And why we peaked with Farscape.

Foreword

Once upon a time, I stubbornly refused to like sci-fi. Space was boring and frankly all the techy stuff made my eyes glaze over. Give me swords and orcs over aliens and space ships any day. Then I watched Star Wars for the first time when I was twenty years old. Rather, my newlywed husband made me watch them all because The Force Awakens was coming out that year and we were going to see it in theaters with his entire friends and family. I relented, with much grumbling and huffing and when the credits rolled on Episode 3, I had lost my ever-loving mind. The lasers! Jabba the Hutt! Han Solo! Stormtroopers! I was absolutely appalled that my uneducated former self had stolen such amazing movies from me.

But if you’d asked me, I would’ve said I still didn’t like sci-fi. I would have argued against Star Wars being sci-fi at all, actually. I was an expert, after all.

About a year later, he sat me down and introduced me to Stargate SG-1. Another thing I didn’t like? Military movies and shows. I couldn’t care less for rah-rah patriotism and hated video games like Call of Duty. So naturally, I didn’t want to watch this one either. I was hooked by episode 5. I binged all ten seasons and then cried when there wasn’t more.

But if you’d asked me after all ten seasons if I liked sci-fi, I would’ve said no.

It wasn’t until I watched all of Farscape that I finally had to begrudgingly admit that okay, maybe sci-fi wasn’t all that bad. But most of the time that people recommend me sci-fi shows and movies, I’m usually not too keen to give them a try. To this day, I still find myself arguing that I don’t like sci-fi shows. But why? Why, if most of my favorite shows and movies are sci-fi, do I still think I don’t like the genre? What about the idea of sci-fi do I find so unappealing?

At first blush, the answer seems rather simple. Aliens. Not scary monster aliens, but proper aliens. Farscape aliens. But this problem goes so much deeper and spreads so much farther than that. So let’s see if we can break it down into bite-sized pieces.

Humor

The first one can actually be applied to so much of modern media, I could probably write a whole separate essay on it. But for now, let’s just try to remain focused on sci-fi specifically. Back when Stargate SG1 and Farscape came out, meme culture didn’t really exist. Especially not to the extent that it does today. I think, because of the rise of meme culture, what the average person sees as funny is wildly different. The bar for a laugh is now set so low, if you have one character addicted to coffee or feeling the slog of a job or acting ADHD in any way you’ve got a chuckle. Make it their whole character, and you’ve got a meme. Or worse, a M O O D. But does this mean that wittier, better written humor isn’t funny? Is today’s generation unable to appreciate the sharp wit or wisecracks of old?

Speaking from the generation of meme culture, I can safely say no meme has ever made me laugh like John Crichton and D’argo’s interactions have.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this clip. I promise you won’t be disappointed

https://youtu.be/rGjB_1lzbOw

Farscape was hilarious. It was also gritty, gross, had a lot of really dark moments and some serious drama. There was some truly unsettling moments, and there were many tears during certain moments in the show. Stargate SG1 was also funny, and had some absolutely amazing lines from both Jack and Daniel. Teal’c was also written brilliantly, and (excuse my momentary fangirling) I really love how they called out his lack of understanding for American idioms. The Teal’c-isms were one of my favorite things about Stargate SG1 because they were both funny and spoke to the cultural differences. I mean, that one time when Teal’c told Daniel “Things will not calm down, they will in fact calm up”? I laughed so hard. What an amazing line. Anyway, Stargate wasn’t just funny. There was a natural sarcastic wit from O’Neill when talking back to people. These lines aren’t always funny, but they are fun.

Modern-day shows are missing this. The line between comedy and drama has grown into this giant, thick eight-lane highway sized divide that keeps dramas dark and gritty and comedies dumb and memey. Now I don’t know of any modern comedic sci-fi, but as far as the dramatic ones go they fall deep into this trap. Foundation, For All Mankind, Westworld, Interstellar… all of these lack this kind of either outright humorous interplay between characters or fun, witty interactions that leave a fond impression in your mind. They are dark, gritty, depressing, heavy, drama filled works of art. And while I’m not arguing against them, I am saying there is a missed opportunity for shows to blend the humor and the grit. And I believe this lack is unfortunately to the detriment of modern media.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for dark, serious sci-fi shows and movies. Some of my favorite movies are dark, dramatic, edge-of-my-seat rides. Whether it’s the more modern shows like Interstellar or oldies like Alien, not every movie and show has to be a wacky, comedic romp. But the divide is so wide that anything that is meant to be funny tends to be only funny. Rick and Morty is just funny. Futurama is just funny.

