The first series of Farscape was a revitalising tonic for TV SF. An ambitious coproduction of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Australia's Channel 9 and Hallmark Entertainment, Farscape launched itself with a refreshing mix of CGI, prosthetics and state-of-the-art puppetry to take a visual leap beyond other genre shows. The witty scripts, too, peppered with double-entendres and pop-culture references, are light years away from the staid style of Star Trek. Admittedly, the first season's basic premise is simply Buck Rogers updated (American astronaut John Crichton, played by Ben Browder, is catapulted to a far-flung galaxy populated by strange aliens), while the crew initially have something of Blake's 7 about them (a motley bunch of escaped convicts pursued by a relentless foe), and ideas like the living ship are borrowed from Babylon 5, but the Farscape concept has a freshness that makes it all look and feel completely original. --Mark Walker

First of all, I love the show. When it originally was shown on Finnish tv, my friend used to come by my apartment every week to watch it since he didn't get the channel that showed it. At that time I didn't care for the show until something like the late second season.

What I love about the show, is character chemistry. There are a lot good sci-fi shows, but in my opinion none have characters, you can relate to more. The chemistry between actors is really phenomenal. Especially in the later seasons when the continuity of the show starts to pick up more, you really start to care about what happens to each character.

This release though was a bit disappointing to me. Not because the quality is low, no sirree. Both picture and sound are spectacular. What was disappointing to me, was the lack of subtitles and that episodes 2-7 were in different order than originally aired on tv. That bothers the continuity of the show, especially important when building character relationships. Since I don't want to watch the episodes in the wrong order, I have the switch discs in my dvd player after pretty much every episode in the beginning. That lowers the rating to 4 stars in my opinion.

Besides that, I can't find anything wrong with this boxset. I only have the first season as of yet, hoping that at least the episodes are in the right order in the other releases.

This series is imaginative, certainly, with some interesting ideas and the typical "bipedal, 6 foot, vaguely human-esque aliens" (of varying colours) that regularly inhabit sci-fi TV series, because they're so much easier to cast and create than aliens that REALLY look alien.

It rollocks along at a hearty pace, with a decent quantity of action, blasts of laser fire, whizzing space-craft, the odd whiff of sexual tension and the characters getting regularly placed in jeopardy (and often in physical restraints too) ... in other words good, cheerful sci-fi stuff.

The characters are typically cardboard cut-out. Arguments are used to build tension and conflict between friends in ways that REALLY make no sense - except as means of pushing the plot in the direction the writers want it pushed. The villains are, as ALL villains seem to be in sci-fi, almost ridiculously poor shots who can unleash volley after volley of weapons fire at the major characters and rarely hit them at all - certainly never fatally.

In other words it's jolly enough, but is it superb? No - not really.

Farscape is an enjoyable show. So far there is no mind-blowing ideas and certainly no masterpiece episode but this kind of things takes time.
It is, mostly, somewhere between Star Trek and the good episodes of Dr Who.

My only complain : I've been very surprised by the lack of subtitles.

I never caught this while it was on TV, but because of all the good reviews and the appearance of Ben Browder and Claudia Black in Stargate seasons 9 and 10 (they're brilliant in it) I thought I'd give it a try.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, the show is funny, inventive and it reminds me of Firefly when the characters use 'foreign' words.

My one bugbear is 'where are the subtitles?' I think all DVDs should come with them as I tend to miss the under breath utterances.

These DVDs are packed with informative extras and if you're a packaging nut like me you'll like the velcro fastened hardboard container it comes in.

The pilot episode of this show is actually a very good piece of genre tv. However, after this promising start FARSCAPE very rapidly degenarates into an inchoherent mish mash of pointless plots about the loopy andventures of one American and a bunch of Australian muppets in space. Best left well alone I think.