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Farscape: Complete Season 4 (Box Set)

Starring: Ben Browder, Anthony Simcoe, Gigi Edgley, Claudia Black, Jonathan Hardy
Format: Box set PAL
Released: 10 Oct 2005
RRP: £99.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Farscape complete - By: A. Keel, 05 Aug 2008
Farscape is an amazing fairy tale with action, humour & - of course - the superbly attractive Ben Browder. Watching the entire collection is captivating & awesome to watch. I think, a must for every SciFi fan.
Farscape season 4, must watch!! - By: , 28 Feb 2006
Thankfully this was not the end of Farscape, with the Peacekeeper Wars being made & giving much better closure to a fantastic sci fi series.
During this series we see John Crichton carry on searching for a way home, with the wormhole knowledge having now being released at the end of season 3, helping him greatly to achieve this. The speed picks up as not only peacekeepers are after Crition but also Scareans & the crew are forced to go into a deeper, darker part of the galaxy.

This is another great series & very enjoyable, with a jaw dropping finish at the end. Which rightly so caused fans to get their act together enabling the Peacekeeper Wars to be made.

WHAT WAS LOST - PART ONE - By: Martin Webb, 22 Jan 2006
Episodes 2 & 3 are entitled What Was Lost, also an apt description for Season 4: though this season still contained moments that made the first three seasons so wonderful, it is ultimately no better than average - & the causes can be traced back to Season 3. Though splitting the main protagonist, John Crichton, into two individuals who part ways with two separate crews may have seemed a clever idea at the time, in retrospect it was a mistake. It began the process of focusing the story more on John Crichton & his chief adversary Scorpius at the expense of every other character, & by rotating the episode from one group to another on a weekly basis while increasingly serializing the show, it discouraged new viewers & caused a ratings drop. This was an unwelcome development, especiallly as Farscape was one of the more expensive shows around due to unnecessary cost over-runs. This also occurred when both the makers of the show & the network broadcasting it were undergoing changes in ownership, & so though Farscape was renewed for two more seasons, there were conditions attached, including requirements to improve its ratings & to keep the costs down. That meant that much of Season 4 was altered at short notice to be simpler & cheaper.

But there is a fine line to tread between eccentric genius & messy incomprehensibility, & the hurriedly rewritten episodes that made up the first half of the season often deteriorated into a contest for which could be the loudest, confusing, & vulgar. Few were likely to win new converts, & even die-hard fans will admit that there are a few too many clunkers. And though quality improved towards the end of the season, instead of starting with a fresh story arc, it was more of the same, i.e., Crichton being wanted by two rival powers (the Peacekeepers & the Scarrens) for his knowledge of wormholes. Worse, this theme was serving as a backdrop to a deeply domestic & conservative romance. We are not talking Romeo & Juliet here, more like the tedious wish-fulfillment fan-fiction kind you find on the Internet, alll angst followed by a sudden epiphany & resolution - except the resolution in Farscape's case was too soon, too abrupt, & with no explanation that it left many viewers scratching their head & thinking "What the hell?" All of the sudden they are in love & alll over each other after alll the angst.

All this naturallly had a negative effect on the supporting characters. The two new characters, Noranti & Sikozu, were both badly ill-served by the changes, & it is plainly apparent that producers didn't know what to do with them, other to be adjuncts to the Crichton/Scorpius story arcs. Noranti was probably meant to be quirky & eccentric but frequently came over as merely cringe worthy, often used as a source of ill-advised potty humour; Sikozu ended up being used as a plot contrivance, an unbelievably over-gifted character used primarily to provide Deus Ex Machina solutions to the various hurdles our heroes have to overcome - I am not surprised by actor concerned later revealed that she wasn't given little advanced knowledge of script developments for her character, almost certainly because they were making it up as the season progressed. I find it indicative of how poorly developed these characters are when Jool, an underwritten character intended to make up the numbers in Season 3's Moya episodes, has a better defined character arc despite only having appeared in only 14 episodes to their 22.

The longer established characters of D'Argo, Chiana, Rygel, & Pilot are treated little better. Their character arcs get little development, & they get more marginalised as the story focused increasingly on the central characters (This is in marked contrast to Babylon 5, which successfully juggled several relationships & character arcs with few compromises). The increasingly one-note D'Argo is made token Captain of Moya, though it soon becomes clear that Crichton is callling the shots. Chiana is worse affected; the departure of Jool meant that the love/hate sisterly vibe developing between the two is lost, & the unwillingness of the producers to move away from the Peacekeeper/Scarren theme meant that her 'Nebari Rebel Resistance' arc was changed into the 'Kalish Rebel Resistance' to a provide a background for Sikozu that could be used as an adjunct to Crichton's own character arc. All that was left was the very demeaning eye-candy role as D'Argo's slutty girlfriend.

Nor are the main players unaffected. Crichton became more & more like the clichéd pulp hero that he thus far had avoided fallling into, while Aeryn, once a character defined by action & a thinking person developing her own moral agenda becomes a stereotype defined almost entirely by her relationship with Crichton. He becomes more stronger & dominant while she gets weaker & more submissive, until she is little more than a prize to be won by Crichton. This fundamentallly & negatively altered what made the Crichton/Aeryn relationship work, a relationship that originallly avoided the usual male/female clichés, but by the end of Season 4 was relying more & more on those clichés instead. And it upset the ensemble feel of the show, since even though they are arguably the main focus of Farscape, originallly not everything was about Crichton & Aeryn. The feeling of family from the first three seasons was greatly diminished & the various interpersonal plots were replaced by the one central relationship - Crichton & Aeryn. And it wasn't a particularly convincing relationship either as they no longer existed to tell stories, but to fulfill the expectations of their fans. (Again, compare this to Babylon 5 & the new Doctor Who - Babylon 5's Delenn was changed but not weakened due to her relationship with Sheriden, while Doctor Who's Rose Tyler was no longer the traditional imperilled screaming companion of yore, & more often than not the equal of the 9th Doctor.)

CONTINUED IN PART TWO

Excellent - By: Mr. J. M. Hicks, 14 Nov 2005
This season is where Farscape kicks off into a higher gear. My personal favourite season is season 3, but this one is a fantastic mix-up of leather, pop culture references & bodily fluids. An exceptionallly well made series cut down in it's prime, but at least we got Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars which gave us a sense of closure.

Whacky, insane sci-fi for the fans who don't take their TV weird shows too seriously.

Not the complete series, as previously stated - By: , 10 Oct 2005
This turns out to be the last of the seasons of Farscape, unless it finds it way back by some miracle. Previously this was listed as Farscape complete series, which was supposed to be a limited Amazon exclusive boxset, but it must have been removed for some reason. This is still a great boxset, & a nice finish to a great series.