Because we are dedicated to honest customer opinions Farscape: Complete Season 1-4 (Box Set) (DVD), we have also included Amazon's customer reviews for this item (of which 3 are displayed below). Amazon customers have given Farscape: Complete Season 1-4 (Box Set) an average rating of 4.0/5.
Top Amazon Review
That's a big box you've got there!. Very pleased with my full run of farscape, although the box is akwardly large the art work goes some way towards making up for it. Sadly there is no extra content, they are the same as the 2 dvd mini-box sets you can get. Also (as with the mini box sets) no subtitles, which i find a bit surprising. All in all my quibbles are minor and my love of the series is massive!
Customer Review 1
WHAT WAS LOST - PART TWO. (Part Two of a review that began on the Farscape Season 4 Box Set reviews page)
Ultimately, Farscape is a failure - an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless. It failed to fulfil its potential due to cancellation and an ill-thought out change of direction by the producers. The network was, with some justification, blamed for the show's early demise, but the producers must also share the blame. Their budgets were overly high, and must have been the catalyst for Farscape's eventual cancellation; Farscape become too fan-orientated just when word of mouth was finally pushing up the ratings; John Crichton, the main character and our POV character in this strange environment, was fundamentally altered from the middle of Season 2 onwards, making him difficult for new viewers to identify with; many episodes considered quintessentially Farscape were too difficult for first time viewers to get into; and as mentioned in Part 1, splitting the crew into two concurrent story-lines in Season 3, combined with the increasing serialisation of the show, further discouraged new viewers in staying tuned in.
With Season 4, the producers effectively pressed the reset button in an effort to make Farscape appeal to a wider audience - the show changed from that of a dysfunctional 'family' thrown together by circumstances to a show that concentrated on the two main leads, while the ensemble element and the plot driven elements prevalent in the first three seasons were largely diminished, and compelling character issues and plot possibilities were ignored in favour of soap opera type contrivances (the baby story-line with all the speculation on its parenthood was pure soap, a meaningless plot device tacked on in an attempt to get the ratings back up). Most of Season Four's stories were revamped at short notice: it's difficult, at best, to come up with new ideas for episodes on short notice and not have them be rubbish.
Season 4 also wasted Crichton's long-time foe, Scorpius, as an under-used and untrustworthy crew member - there is no satisfactory reason given why our heroes allowed their most implacable foe to stay on board instead of marooning him on a convenient planet (or throwing him out the airlock!), especially as it is explicitly stated that he was a threat to Aeryn's unborn child. And his presence only served to undermine Grayza, Scorpius' replacement as chief adversary, who is a mere shadow in comparison. And arguably his presence also dimished the rest of the cast, who get little to do and are dumbed down into stock characters.
There are other problems with Season 4: the lush production values of the first three seasons were compromised by penny pinching; gimmicks take the place of storytelling; excessive theatricality replaced well-thought-out plot lines; overdone SFX took the place of true visual flair; plot possibilities that were conspicuously introduced and then dropped while other stories are inferior retreads of much-superior material from the first three seasons; the last third of the season piled on arbitrary and/or irrelevant revelation after revelation to no good effect; it became narratively unreliable, and the writers were seeming to be count on fan speculations to pave over plot holes and to fill in the blanks for a narrative structure that's going nowhere but in circles.
The changes, instead of opening up Farscape to a wider audience, only served to alienate many of the existing audience and reduce it to a point where cancellation was inevitable. Fans have offered all sorts of excuses for the show's cancellation (like the network's new owners did not like or appreciate the show), but nothing quite so convincing as a simple "not enough people were watching". Sure, the new owners of the network may not have liked or understood Farscape, but it wouldn't have mattered if Farscape was a ratings success - but all they saw was an overly expensive show costing millions of dollars with low ratings. So they did what any other network would have done - cut their losses by cancelling.
Peacekeeper Wars, the mini-series that follows, tries to wrap up plot threads from the previous seasons to satisfy long term fans, but, as it was financed by a third party, it also had to work as an action-orientated mini-series understandable by first time viewers, so the production was compromised for their benefit. The most noticeable compromise was a further downgrading the already marginalised supporting characters, once an integral part of Farscape, into traditional and expendable stock characters and sidekicks, and all the sentimentality, gimmicks, and physical makeovers can not conceal that their story arcs have been crudely curtailed or abandoned in favour of those of Crichton, Aeryn, and Scorpius. With a running time of only 3 hours, there was no chance to rectify Season 4's shortcomings, and commits more faults in the process, eg, plot threads are concluded in a perfunctory and unsatisfactory manner or simply dropped (especially if only relevant to the supporting cast), and characters are changed or rewritten, even if it contradicts canon.
Frankly it would have been better if the producers had cut out Season 4's cliff-hanger (deliberately left in to galvanise the Save Farscape campaign) and finished Farscape there and then, or accepted the Network's offer of a shortened 13 episode season instead of manipulating the fans into an ultimately futile attempt to badger the network into buying a full season of a show that fewer and fewer people were watching, rather with a privately-financed and thematically compromised mini-series.
It's a sad end for Farscape - there was a lot of potential, but the series got side-tracked away from more interesting SF themes and was becoming more like a soap opera with SF trappings, relaying on formulaic plots and the appeal of its stars, when it could have been so much better. My recommendation is to stick to the first three seasons only, and ignore the final episode of Season 3, where the show Jumped the Shark. Everything else afterwards is unnecessary and superfluous.
Customer Review 2
WOW WOW WOW WOW - What a box set. This is the best box set I have ever purchased. Ok, its a bit pricey but still - WOW!!!
The acutal box is amazing - the art work is great and its design perfect. It contains 40 DVDs inclusing every single epsiode. A perfect addition to my DVD collection - makes my shelf look great.
