The Trek BBS - View Single Post - Farscape or Babylon 5?

Lindley wrote:

stj wrote:

As for the arbitrariness of the plotting, the return to Earth, which should have been the climax of the Crichton's story, was suddenly turned into the discovery that they had to leave Earth. Way to piss on years of motivation folks.

Made sense to me. If he had returned in the first year or even the second, maybe he could have made it work. By year four, he's no longer a fish out of water on Moya; now, he's a fish out of water on Earth. I think the show would have been too pat if "returning to Earth" had been the conclusion. Furthermore, the avoidance of that ending is foreshadowed all through season 3 with the assertion that "Earth is unprepared!" in the opening credits.

The amazing fact that Skarran intelligence depended upon a flower that didn't grow on their home planet asks how they ever got out into space.

There's some fairly interesting backstory on that I read somewhere. It's not in the show itself though. As I recall it ties in how Jewel's people and Peacekeepers are related to Humans.

Then we discover that the flower does grown naturally...on Earth. Uh huh.

Does it? We don't really know. John made an offhand joke about it growing in his grandma's garden. Don't know if that's true or just John's sense of wimsy, but it caused a lot of trouble....

The foreshadowing is that Crichton should prepare Earth, which he doesn't. Basically he just leaves. In principle you could make the case that the series could have more than one climax, that the climax of Crichton's return to Earth wouldn't end the series. But it still should have been a climax. In terms of articulating some of the themes the writers wanted the show to be about, that episode was one of the most important they ever did. And in terms of being a climax, to a massive part of Crichton's arc, it should have been, well, you know, climactic. But nobody else likes the episode. It's anticlimactic.