I’ve long been captivated by the character designs of the extraterrestrial, repto-mammalian Scarran race in the Sci-Fi Channel original series Farscape, a Jim Henson Company production–especially the long-necked, “horse face” members of their lower-caste subspecies.

When I look at one of them, I see not only an unsubtle, brutish TV monster, but also a distinctly beautiful fictional animal. Scarrans look like big Permian synapsids–except Earth’s largest prehistoric mammal-like reptiles didn’t walk upright on two legs, flaunting pectoral nipples.

The show’s creature shop kept tinkering with the Scarran design, and near the end of the third season, the appearance of the low-caste individuals takes an unsettling turn. They still look like their own kind of animal, but the features have softened and streamlined. The gray, leathery dinosaur hide and knobby brow ridges are gone. A thick layer of much more human skin covers the same frame, now with a fair-skinned human skin tone. The long face still leads with the chin, but now it’s a human face, stretched at the wrong angle over an equine skull. The chin juts out where a horse’s lips should meet; the humanoid vermilion lips close over where a horse’s nostrils go; and above this distorted muzzle, the humanoid nose and philtrum of the upper lip splay across the horse’s bridge, closing the gap to a pair of nearly congruously placed, forward-facing eyes.

The first Scarran of this strain to appear in the series, Naj Gil, is ghastly beautiful. Pennoch, pictured above, is comparatively fuck-ugly from all but a few angles, in part due to his sickly-looking striping (possibly tattoos, definitely gross. I’ve colored him here in more appealing teal, brown, and magenta tones). But even Pennoch retains the distinct, low-caste Scarran poise: legs hidden in a straight, floor-length skirt of black leather and velour; exposed, bodybuilder physique countervailed by long, covered arms and long fingers with long claws, and that elongated head–with a face so demure when at rest–at the end of a long, thick, and always covered neck; posture and motion more fluid and feline than reptilian. Pennoch remains an elegant animal: a hot-blooded, hot-bodied, anthropoid horse-lizard, brooding in his mottled, sallow, blaster-proof man-skin.