A couple of years ago, before Hulu got fully up and running (watch your favorite TV shows without that bulky set in the corner), I ordered disks of shows to watch on a little portable DVD player. In this way I was able to watch the programs repeatedly -- looking at camera angles, pondering what the director had in mind, letting the dialogue drift in and out of my consciousness. I like anything that is well written, well crafted, and well directed. Genre does not interest me as much as form and content: a good horror movie is a well-crafted medium for its message, as is a good documentary or good romantic comedy. Poor exposition, weak character development, or distractingly bad editing will make me stop watching any vehicle for entertainment, because I like to be entertained, not distracted; informed, rather than left with questions; and thoroughly scared out of my wits, rather than laughing at poor directing or editing. I was in the mood for sci fi, though.

One of the shows I watched endlessly was the Australian-made Farscape, a Jim Henson creation with an American lead and Australian cast. Science fiction was appealing to me because it was as far away from the world around me as I could get (I was mostly housebound at the time). Farscape was as far away in fiction as I could get, too, as it relayed the adventures of a young astronaut who accidentally opens a wormhole and disappears into another galaxy.

Oops.

John Crichton (yes, a nod to the author of the same last name) is deliberately not a typical hero as the series begins. As he says of himself, he is not "Kirk, Spock, Luke, Buck, Flash or Arthur frelling Dent." He is first and foremost a scientist, we are to believe, although actor Ben Browder's "good ole boy" routine belies that at times. Crichton is awed by his new surroundings, and rubbernecks. His craft is immediately taken aboard a huge alien vessel. This is where we have to turn the telescope around, and edit that last sentence -- it isn't the other vessel that's alien, now, it's Crichton. He is naturally a little surprised. He is guided towards the control room, where a bunch of strange creatures are all babbling incomprehensibly. Note to self: folks in other galaxies don't speak English. Hmmm.

Before this can become too much of a problem for Crichton and the success of the series, a DRD (Diagnostic Repair Drone, but with amusing similarites to Tom Baker's K9 in Dr. Who) injects him with the equivalent of Ford Prefect's Babel Fish (universal translating microbes. Hey, it's sci fi), and the crew quickly realizes he's as useless as he looks. Rockne O'Bannon, the show's creator, did something quite Shakespearean with the series: he posed the question "what if a human being was transported to another galaxy -- how the heck would he survive?" -- and then answers it. (I'm not suggesting Hamlet is an alien, no; the question there is "what would a real person do if he found himself in an Italianate Revenge Tragedy?" -- although now that I think about it, some of the costumes are similar.) Therefore, when trying to turn the tables on a later set of captors, Crichton finds himself wrestling a guard's gun off him and telling the men to stand down before he fills them full of ". . . little. . yellow points of light."

Since everything in this galaxy is new to him, we are privy to facts as he learns them himself, and so are spared the exigencies of characters having to describe the technical maneuvers they execute instead of just doing them. And so it was with Dorothy Gale's trip to Oz, or Gulliver's voyages around the globe. Nothing kills a mood like bad exposition. But the series is ultimately a wonderfully crafted love story, with such great Jim Henson creatures as part of the alien crew that you forget they are puppets. Just as Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer plays on the fears and foibles of high school, Farscape is a clever pop culture review -- references to everything from Caddy Shack to Bill Gates to E. T. abound and are genuinely funny. The show plays during kids' hours on British TV, but is worth a look-in if you are into American pop culture.