The Worlds of Farscape

by Sherry Ginn

  Certainly, as Joseph Maiolo reminds us, a troubled peace such as the Cold War on Earth or the Scarran-Peacekeeper standoff in Farscape is not the only probable outcome of an arms race, whether conventional or not:

  Arms races are like waves of action and reaction that ripple through the international system. In periods of acute political tension, one state races ahead to win a military edge over its rivals, who in turn respond to the menace by arming too, and a perilous cycle of actions and reactions ensues, which ends either in war or in some sort of uneasy political-military stalemate [3].

  Maiolo also documents the trajectory of one such competition as it became “an independent, self-perpetuating and often overriding impersonal force that shaped events,” and ended in the largest, most horrific war in all of human history (2–3). The death toll of World War II is conservatively estimated at 61,000,000 men, women and children, exclusive of the tens of millions more who were wounded, displaced, imprisoned, or tortured as a result of the conflict. The pre-war arms race not only made this possible, but helped birth the horror.

  Fortunately, the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union resulted in the second of Maiolo’s probabilities, as—so far!—have the current nuclear races emerging between India, Pakistan, China, the Russian Federation, the United States, Israel, Iran, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea in their various permutations. The alternative would have made the casualty figures from the Second World War appear minuscule. The level of death and destruction resulting from a global conventional war becoming a global thermonuclear war would, in all probability, constitute a total extinction of the human race, and much, if not all of the rest of Earth’s flora and fauna. The point is worth belaboring here because it is the same one being made by the cast and crew of Farscape, particularly in Season Four and The Peacekeeper Wars.

  In a desperate gambit to buy time in which to develop a wormhole weapon, Peacekeeper High Command informs the Scarrans that they have already developed such a weapon and are putting it into production (“Losing Time” 3.9). Like Khrushchev’s similar ploy in 1957, however, the Peacekeepers wormhole-gap tactic is only partially successful (Barrass 113–15). The complete destruction of a Scarran dreadnaught under mysterious circumstances at Dam-Ba-Da in “Infinite Possibilities Part II: Icarus Abides” (3.15) inadvertently aids this deception, but by the time War Minister Ahkna and Commandant Grayza meet in Tormented Space, the lack of any hard evidence of such a weapon has all but convinced the Scarrans that the Peacekeepers are lying (“Bringing Home the Beacon” 4.16). Mere months after the failed peace talks at Katratzi, the Scarrans are making the final dispositions necessary for total war against the Peacekeepers, at least so Scorpius would have it believed. The Scarrans’ true intentions soon become irrelevant as, in yet another nod to Dr. Strangelove, Scorpius acts as a kind of galactic General Jack D. Ripper and starts the war himself.

  Thus, the outcome of the Scarran-Peacekeeper arms race is the Peacekeeper War. Caught in the middle of it are Crichton, Aeryn, their unborn son, their friends, and every other sentient being in the affected regions of space, most of whom would likely agree with Crichton when he tells Scorpius, “I don’t care about the things you care about. Peacekeepers rule the Scarrans. Scarrans rule the Peacekeepers. Let them rule together” (“A Constellation of Doubt” 4.17). It is a sentiment well known to the generations who lived during the Cold War and who faced the potential consequences of the Soviet and American contest for world leadership. Through Crichton, Farscape asks with Gandhi: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?” (377). No difference. No difference at all.

  Whether the Peacekeepers win or the Scarrans, the results will be the same for the mass of beings caught in their war: destruction, death, and misery. Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars shows this unflinchingly through a series of local events that serve to bring those larger consequences home to the audience. Jool and the Temple of Arnessk with its ancient priesthood devoted to peace are destroyed by a Scarran missile utilizing similar technology to modern ICBMs.8 Such would likely be the fate of the 2200-year-old Hindu temple of Shankaracharya and its priests in Kashmir should India and Pakistan ever unleash their nuclear arsenals against one another. The descendants of the Arnessk priesthood, the Eidelons of Qujaga, also become victims of the war, as their long hidden city is ravaged to ruins by the running battle between Peacekeepers and Scarrans, and their entire planet is eaten by the wormhole weapon itself (PKW). Imagine Sarajevo if after four years of brutal siege the Serbs had possessed nuclear weapons and decided to eradicate the stubborn city and its surviving hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants. The message is as clear and ancient as the Kikuyu proverb: “when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers” (Traditional).

