by Sherry Ginn
But the larger point of Farscape’s wormhole conceit is a very simple one, the notion that the accident is destiny here. Or as Crichton notes in the episode “Bad Timing” (4.22), “Sometimes things don’t happen quite the way you imagine.” Jes Battis notes how early on in the series Crichton’s “primary concern is simply to return home. But over time his emotional attachments, as well as his political and ethical commitments, branch out considerably,” and he links that shifting focus to the series’ efforts at raising “all kinds of interesting questions about technology, masculinity, and nationhood” (Investigating Farscape 3). Wormhole “technology” thus becomes a key stand-in for various contemporary Earth technologies—rocketry, nuclear power, even the internal combustion engine—that start out as tools of knowledge, exploration, and development but open onto dangerous and destructive applications that we must culturally negotiate as they begin to take us places that we had never foreseen. That sort of branching out is, of course, the series’ own demonstration of the point Crichton makes, and a further clue to its appeal, as it consistently transports us where we might not have imagined, to our own “Uncharted Territories,” at least those that network television usually prefers not to explore.
Besides suggesting the rather unusual ambition or scope that has often been attributed to Farscape, then, that notion of a constant branching out also affords a different view of individual human direction, pointing up how seldom life follows a simple, plotted line, and rather how much is due to the chance occurrence, the unpredictable event. For example, as the series opens Crichton is helping to develop the “Farscape Project,” an international high-velocity deep-space exploration mission, when that wormhole deposits him in the middle of a space battle. There he collides with another ship, causing it to crash and bringing the Peacekeeper Crais, brother of the pilot killed in the crash, to vow that he will capture and kill Crichton. His planned future as an astronaut, following in the path set out by his father, Jack Crichton, is thus completely sidetracked by a series of quite literal accidents that open up a completely new future, one in which getting home gives way to figuring out how to make himself at home in this newly complex, seemingly constantly changing reality that he now inhabits. In fact, given the possibilities of time and dimensional travel that Crichton discovers over the course of the series, infinite realities begin to seem possible, even infinite personal destinies. That fact is especially thrust home when, in the “Kansas” episode (4.12), he finds that his presence in the past has accidentally altered Earth history so that his father is scheduled to helm the doomed Challenger shuttle mission—and his death would invariably affect John’s life as well. Having to “fix” the past just so that he can go on to an unpredictable future, Crichton begins to realize the very contingent nature of his life.
More to the point, over the course of the series he gradually comes to recognize that the very concepts of home, family, and even self are all similarly contingent and subject to change. Home, finally, is not necessarily the Earth but some place still “uncharted.” His family is the one he is in the process of creating with his Sebacean mate Aeryn, the child she gives birth to in the middle of a firefight in The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries, and those “strange alien life forms” that have become his friends,4 his support, even his saviors through all of his wanderings. What Crichton comes to realize is that his real task is becoming at peace with the sense of instability that this state of affairs brings, with the fact that destiny is not a carefully planned out scientific expedition like the Farscape Project on which he was working, but rather a constantly evolving set of paths that he must choose and/or to which he must adapt. If that sort of conception is challenging, if that view of human life as defined by accident demands a revisioning of our sense of human nature or of life’s purpose, it is also a valuable challenge, one that again speaks directly to the show’s cult appeal. For it reminds us not only of what might be found in that sort of “walking after midnight” that Kawin describes (25), but also of our own responsibility in the accident of destiny. Thus whereas Crichton, in the premier episode, tells his father, “I can’t be your kind of hero,” he is challenged over the course of the series and finally must commit himself to a most fundamental human task, one with which anyone can identify: finding out just what “kind of hero” he can be. Such a task, I would suggest, sits well with a cult audience, with viewers who are looking for something, even if they are not quite sure what.
But this point recalls that sense of compensation that, Virilio and Lotringer assure us, is typically part of the economy of our accident-prone culture, or as Edward Tenner has described such situations, one of the ways in which “disaster is paradoxically creative” (327). As Virilio and Lotringer offer, “the accident of art is the accident of knowledge” (109), and in a series like Farscape with its clearly artistic intentions knowledge finally is the real payoff. Over its course the series drives home a great variety of truths, including the strength and leadership of women, the value of diverse cultures, the wisdom of compassion, the worth of other ways of knowing. Yet it seems to afford such knowledge almost accidentally, since in a world bound by conventions and constrained by certain ways of seeing—such as those typically afforded by network television and its popular genres—this may well be the only way we might encounter, or be willing to accept, such different, potentially subversive concepts. In this context we might consider the point that Crichton makes, rather off-handedly, in the very first episode when Aeryn hesitates to join the other escapees on Moya, insisting that she must remain true to her Peacekeeper training which forbids her from having compassion for others, questioning commands, or resisting the aims of the Peacekeepers—in this key instance, simply helping her companions escape their pursuers. He insists, however, that she “can be more,” that she can learn to be a better being. That she accepts that challenge forecasts the strength of character she will manifest throughout the series, but it also demonstrates one of the most important pieces of knowledge or messages we might find in a cult text, that of our abiding ability, despite all conditioning, to “escape” our own cultural bonds, not to do the impossible, but simply to “be” something better.