CGI and Realism

This is a problem I believe many games also suffer from: everyone is obsessed with hyper-realism. Even the grit has polish! Technology has advanced exponentially since the first sci-fi movies and shows came out. Even as recent as the 2000s, we have seen leaps and bounds in what we are capable of doing when it comes to CGI and special effects. Unfortunately, I think the lessening of restrictions has resulted in more boring visuals. While technological feats are cool, and I love me some crazy machinery and realistic explosions, there is just something special about the weird, wacky prosthetics of old. Aliens in Star Wars and Farscape were amazing and wonderful and most importantly diverse. It’s a wild and weird multiple galaxies out there, it shouldn’t be filled with humans.

Yes, I am aware Stargate is filled with humans. Yes, I can be critical of my favorite shows.

My apologies to the writers. I still love your work. Please give us more Stargate.

It also shouldn’t be filled with non sentient blobs with teeth. Non-sentient monsters, especially ones of invading Earth? Parasitic creatures that invade spaceships? These are cool and all, but aside from being boring from a written perspective they are also boring from a design perspective. Oh, look. Another hulking black thing that you never get to see clearly. Vaguely bestial, probably has sharp teeth, runs on all fours. You know what’s really scary? Halosians. Let me share with you an excerpt on the descriptions of Halosians from the Farscape Fandom Wiki page:

"Halosians were large bipedal, vulture-like creatures. Their cranium was small, and their head had a long, sharp beak. They possessed wings, the spans of which were easily eight feet when fully stretched, but Halosians also had thin arms and articulate claws with which to operate machinery. They often have a very necrotic appearance, with exposed sinews on the mouth and a lack of tissue underneath the jaw."

Now I know what you’re thinking. “But isn’t this just a bird variant of beasts?” Sure, I suppose if you boil it down it is just another type of beast. BUT the Halosians are also intelligent. They have a society that encourages killing not for survival, but for raising their ranks. They can operate weapons and machinery on top of being giant scary creatures. If they so desired, they could choose to use fear tactics that would mimic a beast stalking its prey as well. Key word being choose. The sheer diversity that their intelligence gives them for ways to terrorize and ultimately kill their prey is vastly superior to just a mindless, savage beast.

Beyond villains and monsters, you also miss the opportunity for interesting character design and world-building when you emphasize an overall sense of hyper realism. In a show like Foundation or a movie like Dune, a character that looks like D’argo or Greedo would never be taken seriously. There’s no place for a character like that. Not because of the character themselves, but because they look too alien.

Let me just repeat that bit:

They look too alien. For a show. In space. On alien planets.

WHAT?

There shouldn’t be such a thing as too alien for an alien planet.

Now, as I worked on this I actually began to wonder why. Why, with all of the brilliant, artistic people that were working on sci-fi in those early days did we not get any proper CGI aliens? I can’t imagine that not a single person even tried to make it work. And then it hit me… we did get a CGI alien. And everyone hated him.

Yoda was… an unfortunate casualty in the world of CGI. I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on art, film, or the technology that goes into making movies look like they do, but a quick internet search tells us Star Wars Episode I was actually the first film to have a fully CGI rendered supporting character. Before that, CGI was used in much smaller ways to varying degrees of success. I believe that makes Yoda and the other aliens in the prequels the first to be done with CGI using live performances captured on set. So having established they were the first, it’s pretty much expected they weren’t going to be good. And it’s not like we stopped using this method of CGI after they were so ill received. On the contrary, The Phantom Menace pioneered this technology, and it would go on to be used in many blockbuster films and eventually in video games. While not an alien, Gollum was done in a similar fashion if not using the same technology, and he was amazing! So why are all our aliens CGI blobs? We know it can be done! Why did we give up on trying to make cool, CGI aliens? Alas, I have no answers to wrap this part up. Just a D’argo shaped hole in my heart.

