The war between the Scarrans and The Peacekeepers is the centerpiece of the miniseries Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. All images ™ & © Henson. © Hallmark.

It’s the rare occasion anymore in television for second chances. Nowadays, shows that don’t find a large enough audience are often unceremoniously yanked from the airwaves with blinding speed. Such a fate befell the cult sci-fi series, Farscape, at the end of its fourth season in 2003, when the show was abruptly cancelled, leaving a cliffhanger, outraged fans and a despondent cast and crew in limbo. Almost immediately, the fans rallied and made such a ruckus that the impossible was achieved — Farscape is now being resurrected from the television grave. Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars is a huge miniseries event airing Oct. 17 and 18 on Sci Fi, the cable network that originally booted it from the airwaves, that reunites the original cast and crew to finish the story the story of star-crossed lovers, John Crichton (Ben Browder) and Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) and the rag-tag crew of the Moya while, hopefully, leaving the door open for new stories in the future.

Directed and exec produced by Brian Henson, the miniseries takes the quirky, snarky space opera, which blends real-life actors with puppetry, to a new level. With a big budget and a mandate to not only appeal to existing fans, but gain new ones too, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars is taking full advantage of the opportunity, raising the bar on the already impressive production design and visual effects that have been a hallmark of the series.

VFXWorld spoke to returning Farscape veterans, producer Andrew Prowse and visual effects supervisor Benita Carey, who worked in tandem on the miniseries to ensure that Henson’s vision for the epic-scaled film was achieved through the creations of the animators and compositors on the project. For Prowse and Carey, the miniseries also offered them the opportunity to finally achieve the kind of closure they believed the series truly deserved. “The end of the series was a major cliffhanger,” Prowse says. “We weren’t prepared when the show was cancelled, so there was an awful lot of story up in the air. We could have done a quick wrap-up, but it was a little bit of defiance to leave it to be continued and see what happened. The film allows us to finally wrap it up in this sort of compressed series.”

The miniseries takes place shortly after the events of the series finale against the backdrop of an interstellar war between the embattled alien races known as Scarrans and The Peacekeepers. Staging a war allowed the Farscape team to significantly widen the scope of the universe that had previously been limited by the constraints of episodic television. “You never have enough money, but the budget for the miniseries was obviously way in excess of an episodic budget, so we were trying to take it to a new level of production value that was bigger and different than we had done before,” Prowse explains. “The scale is huge, with an epic expanse of a story. We were going for a movie feel and we always talked about it like it was two movies and I think we’ve achieved it.”

To do that, they had to reassemble the creative machine behind the series that had scattered to the wind on new projects during the year the series went dark. Carey says it’s a testament to the creative team’s love of the show that the vast majority of the vfx team all came back to work on the miniseries. “It’s always been a show where we have pushed as much as we can, so coming back on board was exciting. As far as the animations, we used the same companies and that was in order to have the same compositors and animators that we had before. We had to source them from other parts of the country, but it was important for us to maintain the creative continuity. They were so enthusiastic about it too, so it was fairly easy to get the word out and get them back on the project.”