Frell me, the new Farscape anniversary box set looks cool. 90+ minutes of deleted scenes, 29 episode commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes aplenty — and of course, Farscape Undressed, hosted by Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Rygel and Pilot.

Brian Henson lost no time in telling us that the Fraggle Rock feature film and the Dark Crystal sequel, The Power Of The Dark Crystal, were both slated to be released in 2011. He is a busy guy these days, splitting his time between working these two films and the new Farscape projects.

Henson and co. also confirmed that not only was the comic series coming out (which was announced at NYCC this year) but several webisodes were in the works. Henson said that while they had tossed around the idea of a spin-off, a film, or even an animated series, webisodes just seemed to be the perfect fit. He says:

we're just more interested in continuing the established story than in deviating into a spin-off. These short, non-linear webisodes will be the launching pad for for the next major chapter of Farscape. It's about family; the continuing story of of Aeryn, Crichton, and their son.

Creator and director Rockne S. O'Bannon reveals that

the webisodes actually come, chronologically, before the comics. We stared work on the webisodes first, so we could figure out where they fit on the Farscape timeline. And THATS where the comics start.

Stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black shared their favorite muppets moments and talked about the frelling awesomeness of working with Brian Henson. "I just wanted to work with the frog." Browder confesses. Henson comends the actors for taking a huge leap of faith in working with the creatures.

All we had when they joined the cast were sketches, no muppets. Working with the creatures is challange...you have to treat them with respect, they have to be real to you. Although, in all fairness I have to admit my favorite moments in Farscape are when Claudia smacks Rygel upside the head."

Black agrees the experience was satisfying.

It was great to finally get my hands on Rygel! but really, I think it truly speaks to the talent of the creators that they were able to create these tender,emotional scenes with nothing more than rubber and latex.

There was one final surprise; A representative from The Guinness Book Of World Records presented the series creators with an award for "Most Visual Effects In A Television Series."

It's difficult to separate an actor from her character, especially when the acting is of high caliber. Of course, actors deserve to have private lives just like all other creative professionals, and if some of them don't read the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year (like Dominic Monaghan), well, that's just who they are. But it's a special gift from actor to fandom when the people who play beloved heroes turn out to be more than a little like the heroes themselves. They might not fight caped evil in their daily lives, but these eight actors possess that crucial bit of understanding that keeps them from phoning in their roles — and convinces their admirers that they're worth every jaw-drop and swoon.

Kristen Bell
After three years as teenaged noir super-sleuth Veronica Mars, Kristen Bell had to move on to something different — and she chose Heroes. Having watched the show since day one, Bell told the minds behind the show that she was a huge fan; the rest, as you know, is history. She's living proof that part of being a great actress is having a deep personal investment in the story you're being paid to tell. Audiences appreciate the hell out of that. And in a fantastic interview with the A.V. Club, Bell further showed her respect for her fans:

The bottom line is, everyone's a loser in their own right. Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes. You want to dress up like a Star Wars character and go to Comic-Con? Do it, if that's what makes you happy. People might look at you as super-weird, but if that's your obsession, go for it.

Damn straight, Kristen! And I expect to see you in our next cosplay round-up.

Wil Wheaton
The man you know as Wesley Crusher just might be the poster boy for actors-in-fandom. Whether or not you like his Star Trek character, you have to admit that his subsequent work as a blogger has made the lives of many geeks, nerds, and fans very happy. He's written extensively and thoughtfully on his experiences in the world of Star Trek and in real life, producing three books: Dancing Barefoot, Just a Geek, and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. He currently blogs at Wil Wheaton dot Net in Exile.

David Tennant
Nobody had to explain Gallifreyan customs to David Tennant when he took the role of the Tenth Doctor on BBC's Doctor Who. He'd already been watching the program for years. In fact, he is a self-described "Doctor Who junkie" and once cherished a Tom Baker action figure. Now an action figure himself, Tennant took us through the production history of the show in a memorable episode of Doctor Who Confidential entitled "Do You Remember the First Time?" — and by the way, it turns out that pretty much everyone on the team these days was a childhood fan.

Felicia Day
You may know her as Dr. Horrible's lost love Penny or a Potential Slayer from Sunnydale, but it turns out that Felicia Day's geekiest — and awesomest — work yet is the creation of the online web series The Guild. Her tribute to gamers is adorable, hilarious, and subtitled in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, and German. Yeah, she's one of us.

