Ben Browder on the Most Difficult Thing About Making Farscape

It’s one thing to star in a hit science fiction series, but it’s another thing altogether to put on your creative thinking cap and actually write it. But even as actor Ben Browder held down the fort in front of the camera on Farscape (stream it here on Peacock!) as astronaut John Crichton, he also took his own turn in the writers’ room — a task that comes with a whole different set of sci-fi challenges.

Browder wrote not one but two Farscape episodes: Season 3, Episode 8, “Green Eyed Monster” and Season 4, Episode 7, “John Quixote.” Somewhere in between the two, he sat down for a chat with Sci-Fi Talk host Tony Tellado, and confessed that the SYFY show’s truly out-there story lore (where even the spacecraft themselves became their own sort of “characters”) posed some interesting puzzles that deepened his appreciation for the series as a whole.

Ben Browder on writing and starring in Farscape

Actors Claudia Black and Ben Browder perform in the television show "Farscape." (Photo Courtesy of Sci Fi Channel/Getty Images)

As longtime Farscape fans know, space vessels Moya and Talyn came with their own epochal provenance on the show. They weren’t just engineering projects designed by humans, but living, sentient mechanized space beings. As vessels from across the galaxy who lived and even reproduced (after all, Moya gave “birth” to Talyn!), each spacecraft appeared on the series complete with its own internal consciousness and emotions.

Figuring out how to convey a spaceship’s feeling and intent proved to be the toughest part of writing the “Green Eyed Monster” episode Browder crafted for Season 3, as he explained to Sc-Fi Talk.

“The most difficult character I had to write for was Talyn who doesn't talk,” he said. “[Talyn] doesn’t have a face and was actually pivotal to the episode. Actually that was the most difficult thing to write. I feel that writing for Talyn or Moya is the most difficult thing to write.”

Humans and anthropomorphic aliens, on the other hand, proved to be a breeze — especially characters like Farscape mainstay Aeryn Sun, Crichton’s ongoing extraterrestrial love interest played throughout the series by Claudia Black.

“I write stuff for Claudia and I can sort of guess what she might do with it,” Browder explained. “When I wrote for her, I expected that whatever I wrote for her she would make better, which she always does. And she did. You could write the phone book for Claudia and she'd make it work, interesting and compelling.”

Through four seasons plus a series-ending coda (Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars), Farscape made for must-watch sci-fi no matter who was crafting its sweeping story from behind the scenes.

Catch the full series here on Peacock… and be sure to keep an eye out for Browder’s pair of writer-credited episodes!