  At the center of the final Peacekeeper-Scarran arms race and the Peacekeeper War are John Crichton and the wormhole weapon. At first glance this ultimate weapon of mass destruction (WMD) seems a fairly straightforward symbol of modern nuclear weapons in its vast and indiscriminate destructive power, as indeed it is. In terms of Farscape’s Cold War metaphor, the wormhole weapon is the reality behind all of the posturing, scheming, manipulation, and brinksmanship executed by both empires throughout the series, as the reality of multi-megaton nuclear weapons lies behind the decades of similarly convoluted maneuvers practiced by the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 to 1992 and of the nuclear powers into the present day. The unlearned moral in both instances is that if one plays with fire one will eventually be burned. Only instead of fingertips or even single individuals, it is entire planets (our planet) which will be consumed, and entire sentient species (Homo sapiens sapiens) that will be exterminated.

  Behind the wormhole weapon’s nuclear metaphor, however, lies a larger and more frightening symbolism. It must be remembered that the development of nuclear weapons did not stop with the atomic bomb. Before the Second World War had ended, Manhattan Project scientists were researching more powerful hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bombs (Rhodes 70). By 1955 both superpowers had tested such weapons. In 1978, facing a renewed Soviet advantage in conventional armored forces in Europe and despite widespread domestic and international pressure, President Jimmy Carter secretly gave the go-ahead for the production of components for “enhanced-radiation weapons”—neutron bombs—designed to kill people by massive radiation while leaving equipment and infrastructure largely undamaged (Barrass 216–17). In between and beyond these developments, bombs and bombers were supplemented by the advent of nuclear warheads small enough to be fired by standard artillery or even man-portable recoilless rifles. Warheads were adapted to short, medium, and finally intercontinental-range missiles, to submarine launched ballistic missiles, multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), cruise missiles, bunker-busters, et cetera in a never-ending attempt to refine and improve nuclear weapons and their methods of delivery. Simultaneously, the superpowers were investing billions to research and develop various chemical and biological WMDs.9

  The arms race never truly ends. Not with the power to wipe out human life on Earth, not with the ability to wipe out all life on Earth several times over, not even with the ability to destroy the Earth entirely. Humans, it seems, are always looking for a bigger stick to beat themselves with and have been probably since the first ancestors climbed out of the trees. Farscape takes this propensity for suicidal improvement to its ultimate degree: a weapon that will destroy the entire galaxy, and perhaps even more. Like humanity, the Peacekeepers and Scarrans appear too dedicated to their long-standing feud with each other, too focused on their own hatreds and ambitions, to recognize the insanity of such a progression. Though in the regions of the galaxy where Farscape takes place, nuclear weapons, although not quite beneath contempt, are far from the bleeding edge of munitions technology. Certainly the warheads used by the Scarrans against Arnessk are either nuclea
r weapons which are several orders of magnitude more powerful than any currently possessed on Earth, or an entirely different type of weapon that far overshadows their destructive power. In either case judging by the destruction wrought by the Scarran missile’s thirteen warheads, weapons capable of eradicating all life on a planet are likely part of both races’ arsenals.

