From the April 2003 issue of SCI FI Magazine

Farewell, Farscape

The cast and crew of Farscape celebrate
four frellin' good seasons

By John Sullivan

The show that eventually became Farscape took its first toddling steps into the world in the early '90s, long before it actually made it to television.

Series creator Rockne O'Bannon had been working on the Steven Spielberg-produced SeaQuest DSV, which broke new ground in the use of computer animation on television. He was called in by Brian Henson of the Henson Company, who wanted to develop a new property. Henson wanted to do "a ship show," something that could take advantage of his company's expertise in creature effects and animatronics, as well as CGI, which the Henson Company was beginning to move into at the time. But instead of the children's shows the company was best known for, this would clearly be a program for adults.

O'Bannon says he immediately realized that, if he wanted to create a show set on a starship, he needed to avoid recreating Star Trek. He decided the solution was to invert Star Trek's happy hierarchy and create anarchy aboard his ship. The characters would "have strong personal agendas, not just a group agenda of saving their asses each week." In addition, the characters would all be of different alien species, to give the Henson creature designers room to play.

When O'Bannon went back to Henson with a proposal, the fundamentals of Farscape were recognizable: A lone human character, cast away at the far end of the universe, surrounded by aliens, on a fugitive ship full of escaped prisoners.

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