Farscape: The Complete Collection: DVD Review

Farscape: The Complete Collection: DVD Review

Farscape - The Complete Collection

Released by Magna Home Ent
Rating: R13
The Aussie/ American scifi Jim Henson TV series finally gets a complete box release which pulls together the four series and the spin off TV movie, The Peacekeeper Wars.

Ben Browder acquired plenty of devoted fans in this series - he's John Crichton, an American astronaut, who ends up in the wrong part of space after traversing a worm hole (always the way).

Picked up by a living spaceship, Crichton finds himself forced to live with the aliens as he tries to get home. But his quest to get back puts him into direct conflict with Scorpius, the leader of the Peacekeepers, a bunch of alien baddies.

Farscape was innovative for its time - and this collection, complete with a range of special features, interviews and docos explains why. With some top of the range animatronic puppetry, the series certainly offered something different to the genre - and thanks to some pretty impressive writing, the stories proffered up something different.

But where the creators succeeded in this was the characters - their humanity (despite the fact they're primarily aliens) gave the show the credence it needed - and because of that, the writing rarely dropped in quality (although as ever with a series like this, there are exceptions). Plus later seasons become a little inpenetrable if you've not been there from the start.

An impressively culled together set,The Farscape Collection offers hours of entertainment and a reminder of why Jim Henson was such the visionary.

Rating: 8/10