Brain Assassin

Unbe­liev­able! I almost missed this one, can you imag­ine? Any­way, first things first. I already wrote about FarScape a while back. The execs from SciFi canned the show and left the fans hang­ing in the air with a major cliffhanger. Even though it had good rat­ings. And now they’re gonna bring it back? At least sort of, we’re talk­ing webisodes here. Well, that’s a mys­tery to me but who am I to judge. Any FarScape is way bet­ter than no FarScape. And that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, let’s take a closer look. Over at Gateworld.net I found the first piece of infor­ma­tion which sent me into the depths of the inter­net, look­ing for more infor­ma­tion I could get my hands on. So, SciFi announced that there will be 10 webisodes of FarScape, set to be released on SCIFI.com. At Comic Con 07 Brian Hen­son him­self told the audi­ence that there will be “at least 10 webisodes of Next Gen­er­a­tion Farscape”. In addi­tion, they were talk­ing spin-​​offs or movies but there has only been some devel­op­ment as far as the webisodes are con­cerned. Finally, SciFi has whipped up a site where you can “be first to get news about the web series”.

Sounds good? Well, take it with a grain of salt: Each episode is antic­i­pated to run for 3 to 6 min­utes. “The char­ac­ters, crea­tures, pas­sions, con­flicts and barely con­tained lunacy of the ‘Farscape’ uni­verse have never stopped. We just haven’t had a win­dow into that uni­verse lately to see what’s cur­rently hap­pen­ing there. Well now we do. And it ain’t calm, and it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t like any­thing any­one is going to expect. But it is totally ‘Farscape,’” promised O’Bannon, exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Accord­ing to his words, the webisodes should stay true to the orig­i­nal and be dif­fer­ent on the same time!

I don’t know what to think. The peo­ple in the SciFi forums are quite excited about all this. Even though I feel quite enthu­si­as­tic about the “come­back” it sounds a lit­tle shal­low to me. And who knows what they mean when they talk about it not being “like any­thing any­one is going to expect”? To my mind, SciFi is try­ing to see where the new trend of webisodes is going. Change isn’t going to slow down and you has to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, dig­i­tal con­tent, and, of course, new mar­ket­ing vehi­cles. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.