by Sherry Ginn
Though presented from the outset as racial purists, the Peacekeepers apparently remain open to mixed species and non–Sebacean individuals who display unusual skills or talents, particularly in the Science Military. Scorpius himself is an example of this, as are Linfer and Strappa, two humanoid aliens acting as lead scientists on Scorpius’ wormhole research project in Season Three. Commandant Mele-On Grayza has undergone implantation of an alien gland into her chest, and her grayish complexion differs significantly from that of other Sebaceans, indicating that she may be of mixed heritage, yet she has achieved high rank and considerable political power within the Peacekeeper hierarchy. Clearly Peacekeeper prejudices, while undeniably systemic, can be set aside if the potential gain is considered great enough. The Peacekeepers also show themselves willing to ally with other races, such as the Luxans, when such alliances will advance their agenda, and although undoubtedly racist, there is no evidence that the Peacekeepers have ever practiced a policy of genocide.
Finally, totalitarian systems are not exclusive to any one political philosophy. The growth of such systems is a risk faced by any nation engaged in massive arms production. As Joseph Maiolo points out in Cry Havoc, his groundbreaking reexamination of the worldwide arms race between 1931–1941 C.E., “the liberal democracies struggled with the problem of how to arm themselves against the threat of total war without succumbing to totalitarianism,” because “no matter what type of regime or its military starting point, the [arms] race sent everyone down the same totalitarian track” (4). In the post–World War II world, Maiolo finds the same pressures at work in the United States:
The mounting cost of the U.S. nuclear and conventional force build-ups against [the U.S.S.R.] revealed a real anxiety among some Americans of inadvertently erecting a “garrison state.” Most prominent among them was President Eisenhower, who feared that the burden of an all-out armaments spree would crush a flourishing economy, and with it American liberties [403].
Bearing Peacekeeper history in mind, it is likely that the militarized totalitarian society that produced Officer Aeryn Sun is the result of literally millennia of sustained arms build-ups and war economies as the Peacekeepers struggled to fulfill the role given to them by the absent Eidelons. Taking into account the Peacekeepers’ past reputation as upholders of “everything good” (“...Different Destinations” 3.5),2 and their continued self-indoctrination as an organization that maintains order and harmony, the Peacekeepers begin to look less like Nazi Germany and more like Cold War America (“PK Tech Girl” 1.7).
This is particularly true when the United States is viewed through the lens of a small-power polity like Australia. The belief that after World War II Australia traded one set of imperial masters in Great Britain for another in the United States has “exerted a profound influence on media opinion and on popular and political leaders’ attitudes” in Australia, and continues to pervade “much of the scholarly literature” on Australian policies during the Cold War (McLean 66). Although reliance on American protection against large power threats from the Soviet Union or China was an entirely rational policy on Australia’s part,
there is no reason to conclude that as a result of these developments Australians grew more pro–American in sentiment or more inclined culturally to be subservient to the United States... When all was said and done, Australians, for all their sense of affinity with America, regarded it as a foreign country, in a way that was not true of Britain [73].
This is not to say that Australians are particularly anti–American, or that they see the United States as some sort of warmongering international bad-guy, but in terms of the strong Australian influence on Farscape as a whole, this small power lens is essential to an understanding of the Peacekeepers. During World War II, the Cold War, and after, the United States projected military power in the Pacific largely through naval forces organized around large aircraft carriers with advanced command, control, and intelligence capabilities. The Peacekeepers project power over vast interstellar distances through fleet groups centered on enormous vessels called command carriers, usually escorted by an array of smaller craft ranging in size from single-seat fighters to capital vessels. Press images of heavily armed American military forces in fatigues, helmets, goggles, and masks are uncomfortably echoed in the faceless infantry troops of the Peacekeepers, and Peacekeeper Special Forces troops share a reputation for frightening and deadly efficiency with units like the U.S. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon, and U.S. Army Delta Force. The parallels between the two are readily apparent. Furthermore, “from the Australian point of view the peculiar status of the United States was that it was neither completely alien nor completely familiar” (McLean 74) [emphasis mine]. In a very real way Americans are to Australians as the Peacekeepers are to John Crichton: familiar yet often disturbingly other.
Crichton functions not merely as the point of view of Farscape’s largely American audience by virtue of being human, but also specifically as an American, as a conduit through which that audience experiences—at least in small part—the anxiety felt by Australia and other small powers when dealing with either Cold War superpower. Perhaps Crichton serves yet another purpose by allowing Australians to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude at America’s expense, for no matter what he does throughout the series and mini-series his life is inextricably dominated by the policies and actions of the Scarrans and Peacekeepers, the superpowers which dominate Farscape’s own interstellar cold war.
