Which was the worst episode to do?
I wouldn't say that there were any...
Which one gave you the most grief to do? Gave you the most hassle while you were doing it?
Oh well, that's a different question because sometimes the ones that give you the most grief turn out well.
I was often given the task of resolving the previous season's cliffhanger which was always a huge amount of grief, because David would do such a fine of writing me into a corner. So for instance Season Of Death was an absolute bear because I had a main character who was on a table with his head open, who'd lost the power of speech. The only creature that can save him is lying dead on the floor, or so we think, the villain has what he wants, he's accomplished his goal and there is no reason on earth he should stick around, he should be gone and doing is nefarious things on the other side of the galaxy, oh, and by the way I've got a dead Interion that I've got to resuscitate, somehow or other, by the end of forty-four minutes of film.
So with all that and more it was like, "Okay, this is an interesting puzzle to solve." David didn't exactly have all the solution on place when he wrote us into this corner. He was quite fond of that every season, he'd go, "Okay Ricky, here's one I'm going to give you this season to deal with." So a lot of sweat went into those sorts of episodes.
Terra Firma was another that was very very tough to write, possibly because it was going to Earth for real and not as a fake, not as a gag, not as an alien trick or any of that stuff, but for real. We also knew where it fell in the course of the season and what was going to happen next, and so I had again forty-four minutes to get in everything that could possibly be said and get out, which was very very tough. That episode to me almost should have been a two-parter because there was just so much to get in and so many things that one would have liked to have said there.
They are all challenging in that regard. There's never too little to do, there always seems to be too much, and that's just part of Farscape.
