Now You've Gone and Set Me Off!

I just noticed that Chas Rich of Sardonic Views has posted a very flattering little blurb for Maximum Verbosity over there. Thanks, guy! It's nice to know somebody actually enjoys my random mutterings and ravings!

"If you want to set her off," he says of yours truly, "ask her whether 'Farscape' jumped the shark or not by the end of season 3." Heh. It's funny; my immediate response to that was to think, "Nah, that won't set me off..." Which then led me directly into a five-minute mental tirade, concluding with the thought, "Gee, I guess that did set me off, after all." You know, it's a little frightening to be that predictable to total strangers...

My answer to the question, of course, is bound to be immediately obvious to anyone who's so much as cast a casual glance at this blog. No, of course I don't think it's jumped the shark. Indeed, it's still one of the only two shows currently on TV that I'm likely to bother crossing the street to watch. I haven't been utterly thrilled with every episode of the fourth season ("Twice Shy" comes to mind), and, yes, I've found aspects of it to be, well, a bit frustrating and confusing. But I'm still very much enjoying the ride. I'm even taking great (if masochistic) pleasure in the frustration and confusion.

I can see why some people might think it has jumped, though (even if they are, of course, utterly and completely wrong). The writers have definitely been playing mind games of late, and they haven't exactly been subtle about the fact, either. It's clear that they're trying to keep us a little frustrated, a little confused, a little off-balance. Some people hate that. Personally, I love it. Yup, I admit it, I'm David Kemper's bitch, and I'm perfectly happy about it. Mind-frell me, baby! Come on, harder!

Admittedly, not everything they've done this season has worked perfectly. Some of the plot points that were deliberately kept back from us at the beginning of the season, when finally revealed, felt kind of anti-climactic after all the build-up, for instance. But one of the things I have always loved about Farscape is its willingness to take risks, to do things differently than other shows, and differently than it's done things in the past. So far, it's had a lot more hits than misses, and the pleasure I've gained from the hits more than makes up for the disappointment I've felt in the misses.

As for whether the season as a whole will wind up as a hit or a miss, well, I for one am not going to be ready to make that determination for certain until the final credits roll on episode 4.22. Yes, there have been a lot of things, large and small, that have been strange or confusing or just a little "off" this season. I have the distinct feeling that at least 99% of them have been deliberate, and if we viewers find them disturbing or annoying, it's only because we don't yet understand them. I've repeatedly compared season 4 to a jigsaw puzzle, and, to continue that analogy, we're still missing too many pieces to know quite what the full picture is yet. Any moment now, I'm expecting to get handed the few crucial pieces that will finally make the overall pattern clear, and when that happens, I'm willing to bet that most of the pieces that at the moment just don't seem to fit will suddenly fall nicely into place and leave us wondering why we couldn't see the entire time exactly where it was they ought to go. I'm also expecting that fourth season Farscape, like certain twist-ending movies I could name, is going to be one of those works that is a totally different experience, a totally different story, the second time you watch it than it is the first time. OK, sure, it's possible that even if that's what Kemper and his writing staff are aiming at, they're going to fall flat on their faces in the final stretch and fail to pull it off. But, personally, I have faith in them. Their track record's been damned good so far. They've pulled off something very much like it on a much smaller scale already, back in season two.

So, has Farscape jumped the shark this season? Tell ya what, come back at the end of March and ask me again. It's within the realm of possibility that I might have changed my mind. But if I were to make a prediction, I'd say the answer you're gonna get is a resounding "Hell, no!"