I'm not doing a full review of the Premiere because SF Debris already did, and, well, I try to not overlap with SF Debris's reviews for the same reason I haven't reviewed The Phantom Menace. Not because it's been done to death, but because those guys have video and I do not, and basically say everything I want to say.
(And no, the sudden dive into another "old" sci-fi TV show does not mean I'm abandoning either B5 or A Game of Thrones. My B5 reviews are on hold until I have time to go back and re-watch some early S3 episodes, because I feel like I missed something. A Game of Thrones read/blog continues this weekend; I haven't been keeping up with that because I have to finish The Screwtape Letters for a book club meeting.
So. Just a few notes on "Premiere" and then on to "I, E.T."
It's a lot simpler than just about any other first episode I can think of off the top of my head. Guy gets swept up in wormhole, meets aliens, everyone saves everyone else to justify some teensy level of trust between them, done. Bam. Premise, setting, characters, done. Game of Thrones and Battlestar Galactica both have to hit the ground running, developing their plots and their characters at the same time. In contrast, Farscape's first episode is almost Buffy in reverse; instead of the supporting cast learning about the main character's crazy world, the main character is transported to a crazy world that the rest of the cast already inhabits. Nice, serviceable, a bit silly. I don't have a lot to complain about.
Now with that out of the way, let's look at episode two, "I, E.T."
"Water." "Witch." "Bushwacked." Why does the first episode after the premiere always suck? (It's because everybody's focused on making the pilot as good as it can possibly be, and then they jump ahead to the season's arc and finale.) I can't even remember B5's second episode, and while "The Kingsroad" wasn't bad per se, very little happened.
So the plot of this one is there's still some Bad Guy tech on Moya (it's a living ship, so I'm italicizing it because it's a ship name and not putting "the" in front of it because it's a proper noun on its own), and they have to get an alien anesthetic in order to cut it out of... it. Meanwhile they have to submerge the ship in water in order to prevent the signal from being broadcast. This despite the fact that no Leviathan has ever landed on a planet before. Then, while some of our heroes are out looking for the anesthetic, the characters left on the ship decide it's time to cut the device off anyway. You know, your McGuffin is a lot more acceptable if it happens to have some bearing on the plot.
The protagonist of Farscape is a human astronaut/scientist named John Crichton. He finds some McGuffin in an alien's house, but the little kid alien (played by, and I can't believe I'm typing this, a kid who can, more or less, actually act) shoots him with a cattle prod and his mommy (who happens to be the local SETI rep) starts gushing over how cool it is to have found an alien. They eat lunch and Crichton's McGuffin detector goes berserk, freaking out mommy alien, so everyone starts shouting for no reason. Turns out some local seasoning is the McGuffin. Mommy alien sends the alien alien-hunters off in the wrong direction so Crichton can get back to Moya. Huzzah.
My reaction to this episode is extremely meh because Star Trek did this sort of thing on a couple of occasions. The only twist, really, is that Crichton's not Future-Man the way Picard and Janeway are. And even then, it's brought up for all of about five minutes.
Oh, and then all that talk about how no Leviathan has ever landed on a planet before? Getting off the planet is no problem at all.
As I said, extreme meh.
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