What I found most interesting about this pilot was that the Suliban, a shadowy organization engaged in a “temporal cold warâ€, are very loosely based on the Taliban. They wanted a shadowy, covert organization and used the Taliban as the basis. No lie, Brannon’s admitted it, too. How’s that for timing? I have to wonder if Berman and Braga will end up carrying this out into some kind of parable as the series progresses. Do I give them too much credit? Maybe. After all of their talk of wanting to take Trek into new directions, Berman and Braga for the most part, give us what they’ve given us all along. It’d be nice to see them tackle some current issues in a way that perhaps isn’t so thinly veiled.
I’m a huge Farscape fan, and I’d swear B and B have been taking notes. Witness: an undercurrent of a relationship between Archer and T’Pol, a human and an alien with repressed emotions; sexy alien dancers at an intergalactic ***** bar; gratuitous sex-talk between characters; an even more gratuitous scene between T’Pol and Tucker in which they wipe some kind of “decontaminant†all over one another’s nearly naked bodies (by the way, although it only features two actors, there are actually four stars of this scene…you do the math…it must have been awfully cold in there); another gratuitous kissing scene where one character must “know†another through a lip-lock; a far less rigid group of central characters; more bizarre aliens and fewer alien “headpieces†and who knows what else I might’ve missed – I have to admit, I kind of mentally tuned out in the final twenty or so minutes. To the Scapers out there, I didn’t say they took good notes. Braga says that Farscape is “a lot of fun – wacky-doodle sci-fi†- whatever that means. I don’t imagine he pays much attention to the competition that wins the Saturn Award.
