Farscape is a sci-fi series created by Rockne S. O'Bannon and was brought to the screen by the Jim Henson Company.

The concept began with scientist Commander John Robert Crichton, Jr. (Ben Browder) developing a spaceship that relies upon slingshot propulsion. On its maiden voyage things went wrong and he shot himself into an unknown galaxy and into the middle of a to-do between prisoners escaping from the starship Moya and human enforcers known as Peacekeepers. He ended up getting hooked up with some prisoners, Luxom warrior Ka D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), Delvian priestess Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hey) and Rygel XVI (John Eccleston), plus one of the Peacekeepers, Officer Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black). Also part of the cast here is Chiana (Gigi Edgley).

On top of this all you need is a slew of whizzo special effects for space scenes, animatronics and strange plots to keep the audience entertained. However, it didn't exactly float my boat. The overall rating for the boxset is an 18-certificate, but this only applies to episode 2.07: "Home on the Remains", while the others are PG- or 12-certs. Each episode is also uncut and contains the fade-to-blacks where the Americans usually place their advert breaks but which BBC2 would snip to save time, as they do with other US imports.

The summaries for each episode are :

2.06: Picture If You Will: A mysterious portrait foretells the deaths of each of our crew. Zhaan believes the portrait is the work of an old foe. The question is - has she the strength to defeat it?

2.07: Home On The Remains: When food runs low the crew heads for a mining camp to find meat for the starving Zhaan. The camp is run by an overlord with an agenda of his own, and an eye on Chiana.

2.08: Dream a Little Dream: Zhaan, Chiana and Rygel find themselves embroiled in a criminal conspiracy as they try to come to grips with the apparent deaths of Crichton, Aeryn and D'Argo...

2.09: Out Of Their Minds: An attack by ferocious bird-like aliens has the crew going out of their minds - or is that out of their bodies.

The show was filmed in standard 4:3 and looks superb. Nothing in the way of artifacts or print damage, the transition to DVD has been swift and painless. The average bitrate varies from episode to episode.

Also, while you have a great picture to look at, an unusual, but welcome, step has been taken to remaster the series in Dolby Digital 5.1. For sci-fi nonsense you can guess where its power will be unleashed, but dialogue-only scenes are clear as a bell too.

The extras consist of three Deleted Scenes, two from "Dream a Little Dream" and one from "Home on the Remains", there's a Season 2 Screensaver to show off on your PC and a Stills Gallery of 30 pictures featuring concept artwork, character and prop photography. The latter wouldn't play on my Creative Dxr2 PC DVD-ROM drive with its own software, but worked fine with PowerDVD 2.55. Four original Postcards are also included inside.

Sadly there are no subtitles on the discs and the number of chapters is severely lacking with just 4 per episode. The menus have a bit of sound with brief animation of the spaceship between them.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.