Nathan Fillion
One of the hallmarks of devoted sci-fi fandom is allowing a fantastic story to become your reality. So Nathan Fillion, who played Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly, endeared himself to me forever when he started making posts to internet fan forums and signing them "The Cap'n." The Serenity star is my kind of man: He devoured comics as a child, holds frequent Halo tournaments as an adult, and has this to say about his experience as the leading man of a sci-fi western (from Firefly: The Official Companion):

I put on my costume in my trailer and took one last look in the mirror. They called me to the set and I remember coming right from my trailer to inside the door of the set. When you walked into the studio, the ship was just to your left with the big open cargo bay door looking at ya. I remember walking up the cargo bay door for the first time in costume. I believe it was David Boyd, our director of photography, who turned and saw me walking up and turned back around to the crew and said, "Captain on deck." Some people clapped and it was kind of neat. It was a reception I will remember always.

David Duchovny
Nothing says commitment like writing two episodes of the show you star in, directing three others, and contributing to the story of five more. He may have left The X-Files a bit too early for some of our tastes, but Duchovny and creator Chris Carter were very much in cahoots as far as this celebration of unexplained phenomena is concerned — and that demands some respect. As Duchovny told the Los Angeles Times, it's an honor to be part of sci-fi culture:

The X-Files was said to be the first Internet show. We had chat rooms and fan sites and all that. Look, I'm usually five or six years behind whatever is hip. So it was around 2000 that I started doing e-mail and finally started understanding what all that was about. ... My initial response — and I still hold this to be true — is that it takes the place of some of the functions of a church in a small town: A place where people come together, ostensibly to worship something. But really what's happening is you’re forming a community. It's less about what you're worshiping and more about, "We have these interests in common." Someone has a sick aunt and suddenly it's about that, raising money to help her or sharing resources to make her life easier. That's what it was about with The X-Files on the Internet.

Ben Browder
Ben Browder's starred in the much-loved Australian-American series Farscape and American-Canadian series Stargate SG-1. Other actors in his position might bitch about being pegged as a sci-fi actor, but not Browder; he was heavily invested in both series, and seemed to have as much fun making them as people did watching them. He snagged a story credit for SG-1 and wrote two episodes of Farscape. As you can tell from the panel recording below, Browder learned his stuff while doing it: he says, "when people tell you that some long arc show which is five years in making is planned in every detail from the beginning, they are full of it!"

Simon Pegg
Simon Pegg will be Scotty in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, and is one of the creators and stars of the tongue-in-cheek sitcom Spaced — he plays a sci-fi enthusiast and aspiring comic book writer. He certainly brings a lot of talent to both sides of the screen, and when he guest-starred in Doctor Who, Pegg told the BBC:

Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood ... I'd got into Doctor Who just before Jon Pertwee regenerated into Tom Baker, and as a kid I never remember the special effects being as primitive as they were. It scared the hell out of me but I loved it. I particularly recall monsters like the Sontarans, who had very strange heads; the giant insects in "The Ark in Space" and in one episode, Julian Glover tearing his face off to become this one-eyed creature.

He's speaking, of course, of alien menace Scaroth, who manipulated human history for his own ends in the serial "City of Death." If that brilliantly campy special effect impressed Pegg, he had to have been totally immersed in the story, and that is true sci-fi cred any day.

Salutes all around for these glorious nerdy thespians! Now — who'd I miss?

Thanks to tipsters Heather, Sarah, Ellen, and Lily!

Image from Adventures in Time and Space.

We asked Browder if he'd ever appear on Stargate Atlantis, and he hauled producer Brad Wright over to help answer the question. Wright wouldn't make any promises, but did say he hoped to feature Browder in another direct-to-DVD Stargate movie soon.

When we asked Browder how he feels embodying heroic archetypes like Farscape's Crichton and Stargate's Mitchell. He was super modest: "I let someone like Brad write it, and I just say the words. My job, in a lot of ways is the easy job... my job is just the fun part. I get to go out and do the boy stuff and do the fun stuff, I don't think I think about the heroic archetype. That's something the writers take care of, and the directors and the editors."

Browder had some practice being villainous when he was being mind-controlled by Scorpius in Farscape. Would he like to play an out-and-out villain sometime? Yes, he said. "I think it'd be a lot of fun. Now, wearing prosthetics on a full-time basis — that's not fun."

We asked Tapping about the difference between the gadget heavy Stargate and the more low-tech setting on Sanctuary, and she said Sanctuary is much more "steampunk." Actually, the making of Sanctuary is much more high-tech, because it's entirely shot in greenscreen. But there's less technobabble and fewer gadgets, because her character is 157 years old, and she borrows from all different eras. She said it's a bit weird to be shooting in greenscreen all the time, and she gets a "green chromakey headache." But the good news is that the show's art department shows the actors a really good representation of what the scenes will look like when they're done, so they know what they're reacting to.

