The main characters on Farscape are (as on B7) a group of escaped prisoners. They aren't trying to start an insurrection, for quite a while they are basically just running for their lives. Eventually they do end up in the middle of some big dealings between a couple of interstellar empires, though. The only defense that their ship has is the ability to do a sort of warp jump (in Farscape-speak it's called "starburst"), although once they do it the ship requires a nontrivial recovery time before it can do it again. They have *no* ship-to-ship weapons. At one point a major character coming onto the bridge just after they've met another ship asks: "Have we sent the 'Don't shoot. We're pathetic.' message yet?".
Yeah, they're pretty much always the underdogs.
Babylon 5 is a bit of a special case, even when compared to other shows with long term story arcs. B5 was designed as a "novel for television", in the very specific and finite sense. The entire 5 year story was outlined by the show's creator and primary writer before they ever started shooting the pilot. The titular space station was built (at a sort of "crossroads in neutral space" location) by the Earth Alliance to be a sort of galactic version of the United Nations. So the main characters are very definitely walking the halls of diplomatic power. However, "our heroes" (tm) (at least the humans among them) are among the few who are becoming aware that the EA President is consolidating power to become a totalitarian president-for-life. They end up seceding from the EA, taking away their source of planetary resources and putting them into a civil war with most of their own military. Then the galactic equivalent of World War III breaks out (or rather, grows out of what had been a regional war), with both of the primary powers leading the two sides being very obviously *much* more powerful (both technological advancement and military might) than the Earth (even if they were still united). So how much the term "underdog" applies to them depends a bit on when you're looking during the run of the show. However, even when it is hard to describe them as "underdogs" they have something of tendency to fail in some major objective; or to win only at the cost of very high losses. Suffice to say that, even early on when they are still Earth's official representatives and we haven't found out about much more powerful alien empires, they have some episode ending that you would *never* have seen on Star Trek.
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saudipete
12 years ago
Thanks for the run downs. Farscape sounds very much in the B7/Firefly philosophy.
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PillowRock
12 years ago
Yes, there are definitely some similarities there. The characters on Farscape definitely have very different goals and priorities a lot of the time (aside from the whole not-all-get-killed-or-captured thing). And they really don't trust each other at all (at least initially). There are times when they are very much pulling in different directions. Of course, after they go through enough life threatening situations together, they do start to trust each other and become friends. Sometimes I think that was why they periodically brought another ongoing character onto the ship: it was the only way to believably keep up a level of internal divisiveness and chaos.
Actually, that's one thing that it kinda had in common with Babylon 5. Because B5 had regular characters who were representing different (sometimes warring) planetary empires, regular characters who the audience likes (at least a little) are often working at odds with each other. That's one of the reasons why (back in the 1990s) you would hear B5 described as "the anti-Trek". There was also things like being willing to end an episode with the focal point child dieing instead of being saved by "our heroes"; or the choice to close an episode where large boarding parties are successfully fought off not with the feel-good victory stuff, but with a long slow pan of the dieing and wounded filling the hallways because they've long since overflowed all of the medical bays (a bit reminiscent of the rail station shot in Gone with the Wind).
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foxboro27
12 years ago
I think season 3 and 4 NEEDED Tarrant because he was the only somewhat heroic character left. Everyone else was only out for their own interests.
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Bel_Zedar
9 years ago
Besides, all the male characters looked like Dads. Teenage boys like their dashing heroes to NOT look like their dad. Have you ever see an action figure in tweed trousers, slippers and a cardigan?
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