Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

Each week this month, every Original TV Score Selection of the Week will be an instrumental that was written for Farscape, an Aussie and American show I watched casually when it first aired in America on the Sci-Fi Channel. Like all other instrumentals I’ve picked as Original TV Score Selections of the Week, I’ll be using each instrumental from Farscape as a jumping-off point to discuss one of my favorite Farscape episodes or an important chapter in the show’s run.

Farscape February begins with “Wormhole!” from the cold open of “Premiere,” Farscape’s first episode and a solid introduction to a show that was a wild ride and a weekly showcase of ingenious Jim Henson’s Creature Shop effects (under the leadership of Brian Henson, the late Henson’s son). In the cold open, John Crichton, an American astronaut conducting a test flight aboard the Farscape-1 module, accidentally opens a wormhole that whisks him and his module away from Earth and dumps them into the middle of a space battle in a distant part of the Milky Way. “Wormhole!” was composed by Subvision, a.k.a. Aussie composer Chris Neal and his son Braedy Neal.

I remember watching “Premiere” when it premiered on Sci-Fi in 1999. I knew Farscape was going to work as a sci-fi adventure show when Crichton—trapped aboard a sentient ship, which used to be a prison ship—was injected in the foot with translator microbes, which go to the injectee’s brain and translate alien languages, by a DRD (Diagnostic Repair Drone) that helped take care of Moya, the aforementioned sentient ship. I thought, “Wow, translator microbes! I wish I had thought of that when I wrote and drew that V: The Final Battle storybook that got disqualified from that ‘Make Your Own Book’ contest in second grade. It’s a brilliant fucking way to avoid training the cast to learn how to speak alien languages every week.”

Translator microbes were clearly a response to the universal translator, the hand-held Starfleet device that enabled humans and aliens to understand each other during the original Star Trek and were later built into combadges on Star Trek: The Next Generation and its five sister shows (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy, the most Farscape-ish of the six shows even though it was targeted at kids, while the sexually frank Farscape was definitely not, despite the likable and kid-friendly Henson’s Creature Shop puppets). Unlike the universal translator, the microbes didn’t always work and were comically unable to translate alien curse words like “frell” or some of Crichton’s Earth expressions.

If Farscape had been a Trek spinoff, the universal translator would probably have been one of the capabilities of Moya, who was freed from enslavement by the fascism-fighting fugitives who were her inmates when she was a prison ship and became her crew after they freed her. The Farscape writers decided that Moya had enough on her plate and was too busy escaping from the Peacekeepers, the paramilitary fascists who used to enslave Moya, or protecting her passengers to find the time to act as Google Translate for them. (Moya was a Leviathan, a “living ship” with emotions and intelligence—but she spoke only rarely, so the imaginatively named alien pilot known as Pilot did all the speaking for her.) Translator microbes were one of many ways Rockne S. O’Bannon, Farscape’s creator and the writer of “Premiere,” and David Kemper, who showran Farscape from its second season to its fourth and final season, tried to distance their show from Trek.

“So many people that watch science fiction want it easy, want it really nice. They want Star Trek over and over,” said Kemper to Cinescape magazine in 2002. “It’s the same show. People are nice to each other. Maybe Data and Geordi have a little bit of a disagreement, but they are friendly. That is not this show. The idea of this show [Farscape] is a mirror reality. These people are not best friends. They didn’t take an oath to join a crew together. They did not agree that we are going to take this journey as a team. Not one of them is here voluntarily. Every single one of them, if they could, would be someplace else.”

The Farscape writers’ room included a few writers who were involved with TNG: Kemper, Naren Shankar, and Ricky Manning, who—after I posted on Bluesky how jazzed I was that Shout! Studios currently has the streaming rights to both Farscape and John Woo’s long-unavailable Hong Kong gun fu era—mentioned to me on Bluesky that frequent Farscape episode directors Ian Watson and Tony Tilse were Woo fans who liked to emulate Woo’s action sequences in the episodes they helmed. Kemper, Shankar, and Manning must have felt really liberated by Farscape’s lack of “You can’t do this thing because it goes against Gene Roddenberry’s vision”-type storytelling boundaries.

