Rockne S. O'Bannon

A frelling delight! Peak Farscape, and after all these years, like a reunion with old friends, especially the alternate timeline and flashback stories where D'Argo and Zhaan are still alive.

When the Sci Fi Channel canceled Farscape, I almost swore off science fiction television. The unique show full of puppets, bodily functions, and sex offered intelligent scripts combined with good acting and quality special effects. O'Bannon returns to the universe he created with Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, a well-crafted direct sequel to the original series. Picking up soon after the conclusion of Peacekeeper Wars, the surviving crew helps Rigel regain his throne. show more As expected, things don't go as planned when old enemies show up. O'Bannon expertly explores John's and Aeryn's struggles with parenthood and Chyna's grief over the death of D'Argo. At times sensational, artist Tommy Patterson does an adequate job capturing the visual look of the series. The book falters by creating too many dangling plotlines. I assume these will be covered in future volumes, but here they are just distracting. While not as good as the source material, Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning offers fans the next best thing to new episodes of the original show. show less

Solid fun for fans of the TV series. This picks up right during the final scene from the Peacekeeper Wars, and shows us the start of Crichton and Aeryn's lives as parents, and how they cope with that while being dragged, unsurprisingly, into more dangerous messes. Story-wise, this doesn't quite measure up to the series at its best (although it's very good), but the characters ring true, and the writing is spot on. It's great that we can get more of this story than the SciFi channel let us have.

I got a copy of this from BEA years ago. I was a huge fan of the Farscape Sci-Fi series when it was on and was curious to see what this Scorpius graphic novel spin-off would bring. I finally sat down and read through it, it was a quick read and honestly a bit disappointing.

The graphic novel starts with Scorpius abandoned on an ice world. We get some flashbacks to his past, that were a bit confusing because they aren’t marked as such. Then suddenly a huge armada of aliens land on his show more abandoned planet (why we will never know) and Scorpius manages to worm his way onto their ship and eventually take command of it.

This whole graphic novel is just okay. The illustration is okay but a bit unfinished looking. It is in full color which I like, but the color is blocky and unfinished looking.

The story is a bit ludicrous. An alien armada just happens to stop at the extremely remote planet Scorpius is stranded on. And of course the aliens are stupid enough to go with whatever Scorpius says and let him take control of the ship. It had me rolling my eyes and just seemed very contrived.

The only good thing about this graphic novel is that you do get to see some about Scorpius’s past; however it’s not very clear that you are reading about his past until pretty far into the graphic novel. A nice little notation of something like “many years ago on planet wherever” would have helped clear up this confusion immensely.

Overall a bit disappointing. It was good to look into Scorpius’s past but this graphic novel is plagued by poor illustration and a contrived (almost silly) plot. Add to the that confusing jumps in time and it really wasn’t entertaining or fun to read. I guess I’ll just have to rewatch all the Sci-Fi seasons of Farscape to get my Scorpius fix in the future. show less