  Again Crichton and Company stand in for those living under the threat of both the Peacekeepers and Scarrans and are the vicarious spokespeople for an audience which has itself spent many years sandwiched between two superpowers. Today no one on Earth can truly believe that a global nuclear war can actually be won or can result in anything better than a long and terrible dark age for humanity as a whole. President Truman himself realized this truth, and in 1953 took the opportunity to express it to the nation and the world in his farewell address, concluding that a nuclear war “is not a possible policy for rational men” (Rhodes 79). Yet the Cold War would continue for thirty-nine years more. Eventually, strategists in the United States would introduce a policy of “mutually assured destruction” of centers of civilian population, consciously give it the acronym of MAD and pronounce it good (Barrass 162–63). Knowing the capabilities of these weapons, they embraced their horror as the best defense. Moreover, they did so in policy sessions from which the vast majority of American citizens, and all of the rest of the world, were excluded. All in the service of what, as Crichton says, is truly “mankind’s greatest contribution to the absurd—the thermonuclear bomb” (“Hot to Katratzi” 4.20).

  Thus, despite Crichton’s protests and warnings, despite their own experiments with wormholes, which have given ample evidence of the phenomenon’s inherent danger and instability, the Scarrans and Peacekeepers refuse to accept that they might well be mucking about with powers which they do not fully understand and cannot control. Crichton’s position in this situation must feel at least somewhat familiar. Like most of the population of Earth, Crichton grew up in a world where it often seemed that the Powers That Be had forgotten the true nature of the forces they were using to determine global military-political policy. Despite the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and literally hundreds of test detonations, the leaders of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. all too often seemed to forget that behind the rhetoric and posturing and acronyms lay slaughter on such a vast scale that it was measured in megadeaths.10

  Crichton bears this knowledge, knows it at his very core, and yet even he becomes hypnotized by it. Trapped in the disabled drilling elevator on Katratzi, Crichton reactivates his bomb, and drops it down the shaft to the crystherium chamber. Tellingly, he does so without consulting any of his friends and allies, including Aeryn, who are trapped with him. Like his forebears, Crichton has made his nuclear policy unilaterally, and after deterrence has failed, Crichton launches. Afterwards he reflects on his actions in one of the most moving scenes of the series. Sitting with Aeryn, having already made inroads into a bottle, Crichton lets his bitterness and self-loathing overflow:

  Everything old is new again. Except the old thing’s getting really old. Hey, Honey, guess what I did at work today? I wore a bomb... A nuclear bomb in a field of flowers... I could get lucky. Tomorrow I could have a bigger bomb. I could kill more people. Maybe they’ll be innocent people. Children, maybe ... [“La Bomba” 4.21].

  Much of Farscape’s historical message lies in this short monologue, for in the late 1990s and early 2000s, everything old did indeed seem to be new again. India and Pakistan faced one another over nuclear arsenals. Terrorists invoking the name of God seemed able to strike anywhere, American missiles remained targeted on Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Russian missiles on Washington, D.C., and New York City. Governments had changed, but not nuclear policy.

  Even worse than this cyclic progression, though, is Crichton’s knowledge that he has been corrupted and become a purveyor of this madness in its most deadly form. No longer can nuclear policy be put aside as a problem of governments, of semi-faceless bureaucracies of generals and presidents. It has become entirely personal, and Crichton’s very own Cold War has ended very differently than did its larger Earthly cousin. He himself brought death and fire to “a field of flowers,” and, innocent or not, the beings on Katratzi slain by his action never had a chance, never had a choice, because John Crichton’s nuclear policy failed. It is no wonder that he is slowly weeping by the end of the brief monologue above.

  In The Peacekeeper Wars Crichton says to Aeryn, “War and peace. War and peace. Did you know that Woody Allen’s version is better than Tolstoy’s because it is funnier? And absolute power corrupts absolutely” (PKW). Knowingly or not, he is speaking to himself, for with the escalating danger posed to Aeryn and their child by the war raging around them, Crichton has again become corrupted by the idea that he—and he alone—possesses the power to decide between war and peace. “Unlock the knowledge,” he orders the Ancient he has nicknamed Einstein, “I have to make peace” (PKW). In a lovely role reversal, it is the cold, logical, militant, gung-ho Aeryn Sun who points out the flaw in Crichton’s thinking:

  AERYN: This is what you want. This is what you want!

