Review
There’s a type of show known as the "format breaker" - where the normal rules of a series are set aside. Used well, they perk up a show, giving it the chance to do something different, or put its characters in a new situation.
The trouble is, to do this you have to have a format in the first place, and Farscape is becoming dangerously close to losing sight of its central premise entirely.
Popping John, Alice-like, down the wormhole, Unrealized Reality lets us peek at various ways things could be very different, culminating in a mad mixed-up jumble with the regulars all swapping costumes, characters and even facial features. Between these strange glimpses, an effects-deficient Ancient-type gabbles wormhole theory at John on an iceberg.
This wormhole knowledge is clearly very important to the rest of the series, but did it really need a whole episode to get across? Everything else here is filler, and it’s filler we’ve seen before. Brilliant though it is to get a peek at these realities, they’re only unrealized ones, and can’t grab our attention the way ‘real’ events affecting Moya’s crew do.
It’s fun seeing the cast play against type, but we’ve just had too much of it lately. Farscape’s writers need to have more confidence in the brilliant characters they created in the first place.
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