In Sanctuary, Tapping plays Dr. Helen Magnus, who protects the "abnormals" (the mutants that society has deemed deviations, but who may actually be the next step in human evolution.) So she's sort of like Professor X from the X-Men, except not bald, "and hopefully prettier," she said.

And she confirmed that she'll be in at least a couple more episodes of Stargate Atlantis this season, plus a third direct-to-DVD Stargate movie.

Coolness of the old Farscape:

What made the original Farscape interesting was its vision of a human stranded among aliens. Unlike your typical ensemble space opera, humans were in the minority and we had a lot of chances to explore weird alien worlds. With Brian Hensen's production house behind its alien creatures, Farscape pretty much always had lovely concept design. We see this world through the eyes of John Crichton (Ben Browder), an astronaut accidentally sucked through a wormhole and deposited on the far side of the universe among warring alien factions. He takes refuge on a sentient ship called Moya, among escaped convicts.

How to Reboot:

A rebooted show could play up the criminal backgrounds of Moya's crew. Who can be trusted? Have alliances shifted? The tut-tutting little puppet Rygel once ruled 600 billion subjects of the Hynerian empire, but was sold out to the evil Peacekeepers by his cousin. Maybe we could give him a more ambiguous history — perhaps he was a cruel dictator, and we can see his cousin's side of the story. Meanwhile, we know the zen yoga lady Zhaan assassinated her lover because he helped the Peacekeepers take over her home planet. Let's make her more of a ninja assassin type: Let her use those powers of invisibility more, and do more explosives work. And let's make the anarchist thief Chiana into more of a Warren Ellis-style character who spouts political opinions between bursts of ass-kickery.

Cooness of the old Farscape:

One of the central issues in Farscape was the nature of Crichton's identity. Stranded among aliens, of course he begins to lose his humanness. More importantly, one of the big issues for Crichton throughout seasons two and three was whether he could control his own actions and thoughts after the evil Scorpius puts a chip in his brain. We've got shades of Battlestar here already, since Scorpius would often appear as a vision in his head. Because the old Farscape was often a little goofy, Crichton nicknames his head Scorpius "Harvey" (after the invisible bunny in the movie Harvey).

How to reboot:

Get rid of the silliness with this plot and make it dark as pitch, with some real gothic horror elements. Crichton is losing his mind and being enslaved by a chip that can't be removed. Also, let's give Scorpius a makeover — no more campy leatherboy zombie guy. Instead of making his wormhole technology into his "take over the universe" technology, make the killer app his mind-control chips. He should be a smooth, scary politician who wants to gain power by "changing people's minds" — literally. That way the Peacekeepers really can keep people peaceful, by chipping them all. The crew of Moya is fighting not just to free Crichton's mind, but to keep everyone's minds free.

Coolness of the old Farscape:

Browder was perfect as Crichton, who is both a himbo and a smartass. He was always getting mixed up in sexytime with various aliens, but not in a Captain Kirk way — Crichton is led astray by sex, and gets his heart broken. When he does swagger, it's always with a bit of irony. As his shipmate and love interest Aeryn Sun, Claudia Black was the perfect pre-Sarah Connor Chronicles beautiful, hard-bitten hero. She's feminine, smart, and tough — and she would never wear high heels to a fight.

How to Reboot:

Keep Browder and Black together, but give them new roles and a tragic past that's made them bitter. Perhaps their son was killed by the Peacekeepers and they adopted Moya in his place. Now the spaceship is their "child," and the two of them share duties as "pilot." So we have a new dynamic in place right away, one that makes the ship even more of a character than in the original series. And we can bring in a new person to play the Crichton role, plus recreate the original characters while adding some new ones. Since two of the characters in the original series were anarchists, and all of them were rebels, the reboot needs to foreground this cosmo-political side of the series to make for a more sophisticated tale.

In Summary:

What the original Farscape had going for it was that it was story about how a team of outcasts overcome obstacles that are both political and psychological in order to defeat an oppressive police state. This left a lot of room for space battles, as well as character development. A new, darker show might touch a nerve by delving deeper into the violence caused by political factions and splinter groups. And by focusing on the brain chip technology, instead of the wormhole technology, we open up space for genuinely scary episodes with a texture of conspiracy (who is controlling who? are our minds our own?). Plus, we get a chance to reinvent the cool aliens and sentient spaceships of the old show, using better special effects technology. As long as the new show tweaks the old show's tone by replacing camp with bitter irony, and goofy sex with danger sex, I think we've got a potential hit on our hands.

And if that doesn't persuade you, how about a little gratuitous squee . . .