Finally, we might emphasize how this term “escape” seems to resonate tellingly with the series title and its cult appeal. For the title Farscape immediately suggests a text that is playing at extremes, affording a vision or horizon far beyond the normal range, if not of the impossible then certainly far beyond the boundaries typically set by our world and visualized in our mainstream texts. That sort of expanded vision only further underscores the series’ cult potential, for as Kawin reminds us, the cult work is one that, by its very nature as a radically different sort of experience, usually situates itself at the margins of our culture, “a culture that eats and breathes and oils itself with compromise” (24), with the stuff of sameness, with the normative vision, in this case of conventional broadcast television. In contrast, Farscape as an unfolding text consistently suggests how we might look beyond that world, escape from that everyday realm to other possibilities. Through its group of “strange alien” types, thrown together by chance yet gradually transformed—almost impossibly, against their natures—into “friends,” it visualizes various ways out, as it takes us into and helps us explore the “Uncharted Territories” of culture and of self.
Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of the early television space opera, see Wheeler Winston Dixon’s essay “Tomorrowland TV: The Space Opera and Early Science Fiction Television.”
2. TV Guide first compiled this listing in 2004, shortly after Farscape was canceled. That it would still rank the show as one of the top cult series in 2007 suggests its continuing importance. See “TV Guide Names the Top Cult Shows Ever.”
3. Bruce Kawin suggests that this sort of effect is the real key to a cult work’s satisfaction. As he offers, “what this sacred text gives its worshippers, and what they are grateful for, is a mirror. It tells them something they real
ize as the truth, something they have been waiting to hear and to have validated” (24).
4. In the series’ later seasons, Crichton’s introductory commentary adds a telling note, as he describes those “strange, alien life forms” on Moya as “my friends.”
Works Cited
Battis, Jes. “Farscape.” The Essential Cult TV Reader. Ed. David Lavery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 104–10. Print.
_____. Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Print.
Booker, M. Keith. Science Fiction Television. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Print.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Tomorrowland TV: The Space Opera and Early Science Fiction Television.” The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader. Ed. J. P. Telotte. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 93–110. Print.
Johnson-Smith, Jan. American Science Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate, and Beyond. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Print.
Kawin, Bruce. “After Midnight.” The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason. Ed. J. P. Telotte. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. 18–25. Print.
Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Random House, 1996. Print.
“TV Guide Names the Top Cult Shows Ever.” TV Guide 29 June 2007. www.tvguide.com/news/top-cult-shows/070629–071. Web. 23 May 2008.
Virilio, Paul, and Sylvere Lotringer. The Accident of Art. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2005. Print.
War and Peace by Woody Allen or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wormhole Weapon
Ensley F. Guffey
“Wow. Battle looks completely different when you’re in the middle of it than it does to the generals up on the hill!”—Woody Allen, Love and Death
Popular culture studies assume that any given cultural element is both product of and a reflection on the time period in which it was produced. This idea lies at the core of the so-called “Popular Culture Formula” which “states that the popularity of a given cultural element ... is directly proportional to the degree to which that element is reflective of audience beliefs and values” (Nachbar and Lause 5). With the advent of cable networks and niche programming, television became a means to refine such cultural inquiries by presenting scholars with cultural elements that were popular with smaller audiences and therefore provided a more nuanced view of a given time. For the historian, such windows into the recent cultural past allow a rare opportunity to gauge the reaction of the too-often historically silent majority of the population to the events of their time.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the representations of military and political policies and international arms races portrayed in the award-winning science fiction series Farscape. Originally conceived shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Farscape entered production as the world entered a new phase of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and militarization in the late 1990s. Farscape was able to ask important and often subversive questions concerning the nature of recent history and of the paths the world seemed to be taking into the future. Furthermore, the show’s heavy reliance on cast and crew from Australia provided a small-power/everyman perspective on these questions—a perspective which was unique to American television of the time.