The Peacekeepers also resemble the Cold War United States in terms of racial policy. The United States ended racial chattel slavery in 1865, the last industrialized nation to do so. The armed forces were not racially integrated until 1949, while effective civil rights legislation was only passed in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and African-Americans and other minorities continue to suffer overt and covert discrimination at the time of writing (2011–12). In addition, and unlike the Peacekeepers, the United States does possess a history of genocide from its treatment of Native Americans, and during World War II interned almost all resident Japanese-American men, women, and children for the duration of the war. For most of its history, the face of the United States, like that of the Peacekeepers, was white, and while the Peacekeepers appear to be more egalitarian in their treatment of genders than the United States, it is telling that the highest ranking female Peacekeeper in the series, Commandant Mele-On Grayza, has found it necessary to be surgically altered to give her an advantage over males, has had to use sex to advance her career, and is still out-ranked by at least two grades by Grand Chancellor Maryk, a white male.
The Scarran Imperium is a far more mysterious, and more menacing, polity than even the Peacekeepers. For most of the series, the Scarrans are seen as individual operatives engaged in semi-covert operations and intelligence gathering. They first appear in the three episode arc “Look at the Princess,” where the Imperium’s envoy to the Breakaway Colonies, Cargn, is attempting to manipulate the Colonies’ royal succession in order to create a Scarran puppet state (2.10–2.12). Shortly thereafter, a Scarran operative abducts and interrogates Crichton in an attempt to determine why Scorpius is so interested in him (“Won’t Get Fooled Again” 2.15). Later Crichton and D’Argo are menaced by a literal Scarran sleeper agent (“Season of Death” 3.1), and all of Moya’s crew are threatened by yet another Scarran secret agent, Axikor, disguised as the leader of a band of Coreeshi bounty hunters (“I Shrink Therefore I Am” 4.8). Even when operating on a larger, more militant scale, as in “Infinite Possibilities: Parts I & II” (3.14–3.15), the Scarrans are careful to maintain a low profile and plausible deniability through the use of Charrid mercenaries and the mechanic Furlow until they believe they have achieved their goals.
Though Crichton manages one way or another to foil the Scarrans’ nefarious schemes in each of these encounters, they nonetheless reveal that the Scarran Imperium possesses a well organized, highly efficient covert intelligence system. This system has infiltrated the Uncharted Territo
ries deeply and widely enough to be able to take advantage of intelligence gathering opportunities as quickly as they occur. The network echoes that of the Soviet Committee for State Security, the notorious KGB, which TIME Magazine has called “the world’s most effective intelligence gathering organization” (Kohan 6). The interrogation techniques used on Crichton are, given certain advances in technology, the same used by the KGB, namely “stimulants, hypnotics, and hallucinogenic agents” (Hilden).
Even the self-aggrandizing motives of Scarran agents like Cargn and Axikor resemble those of KGB operatives as described in an internal CIA memo:
Personalities and the private connections of individual officers are often crucial to the success or failure of an operation—or a career. In many ways, the KGB is an organization made to order for the man who wants to claim all the glory for himself and put all the mistakes on the backs of his subordinates [Lambridge].
This structure also encourages competing power-blocks at upper levels such as those within the Scarran Hierarchy. There, powerful Scarrans like War Minister Ahkna seek to subvert the Imperium’s intelligence resources to secure their own political advantage, much as Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin used the chairmanship of the KGB to further their political goals.
At the top of this often shadowy empire is the Emperor Staleek, who strides across the screen with the sartorial splendor of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan Grozny and a brutal menace and cold intelligence worthy of Stalin himself. Always on guard against internal threats like Ahkna, Staleek is vitally concerned with achieving “power, acknowledgement of [his] personal intelligence, and to gain acceptance in the upper echelon of civilizations,” goals which would have been familiar to Russian leaders from Peter the Great to Dmitri Medvedev (PKW). As S.M. Plokhy points out, when dealing with the Soviet Union,
U.S. and British diplomatic services ... had a long tradition of treating cultural difference between the two sides as evidence of [the U.S.S.R.’s] inferiority ... it was customary to suggest that they displayed Oriental features, torn between extremes of humanity and cruelty. They presumably inclined towards tyranny, possessed a peasant mentality, were disorganized, and could work only in short bursts of frantic activity [64].
The Scarrans are viewed similarly. Scorpius/Harvey dismisses them without the crystherium utilia flowers as “simple, brutish creatures” (“We’re So Screwed, Part III: ‘La Bomba’” 4.21). Like the Soviets, the Scarrans are all too aware of this perception. As Staleek says, “at the peace table, we know how we’re viewed: brutish, ignorant” (PKW). Such errors in judgment were to prove costly in both fact and fiction.
Like the Soviet Union, the Scarran Empire’s apparently overwhelming strength protects a debilitating secret. For the Soviets the secret was a shrinking economy and industrial base which was unable to maintain both arms production and domestic growth, and finally incapable of doing either. For the Scarran Imperium it is the species’ reliance on crystherium utilia, without which they apparently devolve, at least intellectually (“La Bomba”). Scarran territorial expansion is predicated on establishing and maintaining lines of supply to crystherium production points, and the destruction of the crystherium mother plant at Katratzi resulted in the Imperium being forced to abandon an entire sector of space until a new crystherium supply could be established (“Bad Timing” 4.22).