  CRICHTON: No, Aeryn, it is not what I want! It’s just that fate keeps blocking all the exits. And no matter what I do, I just keep circling closer to the flame.

  AERYN: Then pull back. This war is not your responsibility.

  CRICHTON: You and the baby are my responsibility. And how am I supposed to protect you from the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans and the Tregans and the lions and tigers and bears? ... No gun is big enough.

  AERYN: We still have Stark and the Eidelons.

  CRICHTON: It’s not enough. This, this is enough. Wormholes. What’s inside my head. This is ugly, and it is malignant, but it will protect you and the baby...

  AERYN: Ah, you see? You don’t just protect me. We protect each other [PKW].

  Aeryn is telling Crichton that his days of unilateral action are over, or should be. The war, the worlds, and his family are not his sole responsibility, no matter what he may think or wish. Such responsibility is always ultimately shared.

  Crichton learns the lesson. After more pain, more death, and more tragedy, Crichton and his friends return to Moya to find themselves trapped between two warring fleets, each of which “seem as intent on annihilating us as they are each other” (PKW). They also find themselves possessed of the technology needed to create a wormhole weapon. This time, however, Crichton takes the council of his friends, and particularly of Aeryn, who perhaps is the only one who comes close to understanding what is at stake before it actually appears. Aeryn asks if the wormhole weapon is “worse than D’Argo being blown to pieces? Worse than our son dying?” Looking out Moya’s viewport at the raging battle around them, she asks “Is it worse than living with this?” As Crichton moves away without answering, Aeryn’s expression leaves no doubt that it is indeed worse than all of these things. The actual deployment of the weapon is followed by Crichton’s biblical “Behold, the wormhole weapon,” irresistibly bringing to mind the Book of Revelation: “behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him” (New American Standard Bible, “Revelation” 6:8).

  Nor is such an allusion accidental, for death is the sum total of what the wormhole weapon brings forth, destroying any and everything on its event horizon. Once the combat has been silenced in the face of this horror, Crichton imparts the basic wisdom that the Scarrans and Peacekeepers have denied: “Wormhole weapons do not make peace. Wormhole weapons don’t even make war. They make total destruction. Annihilation. Armageddon. People make peace” (PKW). Crichton’s lines are not merely the exhausted cry of a fictional character to his fictional enemies, but the audience’s own cry to the powers which still play games with nuclear fire, holding the world hostage to their policies without voice or vote: peace is not a side effect of technological artifacts. Peace is something that people sweat and strain to build; something that requires a continued commitment and a redou
bling of effort to maintain.

  It is not the wormhole weapon which ends the Peacekeeper War; it is Commandant Grayza, and it is Emperor Staleek. Theirs was the choice for war or peace. Nor is it a fairytale ending. As Farscape continues in its new medium of comic books and graphic novels, Crichton’s world is still a very violent and dangerous place. The Peacekeepers are fragmenting, with the High Command in confusion and mass desertions form the ranks (O’Bannon, The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, “Book Three”), while the Scarrans are already beginning to question the treaty forced upon them at Qujaga (O’Bannon, Strange Detractors “Book One”). Meanwhile, the galaxy has only become moderately less dangerous, even without wormhole weapons. What is more, the genie has already been let out of the bottle. That wormhole weapons can be created is now widely known and knowing that something can be done is often enough to ensure that it will be. On Earth, it is believed that Iran is progressing with its nuclear weapons program in spite of all sanctions. India, Pakistan, and China continue to refine and improve their capability to deliver nuclear weapons to targets both near and far, and the possession of nuclear or radioactive “suitcase bombs” by terrorist organizations is a very real threat. The arms races continue. We, the people, have not made peace. One cannot help but feel that Crichton would be saddened by the news, but not, in the end, surprised.

  Notes

  1. Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. On 12 April 1961, he became the first human being to go into space, orbiting the Earth for 108 minutes.