What about Rockne?

 Everyone knows JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, and they're both amazing and you can generally trust most TV from either of them, but for me, going back even before Buffy (my first Joss), there was Rockne, making the shows I want to watch. Someone other than me must've been hooked my Alien Nation and brought through the 90s by SeaQuest, but no one seems to talk about this dude as much as the Js--so I want to just put this little heads-up post here, talking about his work, to weigh the scale a little on the other side.*

If you know about SciFi, you almost definitely know about Farscape, and that's probably his best show to date (though I haven't seen as much of Defiance and Revolution as I want, so maybe they're catching up and I'm just not aware yet), but all his work has certain similarities that make them his:

• Lots of strong characters with their own motivations and goals, that don't always match up with anyone else's
• Weirdness handled well--alien civilizations, conspiracies, not-normal-earth realities
• Long, interconnected chains of smaller stories that tell bigger stories
• A certain unexpectedness--it's hard to guess what his shows will do next, and that's kind of great when you watch a lot of tv
• The juxtaposition of normal and super-bonkers--Human astronaut lost in space, end of the world survivors with new roles, a cop and his alien partner, etc
• Big storytelling--not just a few people's stories, but the whole world's stories
• Hopefulness, usually, even if it's hidden
• The idea that humans are pretty adaptable, even if we're also sort of ignorant and need to be taught things
• Politics and religion as main issues, though generally they're alien or post-apocalyptic, so it doesn't really get preachy
• Cross-cultural understanding as the answer
• Neat tech

Basically, if you're a fan of the normal and everyday colliding with the weird, and with those weird collisions telling stories that couldn't be told without them, you should be watching his shows and picking them apart and talking about them. And that'll give him the space and the faith from the networks to write the way he wants to write and give us more on the scale and quality of Farscape!

And speaking of, I hope the movie for that is so fantastic that the world clamors for more Farscape in some form or another, and gives the man a chance to bring us something else as ambitious without interference from the network! Because that's my wish for all my favorite writers and creators--freedom from network interference.

What do you think of when you think of Rockne S O'Bannon?



NOTES:
*as if fandom was a scale, rather than a big ball of wibbly wobbly fandomy stuff.

The Farscape movie and why I desperately need it

There have been rumors around lately, and without any research to see how real they are, I would like to just react right here in my own space.

My first reaction is: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then after that, I start thinking about it, and come up with actual reasons.

If you haven't seen Farscape, go watch it right now. I'll wait. It's only four seasons and a TV wrap up, and sure those are US seasons, but I promise you'll feel just as deprived as you ever felt with a limited episode Brit or Premium show--it's that good. It started off with a total inversion of the classic sf-idea that the human hero-astronaut knows all and automatically becomes the savior of everyone in the galaxy. Which is brilliant. John basically knows nothing and is near-entirely unprepared for each and every aspect of life in a populated alien milieu and it is heartbreaking and frustrating as hilarious.

From there, it goes on to switch up gender roles, tell an epic love story while still remaining very scifi, develop actual characters that change and evolve and deal with the actual physical and often drastic consequences of their actions, and challenge standard views not only on society and politics, but also on plot and just how you're supposed to make a show.

There's strangeness everywhere, and almost all of it makes perfect sense later. There's death and birth and cosmic stories and very personal struggles. And it's amazing.

And it was also cut off after being told it had a whole other season and so needed a very fast and frenetic tv special that did pretty much everything they should have had another season to express and didn't. It was more than we expected, but it wasn't satisfying as they wanted it to be--or that we-the-fans wanted it to be.

My number one reason why it needs to happen is that the story is unfinished.

They carried on a whole in the comics, but a lot of people, I'd bet, haven't read those--I had trouble finding them in my local comics shops and have only read some of them.

And enough time has passed that special effects have caught up with the ambitions of the show, giving them more to work with as well as new limits to push as they create it, and I really want to see that.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop made all the physical aliens, and they were brilliant, unlike anything on TV or in movies, as well as being wildly different than the things the Creature Shop usually made. Now, with that new competition show to find new talent for the Shop starting up on SyFy, it'll be visible again soon, and this is the perfect time to relaunch the Shop's flagship of creativity, Farscape!

Plus, we're in a time when our scifi is split between near-future or present-time barely-scifi on TV and a few high-concept scifi movies (Oblivion-like) on big screens, but mostly on the side of superhero stuff, which I love, but which leaves the niche of Space Opera wide open for Faracape. We haven't had a good space opera in ages, and the last round was very dark and humorless because of the brilliant but heavy and often depressing Battlestar Galactica. I feel like it's time we got some humor back in the genre as well as the huge importance of the plots.

There's also the rumor that the new story would be about John and Aeryn's kid, which I'm divided on. On the one hand, I really want the old show back, but I know that's unreasonable. On the other hand, starting with the kid could very easily be like a Next Generation thing--literally--and would be enough of a restart that they could capture the old fans AND a whole new batch of fans who are versed in the ways of super-support fandom the way Doctor Who did.

And it would just be amazing. If one beloved niche show can revive, maybe others can. Maybe we-the-fans can save all our favorite shows that ended too early!

Note:

This post was originally posted on my other blog accidentally, but is now here where it belongs!