Entertainment
This 4-Part Sci-Fi Series Officially Changed the Winning Formula for Steamy TV Romance
Farscape: the definition of “if you know, you know.” If you’re an outlier in this equation, allow us some evangelizing. Within cult classic circles, Farscape is the Sci-Fi Channel series guaranteed to make you weep over farting, lustful alien puppets designed by the incomparable Jim Henson Company. In many ways, a summation like “an American guy gets stuck in an Australian BDSM fever dream” isn’t wrong. In other ways, Farscape‘s reputation as the defining “found family in space,” proto-Guardians of the Galaxy story is untouchable and nigh-impossible to replicate.
Part and parcel of this content feast is the series’ most irrefutable fact: Farscape is a romance. Normally, love stories aren’t a selling point for traditional science fiction. You have your Mulder and Scully, your Sheridan and Delenn, even your Aral and Cordelia if you include books. But love stories are one plot among many, a complementary feature emerging from a series’ character pool that sometimes enhances the whole.
Farscape doesn’t just brandish its weeping, swooning, whack-a-doodle heart on its sleeve; it bellows it into a space megaphone. Creator Rockne S. O’Bannon and co-producer Brian Henson crafted this oddball gem as a sweeping love story set against the backdrop of an equally sweeping space opera. John Crichton (Ben Browder) and Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) are a destined love written by the stars. More importantly, because Farscape also defined itself through enviably exemplary script work, John and Aeryn resonate as palpably human.
Their connection is as delicate as a whispered secret and as wrenching as an open wound. These two are everyone’s favorite love story across decades of science fiction — yes, everyone’s, because I said so. And if Farscape‘s team hadn’t broken the television industry’s rules about romance, then this revered couple — the concept baked irreparably into Farscape‘s DNA — might never have unfolded.
How Was ‘Farscape’s Romance Different?
When Farscape premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel in 1999, television romances were defined by the “will they won’t they.” A dynamic as timeworn as, say, Little Women‘s Jo and Laurie, series like Moonlighting, Cheers, The X-Files, Friends, and Gilmore Girls notoriously toyed with fans’ hearts by dangling potential love stories and denying them resolution season after season. By those standards, Farscape hits the ground running and never stops long enough to beat around the bush (or asteroid belt). John Crichton, a human astronaut transported to another galaxy through a wormhole and stuck with a group of murderous criminal misfits, might be outrunning villains who want to master wormhole technology. Still, John Crichton and Aeryn Sun simply are the A-plot of Farscape. The two kiss halfway through Season 1 and sleep together three episodes later.
And they keep sleeping together into Season 2! They catch “I’ve never felt this before” feelings and tentatively reckon with their significance! Yet John and Aeryn are far from a rushed, empty attempt to increase ratings via sex (in space, no one wears anything but leather). The writers’ room uses the seasonal episode counts to their advantage. They time emotional arcs beat for beat, prioritizing the characters’ separate and shared growth and letting situations organically emerge from that conflagration. John and Aeryn’s romance consumes them without ever subsuming.
If Farscape had adhered to television practices contemporaneous with the 1990s, a romance executed to this caliber — a full series of this caliber, where people talk more than they shoot — wouldn’t exist. In May 2023, Shout! Factory TV held The Farscape Fandemonium Marathon. Reflecting on the series, Rockne S. O’Bannon and Brian Henson left no doubt about their intentions with John and Aeryn. Farscape intentionally broke with established industry practice. “The television rules with a potential romance were, don’t ever let them get together,” Henson explained. “But Rockne, you knew really early, this was going to be a huge romance. We are not going to keep them apart.” O’Bannon elaborated: “I wanted it to be a classic, classic romance. […] I wanted to keep them at odds as long as possible […], but it was all kind of this planned thing to make sure that we made it as unlike other shows as possible, the way other shows would follow tropes [and never let them get together].”
If Farscape hadn’t crossed out the rules with permanent marker then shredded the rule book and ejected the scraps into space’s cold vacuum, the most exquisitely poignant and agonizingly raw romance known to science fiction probably wouldn’t deserve those adjectives. What a disappointing world that would be.
What Made John and Aeryn a Compelling Romance on ‘Farscape’?