The writers’ room also included a few names I recognize from the ’80s and ’90s Cannell series episodes I watched for the first time last month as part of Cannell-ary 2026: Babs Greyhosky, Tom Blomquist, and Silk Stalkings showrunner David Peckinpah (prior to writing a couple of Farscape episodes, Peckinpah was also known for being despised by fans of Sliders’s first couple of seasons when Sliders went off the rails due to Fox network execs’ creative interference and Peckinpah’s creative decisions while he showran Sliders). The Cannell connections are interesting because even though Farscape wasn’t a Cannell production, Crichton was basically a Cannell hero trapped in a space opera full of aliens who either fart helium or experience orgasms while absorbing sunlight. For instance, he frequently compared the madness that surrounded him—whether aboard Moya or on some planet in the distant part of space known as the Uncharted Territories—to Trek shows, Spielberg movies, or Simpsons moments.

When Jim Rockford quipped to a cop he didn’t like that he sucked at arresting people because he didn’t keep the sun to his back like John Wayne would always do, it was unusual to see a late ’70s private eye show doing that because lead characters in private eye shows that preceded The Rockford Files weren’t as pop-culturally literate as Rockford was. In 1999, it was equally unusual to see Crichton or Colonel Jack O’Neill over on Stargate SG-1—a show Ben Browder and his Farscape co-star Claudia Black later became a regular part of—comedically making references to present-day movies or TV shows in the middle of a planet-of-the-week show. (The crews of the Enterprise-D, the Defiant, and the Voyager were not full of couch potatoes like pre-Moya Crichton and O’Neill because they were in the 24th century, and except for Tom Paris, a fan of classic TV, horror B-movies, and the fictional Captain Proton serial, most 24th-century folks outgrew movies and TV.) And despite Browder’s chiseled looks, Crichton was, like fast-driving ex-con “Skid” Mark McCormick from Hardcastle and McCormick, more often the guy who gets knocked around by other main characters or thugs than the guy who does all the ass-whupping on the show. Aeryn Sun, a disgraced Peacekeeper at the end of “Premiere” and Crichton’s eventual love interest, and Ka D’Argo, a Luxan warrior with a prehensile and poisonous tongue, tended to be better than Crichton in the action heroics department.

“Before Crichton (or the audience, for that matter) can get his bearings, he is choked, shoved, interrogated, spat upon, and finally rendered unconscious when stung by one of the alien’s tongues,” wrote Alasdair Wilkins in a 2013 A.V. Club review of “Premiere.”

His first encounter with Aeryn in a cell aboard Moya ends with him getting knocked around by Aeryn, who assumes he’s a Peacekeeper like her.

Nah, Crichton is a scientist who has been trying to revolutionize interstellar travel.

Crichton’s knowledge of science—instead of the violence Aeryn and D’Argo are really good at or the mystic powers of Zhaan, the ship’s Delvian priestess—saves the Moya crew at the end of “Premiere.” His idea of using Earth’s gravity to power the Farscape-1’s speed is what got him in this mess, and it’s what gets him and the other fugitives out of trouble when he instructs Aeryn to use the gravity of another planet to power Moya’s speed and steer the ship away from the ruthless Captain Crais—a Peacekeeper who wants Crichton to pay for the death of his brother, another Peacekeeper, in a Prowler crash during Crichton’s wormhole incident—and his crew. But by the end of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, this guy who was just a scientist when we first met him in “Premiere” is more than just a scientist: He’s also a hardened survivor of interstellar war who died multiple times and was brought back to life each time, as well as a warrior, a loving husband, and a new father.

After the first airing of “Premiere,” I didn’t watch every episode of Farscape during its run on Sci-Fi, and I still haven’t watched all of them. But I watched all of its final season, in which Crichton outgrew his need to return home to Earth and became preoccupied with protecting from the Scarrans the planet he no longer called home—I remember how all those scenes that took place in America that season were really fucking cringey because Farscape hired a bunch of Aussie actors who could not do an American accent as effectively as Naomi Watts can—and I saw The Peacekeeper Wars. The storytelling risks Farscape took in many of the episodes that followed “Premiere” (even though those risks didn’t always work), the brilliance of the show’s cast (an Aussie and Kiwi cast, except for Browder, the only American in the cast), and a bunch of puppeteering effects and CGI visuals that have aged remarkably well are reasons why we’re still talking about Farscape and rewatching it (or getting storytelling ideas from it, like James Gunn did when he modeled his Guardians of the Galaxy movies after the show) today.

Next week: Farscape does my favorite body swap episode ever.