they could do for feature films, so they started to think about doing a TV series—initially, something similar to the Star Wars bar scene at Mos Eisley, which featured numerous alien species interacting in a dangerous, dramatic fashion. The Henson Company's vision for the show was very ambitious, meaning that the costs of building sets and creating the animatronics were prohibitively expensive for the purposes of creating one pilot episode. Consequently, they needed the OK to fund a whole season before they began production in order to make things feasible financially. Thus, while this episode was the premiere of the show, it was not a pilot in the usual sense of the term. In the shuttle launch scene at the beginning of "Premiere" the shuttle has the insignia "Collaroy." Collaroy is a suburb of Sydney, Australia and is threaded throughout the Farscape series. The creators had originally wanted to make their protagonist an astronaut with NASA, but they couldn't come to terms with the space agency, so they changed their agency to "IASA" (International Air and Space Agency). In order to save money, the producers originally arranged for two episodes to be filmed at the same time, meaning that Premiere and the episode "I, E.T." were filmed simultaneously. The entire first season of the show was filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, which were purpose built structures for filming. After the first season, the buildings were needed for the Star Wars prequels, and the production had to move to new facilities. It remains the only television show to film there. In order to highlight their puppetry skills, The Henson Company puppeteers created Rygel to be as small as possible, so the viewers could clearly see that it was not a human being in a suit. Similarly, they made Pilot so large and shaped in such a way that it would be clear it was not simply a suited and masked human, either. Reception A BBC reviewer felt that while there were obvious influences from other science fiction television programs, Buck Rogers couldn't express the isolation felt by its main character the way Farscape did for John Crichton, and that Star Trek: Voyager wasn't as remotely as satisfying a series. Finally, the reviewer felt that the amount of backstory included in this episode was too much, and should have been spread across several episodes. An IGN reviewer felt that the puppetry