It is in the escalating arms race between the two empires, however, that Farscape’s Cold War allegory blossoms. Like the Soviet Union, the Scarran Imperium seems to have concentrated its efforts towards building up its conventional forces, and as Scorpius reveals in “Losing Time” (3.9), this has been largely successful: “By latest estimates, Scarran warriors outnumber Peacekeeper soldiers ten to one ... if and when they attack—we will lose....”3 Added to this numerical superiority is the undeniably superior individual toughness and physical endurance demonstrated by Scarrans as individuals, who are naturally resistant to pulse blasts, possess greater physical strength, have the ability to project a heat ray that is devastating to Sebaceans, and even lack external “mivonks”!4 Likewise, the Soviet soldier was “considered a superior adversary prepared for the most demanding of combat circumstances” (Hertling 20). In either case, the foe is formidable.
In response to these advantages, as the series opens the Peacekeepers are investigating several possible avenues of weapons-research: potential bio-weapons like the intelligent virus in “A Bug’s Life” (1.18), creating hybrid Leviathan warships (“The Hidden Memory” 1.20), and, of course, the possible military applications of wormholes (“Nerve” 1.19). Though the subject is never directly addressed, it seems logical to assume that the Peacekeepers have found themselves unable to match the Scarran quantitative advantage, and are therefore seeking a technological superiority which will counterbalance—or preferably negate—the Scarrans’ conventional one. At a minimum, Peacekeeper High Command is seeking a weapon capable of deterring a Scarran attack through the threat of devastating retaliation, a strategy that bears more than a little resemblance to the nuclear stance of the United States and NATO in Western Europe.
Faced with a similar numerical inferiority to Soviet conventional forces in Europe, in 1953 the Eisenhower administration issued National Security Council document 162/2, which stated in part that “in the event of hostilities the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as any other munitions” (22). In other words, the U.S. was willing to counter any type of Soviet attack in Europe, whether conventional or nuclear, strategic or tactical, with nuclear weapons. As J. P. D. Dunbabin notes, “Deployment of [U.S.] tactical nuclear weapons began in 1954, and seemed admirably suited to remedy NATO’s shortfall in conventional troops” (33). However, while Peacekeeper High Command may be hoping to create a similar deterrent in order to prevent war with the Scarrans, Scorpius—and later Commandant Grayza—hopes to achieve something greater: a super-weapon with which to eradicate the Scarran Imperium once and for all.
The wormhole weapon is Scorpius’ ultimate fantasy, something so new and so powerful that the Scarrans stand no chance against it: a superweapon. Nor is Scorpius original or even particularly unusual in imagining a weapon so terribly powerful that its very existence will end war and guarantee its possessor the power to dictate the terms of eternal peace. Such ultimate weapons have been a staple of Western fiction since the early 19th century. The Industrial Revolution brought with it dreams of technological advancement which would put an end to war, even if only by making it too horrific to contemplate. Looking into the future in 1835, Tennyson
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
...
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world
[“Locksley Hall” 123–24, 127–28].
One hundred ten years later, in July of 1945, American president Harry S. Truman would pull a piece of paper from his wallet upon which he had written these lines as a boy, and read them to a reporter as they traveled to the Potsdam Conference in occupied Germany (Franklin 18). A few days later, on 16 July 1945, the first atomic weapon was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Instead of world peace Truman’s wonder weapon ushered in almost fifty years of Cold War stalemate and never-ending arms manufacture. In the end, “overkill arsenals and bloated military-industrial complexes finally crippled the Soviet economy and blighted America’s national infrastructure, stunted its social progress and militarized its culture” (Maiolo 404). Despite this, nation-states are still lining up to join the so-called Nuclear Club today. The same kind of strategic thinking that is reflected in the goals of Peacekeeper High Command and Emperor Staleek has lead to a growing proliferation of nuclear weapons on Earth in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, largely based upon the Cold War strategic theory that nuclear weapons provide an effective det
errent to attack. However, as Jacek Kugler writes, the view that deterrence actually works is questionable:
First, nuclear nations do not have an obvious and direct advantage over other nuclear or nonnuclear nations in extreme crises... Second, nuclear preponderance, which, logically, should enhance the likelihood of war, does not lead to demonstrably different or less stable behavior than nuclear parity... Finally, the most consistent reason for the absence of major war in the nuclear era seems to be the relative congruence of policy objectives among the nuclear powers, and this congruence cannot be directly traced to the buildup of nuclear arsenals [501].
When dealing with these issues in terms of the wormhole weapon and all of the schemes and counter schemes surrounding it, Farscape is at its most frustratingly eloquent.
As noted above, Crichton is a product of those fifty years of brinksmanship and détente, of the “Evil Empire” and SDI.5 The race to the wormhole weapon is literally a film that Crichton has already seen. “Welcome to my cold war!” he cries in “We’re So Screwed, Part II” (4.20) while wearing a thermonuclear bomb around his waist upon which he will later write “Hi There!” in a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic Doctor Strangelove.6 Indeed, Strangelove becomes a theme during the end of Season Four and The Peacekeeper Wars mini-series, with Crichton attaching another nuclear bomb named “Dear John” to Scorpius in “Bad Timing” (4.22),7 and Scorpius/Harvey mimicking Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove himself in The Peacekeeper Wars. The classic satire becomes a vital touchstone in the narrative as a reminder of the dangers of superweapon arms races.