FARSCAPE LIVES Executive producer Brian Henson rescues the Farscape saga from the mother of all cliffhangers. Exclusive from SCI FI Magazine, August 2004 by Kathie Huddleston "IT'S LIKE MAKING MATRIX FOR TELEVISION," says executive producer Brian Henson of the challenges involved in bringing Farscape back to life and back to the SCI FI Channel in the form of a four-hour miniseries called Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, which will premiere Sunday, October 17, at 9/8C. After working on Farscape since 1993, Henson was naturally disappointed when the series was canceled. "Farscape has always been something that's enormously dear to my heart and I've always been very committed to, and I didn't like the way the series finished. At this time, I don't think of the miniseries as necessarily the completion of the series. It's still a stand-alone piece, and we have made it so a new audience can follow it. But it does give a better sense of completion to that series, even though it really is a stand-alone piece." For those who've never seen Farscape before, take a deep breath and pay close attention: When last we left the gang, Moya landed on a planet in a body of water. After going out together on a boat to be alone, Aeryn told Crichton that the baby she was having was his, and he asked her to marry him. The crew of Moya watched from a distance, first joyous when they realized the couple had decided to marry and then horrified as an attack from above turned John and Aeryn into a pile of crystals. As usual, it was bad timing indeed for the couple, who never could seem to get by their problems in the past. Henson promises the miniseries will answer many of the unanswered questions and tie up some loose ends. "It is basically the story of John Crichton and Aeryn Sun finally trying to have their baby amid an intergalactic Peacekeeper/Scarran war, which Crichton is getting pulled into as both sides try to align him with one side or another. So it's really the struggle of one man trying to put his family first above huge intergalactic pressure to get involved with this war." While many of the details of the miniseries are under wraps, the one big secret Henson is willing to part with is that Crichton won't stay crystallized very long. For a guy who's had the top of his head separated from his body for brain surgery and had his eyeballs pulled out of their sockets and lost his head after being turned into a statue, a little crystallization shouldn't be too much of a problem for our hero to handle. Much like John Crichton overcoming all odds, Henson had his work cut out for him when it came to creating the four-hour miniseries. He had to bring back an enormous cast and crew who had all gone on to other projects. Because he had kept in contact with all the key players, even through the dark times when bringing back Farscape seemed impossible, everyone involved dropped what they were doing to make the mini. In front of the camera, all the members of the cast who were "alive and kicking at the end of season four" have returned. "The cast works very, very well together, and certain members shined in different ways than they have done during the series. It was really exciting to see some of the characters sort of take on a whole new level to themselves than they had in the past." And the returning crew brought their unique Farscape perspective to the miniseries. "The level of invention at all levels of the production is significantly more than you would find pretty much on anything else I've ever seen. When the scene comes onto the floor, the amount of invention in 'Well, what if we tried this idea? How about if we changed this? What if we didn't have this character doing this instead of that?' is really fantastic. I've never seen that sort of creative investment on any production. "With Farscape, there's no way to credit any one or even two or even 10 people with the production. It's everybody investing 200 percent of themselves creatively and coming up with fantastic and weird ideas that affect the end product. You can't tell from the script what the movie's going to actually be. [laughs] Which was kind of true in the series, too. You couldn't really tell with the episodic scripts. There was going to be so much invention on the floor before it was finished, and that's what I think creates that cool Farscape energy." The final result is vast, said Henson. "It's a very big miniseries. It's a very big, high-budget, action-packed epic. We were faced with how do you take Farscape, which was already a television series where every episode was meant to look and feel like a movie, and make that series into an event television miniseries? It's really tough to figure out how to make it even bigger, but we did. It is bigger. It's a lot bigger." To create the bigger story, executive producers Rockne S. O'Bannon and David Kemper wrote a script that had four hours to create a more epic and deeper emotional story. "The cast is so large, and we did decide we really wanted to figure out all of their stories so you'd be satisfied where all these characters were going by the end. The only reason why it's possible was because that group had been making the show for such a long time. Andrew Prowse was the main producer down there, and he'd been with the series throughout. He was fantastic in pulling it all together, and really David did a monumental amount of work on the script. Rockne and David did the first draft together, but then David did most of the rewriting for production. And he was writing all the time. He never stopped writing until probably three days from wrapping the shoot. And then we were just shooting like crazy down there." As a result of this big, big miniseries, there are opportunities for Farscape that didn't exist when the series ended. "The last episode of season four had a lot of things wrapped up, and then we opened everything back up in the last minute. It didn't really give us a chance to emotionally get our heads around finishing that chapter. It's really nice to have gotten back together to do the miniseries, because it does give us a chance to feel like there's a conclusion to this chapter of Farscape." Henson believes the miniseries will take the universe to a place where Farscape can continue. "Coming out of the series, we had left so many cliffhangers that we really couldn't just go anywhere. We needed to bring the characters to some sort of stasis. We had to bring them, not completely to a resolution, but to a place where we could make a theatrical movie. We could make a spinoff series. We could make more miniseries. Now we can go in almost any direction. And I think what we'll do is we'll see how this miniseries does and take it from there." And who knows? If Farscape fans have anything to say about it, come October they won't have seen the last of John Crichton and his pals, even if they have to travel through wormholes to keep the Farscape universe alive. Did you enjoy this article? Then check out SCI FI Magazine for interviews and behind-the-scenes coverage of the entire world of science-fiction.