Random spoilers to follow, mostly about characters.
Stargate/Farscape shared actors
Claudia Black- She’s cool as Aeryn Sun, but I think her prowess as an actress is shown off way better as Vala Maldoran. Vala is so deceptive and street savvy. She really is a very interesting character. Aeryn is cool but much more straightforward. She has her personal rules and lives her life by them, end of story.
Ben Browder-I like him alot as John Crichton, but then he shows up on Stargate and becomes the most boring character ever. Just because you are the replacement for Jack doesn’t mean you have to be Jack. I wish they’d let him show his range more often. That episode wherein the crew all exchange bodies was way hilarious.
Stark- my new favorite character! When you first meet him he seems completely crazy. Then by the end of the deuce episode he seems infinitely wise- but this isn’t his whole character either. We see so much more of him later on. At this point in the show, he is a man with potential for infinite wisdom and absolute madness. When he’s feeling emotional he loses control and cannot function. But there are times he has total clarity and seems to be capable of anything. He’s this weird dichotomy and can swing from one to the other like a pendulum. It makes him so interesting and I can’t wait for more with his character.
TV show plot transparency-
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. It has to do with how much information the audience is given as they watch a show. Some shows will have information left unavailable to the viewer so at the end they can solve the problems by simply- “AHA, that’s what they were really doing!”
A famous example is the episode where Kirk and Spock fight. At the end of the fight Spock thinks he’s killed Kirk, and so does the audience. Back on the ship it is revealed that Kirk was given a drug by the doc to make him appear dead, so all is explained and so solved. The situation was not totally transparent to the audience until the end reveal.
For a long time when I first watched Farscape I expected this type of hidden information format. They would get into situations that seemed impossible to solve, then you’d see that there was no trick and they still manage to escape by the skin of their teeth. In one such episode John is turned into a statue to preserve him for several centuries and someone kills him by cutting off his head. I thought for sure that something was up, he wasn’t in the statue at all and we’d find out later. Nope. All they have to do to save him is weld the head back on. So I’m getting used to knowing that as the Farscape audience we basically have all the information there is, and not to expect any clever reveals.