Oh, the variety! …or lack thereof

Setting aside mere appearances, where is the variety of alien civilizations? Do you know how big the universe is? Let’s say for a moment that you have an Earth or Earth-like planet, with equivalent life. Are all planets really just going to be copy-and-pasted versions of ferns and humans? Or worse, completely devoid of any sentient/sapient lifeforms? Where are my hive-minded plant people? My crustaceans that communicate with clicks of their claws? Just imagine for a moment, an entire forest of sentient trees debating their war against the encroaching ferns through patterned leaf rustling. Knitting their branches together to provide shelter for their bird friends. Other non-humanoid races, either technologically advanced or pre-agrarian, should exist in the universe. At least from a story perspective. Either we’re alone or we are among many. But even beyond what would be plausible (hello, no one watches TV for reality, not even people who watch ‘reality tv’) I just think it’s not very interesting to see mindless monsters invading Earth. What, you’re telling me an entire alien race mastered interstellar travel just to growl at us? They don’t exhibit any sort of hierarchy? They don’t have any sort of higher intelligence beyond basic murder instincts? That, to me, is lazy writing and a missed opportunity. And any sentient, sapient alien race with a hierarchy society capable of interstellar travel would have at least one individual with wit and/or a sense of humor. It’s just… how thought works, okay? So why do we keep making these boring, Ooo scary alien shows?

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. There is an argument to be made for a singular type of alien and civilization. What if the environments needed to evolve sapient, conscious life forms is the environment provided on earth? What if the natural, peak evolutionary form is ultimately a variant of human? I hear you, and I understand the reasoning. However, this has one major flaw.

It’s BORING. Are you telling me we peaked with this form? No wings? No scales? Can’t even consume sunlight as a primary nutrition? Can only breathe a very specific atmosphere? Honestly, who cares how scientifically sound a lore is. Again, we don’t come here for reality. We come here for the cool shit, primarily, aliens. It’s so hard for me to justify watching and consuming new shows and movies when I know I could just go back and watch Farscape again. Why would I watch Invasion when the trailer literally shows me a black blob with teeth? I’m not even kidding, look at this shit:

And what about the new prequel to A Quiet Place? Like, okay, the original movie was amazing. The direction was great, the writing was great, and I loved the premise of a silent world and monsters that could only hear. But that’s what they were: monsters. Not aliens, but utterly terrifying monsters. These creatures shouldn’t be capable of interstellar travel. It shouldn’t have been possible for them to arrive in our solar system and invade our planet. They’re predatory monsters, plain and simple. No matter how good the direction or cinematography is, when you boil it down… it’s just another boring, generic scary alien monster movie. And that’s disappointing.

Now, I do feel compelled to touch-however briefly-on the concept of parasite or micro aliens. For the sake of simplicity, I am not including alien robots like the nanobots and replicators from Stargate SG-1. Unfortunate because, one more quick side note, replicators were so freaking cool and terrifying and I definitely consider them aliens. I do think alien parasites and viruses can be well done, but I do also think it is rarely done well. And I think it’s very easy to tell what makes it good with a simple two questions: 1) is it’s primary goal to kill whatever it comes into contact with and 2) does it have a reason for doing whatever it does.

For this point, I want to reach for Farscape- kidding! Can you tell I’ve recently rewatched Farscape? No, I think Stargate actually takes the cake for this one. There are a variety of episodes I could pull from that contain viruses, parasites and microorganisms of all kind throughout the ten seasons of the show, not to mention the… well… main villain race. Members of the internet, I present to you all Exhibit A: The Goa’uld. They are in fact a parasitic race, but they are complex, hierarchical and intelligent. They don’t seek to kill, they seek to control, to dominate. If that wasn’t enough, take a look at exhibit B: the alien race from the episode Message in a Bottle. SG1 brings back an artifact from an alien planet, which contains what is originally classified as a virus that infects O’Neill, slowly killing him and spreading through the base. 

Now whether or not it’s still classified as a virus in the show, it does eventually grow and evolve to the point where it speaks through O’Neill revealing its history and its intentions. It may be a virus, but it is also a sentient race whose desire isn’t necessarily to kill. It simply doesn’t care if it kills all life on earth if it means it can have a chance to restart. This was a brilliant move on the writer’s part. They could have simply made it an artifact that was a bioweapon containing a mindless virus. It would have still been scary, still made the episode a good one, but would it have stuck in my memory? Not even a little. For a monster-of-the-week episode, it was definitely one of the better in the early seasons thanks to the simple move of making the virus sentient and giving it a lore and a purpose.

