KSUN · 19.81 · The New Sun · essay · September 24, 2026

Kansas

Dorothy Gale, John Crichton, and the difference between getting home and being home.

A girl in Kansas gets caught in a storm, and her house comes down on a witch. An astronaut in Florida gets caught in a radiation wave, and his module comes down on a Peacekeeper pilot. Both of them land in the middle of somebody else's war, and both of them kill somebody by accident in the first few minutes. Both of the dead have a sibling with an army. The Wicked Witch of the West wants the girl for her sister. Captain Bialar Crais wants the astronaut for his brother Tauvo, and he spends a season hunting a man who never saw the ship he hit. The girl is Dorothy Gale, from The Wizard of Oz. The astronaut is John Crichton, from Farscape, and this is about how closely the second story retells the first, right up to the ending, where they part.

That is where Farscape starts, in March of 1999, and the story it is retelling is sixty years older than the channel it aired on. The show was made in Sydney by the Jim Henson Company for the Sci-Fi Channel, and it ran four seasons and a miniseries. It gave John Crichton, an astronaut testing a theory about gravity, a wormhole instead of a tornado, and a living ship full of escaped prisoners instead of a yellow brick road. What it kept was the shape. A stranger falls into a place that runs on rules nobody explains, gathers three companions who are each missing something, and sets off to find the one person who is supposed to be able to send them home.

The three

The 1939 film gives Dorothy a Scarecrow who wants a brain, a Tin Man who wants a heart, and a Lion who wants courage. Farscape gives Crichton a plant, a warrior, and a deposed king, and the fit is closer than it has any right to be.

Zhaan is the Scarecrow. She is a Delvian, a species that is plant rather than animal, and she is the wisest person on the ship. The Scarecrow is stuffed with straw and turns out to have the best mind in Oz. Zhaan is a priestess who is also a murderer, imprisoned for killing her own lover, and the thing she is looking for is the thing she already has, a way to hold both of those facts at once.

D'Argo is the Tin Man. He carries a blade the way the Tin Man carries an axe, and he was hollowed out before the story began. His wife was murdered, her brother did it, and D'Argo went to prison for it. What he wants is his son back and his name cleared. What he needs is to stop rusting in place. The Luxan hyper-rage, the thing that makes him dangerous to his friends, is the tin body that has grown over the man.

Rygel is the Cowardly Lion, and this one is not subtle. Rygel XVI was Dominar of Hyneria until his cousin took the throne, and he spent a hundred and thirty cycles in a Peacekeeper cell. He is greedy, he is a coward, and when the moment comes he is brave in a way that surprises him. The Lion's big number in the film is about what he would do if he were king of the forest. Rygel was king. He wants it back, and the show lets him be ridiculous about it for four years without once making him small.

Crichton even has a Toto. Moya's DRDs are the small yellow drones that keep the ship alive, and in the fourth season he adopts one, paints it red, white, and blue, and names it 1812. It follows him around. It plays the overture.

The wizard

Dorothy walks to the Emerald City because the Wizard is the one who can get her home. When she arrives he is a man from Omaha behind a curtain, and the answer was on her feet the whole time.

Crichton's Wizard shows up in the first season. In "A Human Reaction," he goes through a wormhole and comes out over Earth, and it is his Earth, his father, his coastline, until it is not. The Ancients had built the whole planet out of his memories, to see what humanity would do with a visitor, and humanity failed the test. Before they let him go they put the knowledge of wormholes in his head, buried where he could not reach it. So the way home was in Crichton from the sixteenth episode on, the way the slippers were on Dorothy, and he spent three more seasons finding out.

The film's Oz is built out of Kansas. The farmhands become the companions, the traveling showman becomes the Wizard, and Miss Gulch on her bicycle becomes the Witch on her broom. Farscape does the same thing in reverse. Its false Earth is built out of Crichton, and later, when Scorpius plants a neural chip to dig the wormhole knowledge out of him, Crichton gets a man behind his own curtain, a copy of Scorpius who lives in his head and calls himself Harvey. The show is about a man learning to run his own mind while somebody else is in there pulling levers.

Rockne O'Bannon, who created the show, has said his mother played a Munchkin in the 1939 film. An early draft of the pilot opened on Earth with a set of scientists who were the home-world doubles of D'Argo and Zhaan, the way Dorothy's farmhands double the Scarecrow and the Lion. That got cut for the cast count. In a 2017 interview he put it plainly: "Lots of The Wizard of Oz in this and that got taken out." Not all of it. In the fourth season Crichton compares himself to Dorothy Gale out loud, and the next episode is titled "Kansas." It is set in Florida, on Halloween, in 1985, with the alien crew walking around his hometown in plain sight because everyone assumes they are in costume. There is a television on in one scene showing Sesame Street, and for a second Kermit the Frog is looking back at his own studio.

The shelf that trusts the reader

The reason the show belongs on this station is the way it handled all of that. Farscape never explained itself. Nobody tells you what a microt is or how long an arn lasts. The Luxans have a word for what happens to D'Argo when he loses control and the show uses it without a footnote. The ship is alive and has a Pilot who is bonded to her, and the mechanics of that arrive one scene at a time over four years. The 1939 film trusts a child to follow a girl into a country with its own weather, its own money, and its own politics, and never once stops to draw the map. Farscape extended the same trust to adults, on a cable channel, in 1999, while Star Trek was still explaining the warp core.

Home

The endings are where the two stories part. Dorothy wakes up in her own bed and tells everyone that she will never leave home again, and the film believes her. In the book, which is older and stranger, Oz is a real place, and Dorothy goes back to it in the sequels. Farscape takes the book's side. In "Terra Firma," a season after "Kansas," Moya's crew reaches the present-day Earth for real. Crichton gets his father, his country, a press conference, and a government that wants his ship. He stays a while. Then he leaves, on purpose, with Aeryn Sun.

Aeryn is the part of Farscape that Oz has no room for. She is a Peacekeeper, a soldier of the people who are hunting them, and her own commander declared her contaminated by too much contact with a human. Dorothy travels with three friends and a dog and goes home alone. Crichton travels with the same three and a drone and finds that home has become a person who was born on the wrong side of the wormhole. The slippers get Dorothy back to Kansas. The wormhole knowledge gets Crichton back to Earth, and once he is standing on it he understands that getting there and being there are different things, and that the second one had already happened, somewhere else, while he was looking for the first.