By bucking the confines of the will-they-won’t-they, Farscape lets John and Aeryn’s galaxy-spanning love story exist. Sometimes their love thrives, sometimes it withers, but it’s always lived in, always breathing, and always reactive to the wider narrative and proactive in its evolution. Watching John and Aeryn is compelling not just because of the superior writing and the actors’ chemistry (an embarrassment of riches, there), but because Farscape makes good on its scope — microcosm and macro. At first, these grown 30-somethings dance around each other like smitten, awkward teens. It’s simultaneously endearing and tragic given the abusive brainwashing the Peacekeepers subjected Aeryn to. For a soldier conditioned to never feel, being vulnerable with John breaks every rule. What’s more, Aeryn’s been hurt before. A hulking space monstrosity? No big deal. Hand the lady a gun. True emotional vulnerability is a risk from which Aeryn flees time and time again. She’s a desperately frightened rabbit in a trap, trembling inside her protective Peacekeeper shell.
Yet to paraphrase the perennially applicable Jane Eyre, there’s a string binding John and Aeryn together. It pulls them taut, an irresistible gravitational pull. Their primary emotional conflict and division stem from finding the courage to love and be loved in a ruthless galaxy where pain, loss, and tragedy lurk predatorily around every corner. Who couldn’t root for that? Just the way the camera frames their kisses or tracks John’s yearning blue eyes is worthy of scholarly study. Their empathy’s aching tangibility warrants assuming the fetal position. John and Aeryn’s romance is a testimony to the lengths we’ll go to protect this fragile yet innately human thing called love. Farscape devastates you to a pulp and then offers catharsis.
A solid foundation compounded by genuine stakes and “no other show has the guts, I’m scarred for life” tragedies makes John and Aeryn’s romance oscillate like a tuning fork on repeat. Farscape makes the psychological stakes equivalent to the plot’s stakes — which are the height of space opera. Whether the crew survives, whether these two wild kids can make it work, matters as much as preventing the totalitarian villains from conquering the universe. Personal conflict balances with spectacle; they work together to escalate tension like a storytelling pas de deux. John and Aeryn survive plot twists that should be ludicrous but are earned by their sincerity. They don’t even break up (a tired trope) so much as grow. Sometimes, growing means unraveling your tangled knots before reuniting.
Their relationship evolves because the characters exist in constant metamorphosis. Science fiction can equal escapism, but isn’t a realistic relationship inside an outrageous situation the most pleasing outcome? Farscape tells the best story: one where every joint in the architecture informs the rest until it’s a symphony, with John and Aeryn’s romance as the leading motif. (Yes, I’ve mixed my metaphors. John Crichton would be proud.)
25 Years Later, ‘Farscape’s John and Aeryn Are Still Amazing
John and Aeryn even call gender stereotypes a rude name before punching the concept, because why not add egalitarian feminism and healthy masculinity to the victory lap? The radiant Aeryn Sun with her cutting features is the stoic, closed-off one. She’s the action woman who never leaves Moya without her guns. John Crichton eventually can aim for more than the broadside of a barn, but he’s a wise-cracking pop culture maven attuned to his emotions. He’s starstruck, reverent, and open, and unrepentantly cries at a hat drop. John and Aeryn balance one another by coincidence and understand each other by design. Shades of Peter Quill and Gamora exist here, but Quill couldn’t manage this level of male-wife.
As for the actors carrying 2000s science fiction on their backs, Ben Browder and Claudia Black are, in the words of Brian Henson, “magic.” Chemistry that one in a million can’t be manufactured. They’re attentive performers who match, regulate, and dynamically improve their scene partner. Both deliver a Masters curriculum on how to act your ass off. And even with scripted exchanges like “Do you love Aeryn Sun?” “Beyond hope,” Browder and Black convey that enormity without words. It’s a testament to the risks Farscape took and the rewards it reaped. Moya’s family of misfits, criminals, and morally bankrupt broken people defined the era. John and Aeryn defined the sci-fi genre. Next year marks the series’ 25th anniversary. No science fiction love story has surpassed the reformed Peacekeeper and her nerdy astronaut — and good luck trying.
Farscape is available to stream on Peacock in the U.S.
Farscape
- Release Date
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1999 – 2003-00-00
- Writers
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Rockne S. O’Bannon, David Kemper, Justin Monjo, Richard Manning
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