Politics

Listen. It’s uh… spicy out there. Thankfully, sci-fi is a great medium to talk about. After all, we’re already living in a world that 20, 40, 60 years ago only existed in paper back novels. But why the hell does every sci-fi show want to pretend as if thinly veiled allegories about climate change, lack of privacy, and capitalism are the only way to incorporate politics into a show? I feel like so many movies and shows are trying to make political statements by repeatedly using these same narratives. And they try to make them as dark and doomsday as possible. The politics in Stargate SG-1 were real and relevant, without making me want to turn my TV off and go back to reality because at least we aren’t all living in a bunker yet. An even better example would be the multitude of political issues explored in Farscape. Moya is a sentient being—and a spaceship. What kind of freedom is such a being allowed? And Zhaan, being a Delvian priestess, is constantly caught between the politics of her religious and the group’s need for survival as run away prisoners. I’d just like to ask the people of this fair and foul planet: which would you rather watch? A) A show that is basically just Earth in the darkest possible future where climate change has driven us all into a bunker or we’re living under an authoritarian government with no personal freedom, or B) A show where two people are turned into living statues and placed outside a government building for eighty of the planet’s cycles to learn the wisdom of governance before they are set to rule? I’d say the choice is obvious. Both are political, but one is new and exciting. The other is just more of the same, overused, uninspired tropes.

I know, I know, the Matrix is a masterpiece and is very obviously political. It was also stylish, groundbreaking, deeply engaging and oh, yeah badass and fun as hell to watch. There are exceptions, okay?

I would argue that it is borderline necessary to bring politics into sci-fi when creating alien races. After all, politics are a facet of any culture and as we have established by now, alien lifeforms should have their own culture. We can even base it upon our own planet’s politics. It just needs to be done right. Look to the histories. Ask yourself, what would our current political landscape look like if black powder had never been invented? What if we’d managed to harness the power of light and photons instead? And what if it was easy and civilians were capable and educated enough to create and use potentially dangerous technology? What laws and forms of government might crop up surrounding this? I feel like everyone wants to use the same few allegories of oil wars and climate crisis in their stories and like… that’s just such low-hanging fruit. I love the new Dune movies, they are beautiful and masterful, with a rich lore and delightfully wicked sorceresses. Dune hits nearly all the right notes for me so far. But it is very obviously just a war for oil, complete with it being found in yet another desert planet. 

Me too, Anakin. Me too.

Conclusion

Honestly, it’s hard not to wrap this all up as just an obsessive fans ranting about how nothing could ever be as good as Farscape. But I mean… has anything been as good? Farscape was messy. It was crazy. The aliens were creative and unique, the characters unapologetically wacky and wild while still being complex, 3 dimensional beings with growth. The story had it all, the humor, the grit, the drama, the politics! It was STRANGE it was WONDERFUL and by GOD IT HAD THIS CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER:

sigh

Let me be clear. I LOVE sci-fi. And I even love the dark gritty dystopia future sci-fi like The Matrix and Terminator. I love Dune and it’s rich lore, and I do actually like Foundation, or at least what I’ve seen of it so far. I know there are plenty of wonderful shows and movies out there that a lot of people worked really hard to make. I just want to ask all the writers, producers, and directors out there a simple question:

Why not do both? We have a wealth of talent and an overabundance of eager creatives out here. Why are we not using them to make more than just another dark sci-fi drama? Or another cheesy, memey headache of a show? We can bring the two together, sharp wit and dark drama. There are actors that play well off each other, costume and prosthetic designers who are itching to make more than just another boring militaristic robe, cloak suit thing. Writers who would love nothing more than the freedom to create character-centric stories with diverse cultures and lore. The best doesn’t have to be behind us, left to be remembered as a fond, nostalgic mark on the genre’s timeline. I believe a modern day show that held itself to the same standard as Farscape, with the same, strange design choices that brought about D’argo and the Halosians, could become one of the most popular shows of the time. Have we forgotten that John Crichton has a kid out there in the big bad universe? As much as I dislike the spin-offs and remakes pervading modern media, I wouldn’t say no to a well-done show about Crichton’s daughter in the Farscape universe.

Humans of Earth, I implore you: stop making boring aliens. Bring back the unpolished, weird, puppets and prosthetics of old. Enough with the shiny, drama-infested, meme filled slop. If you use CGI, give your aliens the same care and attention Gollum received and stop making mindless black murder blobs with legs and teeth. These are civilized alien races capable of interstellar travel. Show some respect.