frell on for a wild ride. I envy you.