Riveting, frightening, bizarre and utterly unique in true Farscape style!

Such was the message I sent directly to my brother-in-law, a fellow fan of Farscape, after I saw Farscape: Peacekeeper War for the first time.  Creators Rockne S. O’bannon, David Kemper, Brian Henson and Robert Halmi Jr. had a lot of strings to tie up in the two-part television movie after SciFi Channel dropped the Australian-made television series in 2003.

And just what was SciFi Channel’s excuse for dropping this groundbreaking show?

'Bonnie added that the reason it has decided to continue with Stargate: SG1, but not Farscape is simply due to ratings and the style of the show:

"Even though Stargate is sci-fi, it's very broad sci-fi. It's not serialised. Every episode, you can come to it whether you've watched the one before. They are self-contained... Farscape, on the other hand, got very, very serialised. It got very 'in' ... They had brilliant and sophisticated writing, but it was so narrow that it basically was an invitation to not tune in if you weren't totally familiar with the show."’

(Farscape Cancellation Facts, BBC Cult Television)

In the final episode of season four, main character John Crichton and side-kick/lover Aeryn Sun were ‘crystallised’ moments after he proposed marriage.  All this after a dramatic confrontation with Scarran and Peacekeeper hierarchies in an effort to gain freedom and prevent the power-hungry war-leaders from using John and his worm-hole knowledge to wreak destruction on each other and the universe.

Peace was the theme in Farscape: Peacekeeper War, after four seasons of conflict and turmoil.  Surprisingly well tied-in with earlier episodes, the tele-movie revealed a surviving race of Eidolons living in seclusion.  This advanced race had a unique, telepathic ability to inspire peace and reason during negotiations.  John, Aeryn and the ‘escaped-prisoners’ from Moya were caught up in a battle not their own, once again.  During the Peacekeeper War, they did everything in their power to restore knowledge to the Eidolon survivors so they would then be able to inspire peace between the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers.

‘Talking to SFX magazine, the director and executive producer of the Farscape mini-series, Brian Henson, says: "It's great, it's big, it's epic. I think it's going to be the biggest thing there has ever been."

"It was tough to figure out how to make a big event mini-series of Farscape when on every episode we were trying to make a movie a week," he adds, before revealing a little bit about the plot:

"It's basically the continuing love story of Crichton and Aeryn... set against a backdrop of a full, all-out, intergalactic wa[r] between the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers."

Henson also reveals that far from closing the Farscape book, the end of the mini-series creates a whole new set of possibilities for the franchise.’

(Epic Farscape, BBC Cult Television)

Despite doing everything to avoid it, John Crichton eventually accepted the knowledge from the ‘ancients’ of how to use wormholes for mass destruction.  (Spoilers follow).  It wasn’t until Crichton found that both his friends and his enemies were clamouring for the wormhole weapon to be used that he unleashed its power.  And in doing so, he showed everybody how wormhole weapons were not something to be used to gain peace.

Whether this was a dig at U.S. warfare (raining destruction on ‘a few’ to gain peace for ‘many’) remains a matter of personal opinion.  The resounding message in Peacekeeper War was not to take peace, prosperity, safety and loved ones for granted.  Although Ka D’argo died near the end, his name lived on in the battle-born child of John and Aeryn.  The babe was named D’argo Sun Crichton at the end of the movie and under a vista of stars and a purple and pink nebula, he was told, ‘This is your playground.’

Peacekeeper War is layered with meaning and, like almost every episode of Farscape, would need to be seen at least twice so as not to miss all the subtle storyline twists, character nuances and intertextual puns.  With a staggering number of action scenes, both melee and in space, Farscape: Peacekeeper War is an entertaining ride, even if you’re not into the shocking and strange actions of the majority of the characters!    

A must-see for any fan or creator of sci-fi, I would give this tele-movie 9 out of 10 for sheer brawn and originality.