Farscape was, in part, an extended meditation on Cold War policies, arms races, ultimate weapons as a road to peace, and the recurrence of these themes in modern history. For John Crichton and the audience, the Peacekeepers and Scarran Imperium are in many ways respectively coded as the United States and the Soviet Union. By using human historical and cultural experience to interpret the institutional enmity between the Peacekeepers and Scarrans, Farscape fashions a lens which illuminates and questions the military-political practices of both these fictional empires, and of the very real nations and non-state organizations of 20th and 21st century Earth.
As with so much else in Farscape, the key to this perspective lies in the character of John Crichton. Series creator Rockne S. O’Bannon has stated that
[Crichton] represents you or me or any member of the audience. He’s seen all the same movies that we have and he’s got all the same cultural references, but the poor guy’s essentially dropped into a galaxy innumerable light years away. It gives us that wonderful, fascinating touchstone that we can all identify with [Bassom 28].
Furthermore, as Jes Battis points out, Crichton is specifically coded as an American astronaut who “is never unmoored from the ideological frameworks that compose the United States” (163). These points are vital to Crichton’s interpretations of military-political structures he encounters in the wider galaxy.
As Farscape posits a fictional Earth differing only slightly from our own, Crichton would have grown up with a world which was, until 1991–92, divided by the Cold War into two armed camps around the United States and the Soviet Union. Jack Crichton’s gift to John of a puzzle ring given to him by Yuri Gagarin1 firmly places Crichton and his family in the world of the Cold War and the Space Race (“Premiere” 1.1). Crichton would also have seen the hoped-for “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War disappear in the face of new arms races and new international military tensions. Throughout the mid and late 1990s, nuclear weapons technology became available to both nation states and terrorist organizations through black markets originating in former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states, and in 1998 Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, increasing tensions with its nuclear neighbor, India. This personal and global history is at the core of the way Crichton—and the audience—views galactic politics at the far end of the wormhole.
As they concern the Peacekeepers and Scarran Imperium, those politics have reached a point of tension just short of war when Crichton finds himself catapulted into their midst. In the Uncharted Territories, this hostility has already begun to erupt into open conflict in the form of skirmishes among the various forces deployed there by both sides (“Eat Me” 3.6). The two empires are also competing for political alliances and influence with various systems in the Uncharted Territories (“Look at the Princess, Parts I–III” 2.10–2.12), and both claim territory there, including sectors claimed where each disputes the other’s title (“Bringing Home the Beacon” 4.16). As a result of these conflicting interests, which both see as leading inevitably to war, the Peacekeepers and Scarrans have embarked upon an arms race by which each seeks a decisive advantage over the other.
In between these two maneuvering superpowers are an unknown number of smaller polities, ranging from the Hynerian Empire and Luxan Territories to individual worlds like Sykar and Dam-Ba-Da, as well as billions of sentients, including Moya and her crew. In addition to his function as the viewpoint of the extradiegetic audience, Crichton also serves as the viewpoint and voice of these intradiegetic billions who live between and among the superpowers, and are all too often subject to their whims of policy. This is Cold War Earth writ large indeed, with Crichton and Company standing in for the “every-human” caught between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., circa 1945–1992.
The first superpower encountered by Crichton and the audience is the Peacekeepers (“Premiere” 1.1). From the outset, the Peacekeepers are portrayed as militaristic, hierarchical, totalitarian, and technologically far in advance of Earth. We quickly learn that the Peacekeepers are also slavers, forcing the Leviathan living ships to serve their ends by means of control collars. Much later, it is revealed that the Peacekeepers were originally human, taken from Earth around 25,000 B.C.E. by the Eidelons and altered to enforce and guard the peace negotiated by their benefactors (Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars [PKW]). This leads to what is perhaps the single most important fact about the majority of Peacekeeper personnel: their human appearance. Indeed, outwardly they look just like Crichton, and us. The Peacekeepers are both familiar and alien at once, and there is nothing about their society that we do not recognize from one period of human history or another.
Ba
sed upon the Peacekeepers’ totalitarian political structure, the apparent total subservience of Sebacean society and economics to the military state, as well as the Peacekeepers’ prejudicial racial policies, Jes Battis has written that the Peacekeeper political-military system “bears more than a passing resemblance to German Nazism” (Battis 164). This reading is supported both within the diegesis (“Kansas” 4.12), and by remarks made by executive producer Brian Henson (Henson). As Battis is careful to point out, however, there are some problems with this coding.