The Worlds of Farscape

by Sherry Ginn

  2. Quotations are taken from the author’s own viewing notes, supplemented by transcripts of Farscape episodes available online at “The Terra Firma Transcript Archive” (see Works Cited).

  3. In Farscape, however “conventional” weapons include munitions which make 21st century Earth’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction pale in comparison.

  4. In the Farscape universe, a colloquial vulgarity for testicles (i.e., “balls”).

  5. Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the Star Wars Program. SDI was proposed by American president Ronald Reagan and, as conceived, would have used ground and orbital based systems, including laser-armed satellites to defend the United States against nuclear ballistic missile attack.

  6. The same inscription is seen on the nuclear bomb that a whooping Colonel Kong (Slim Pickens) famously rides to Earth at the end of Kubrick’s film.

  7. The second nuclear bomb that is seen in Colonel Kong’s B-52.

  8. Many modern ICBMs are equipped with multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) each carrying a separate warhead, allowing a single missile to destroy multiple targets or to ensure the elimination of a single target by overwhelming any possible defenses.

  9. In one of the supreme ironies of the Cold War, U.S. Army Intelligence used misinformation to cause the Soviets to divert precious funding into researching chemical and biological weapons, areas thought to be dead ends. The Soviets, however, turned out to be masters at bio-weaponry, and successfully developed “biological weapons of almost unimaginable horror.” See Barrass 408.

  10. One megadeath = 1,000,000 killed.

  Works Cited

  Barrass, Gordon S. The Great Cold War: a Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors. Stanford: Stanford Security Studies/Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.

  Bassom, David. “Farscape Creator.” Starburst 267 (Nov. 2000): 26—30. Print.

  Battis, Jes. Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Print.

  Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, David Naylor. 1964. Sony, 2001. DVD.

  Dunbabin, John P. D. The Cold War. London: Longman, 2008. Print.

  Farscape: The Complete Series. Creator Rockne S. O’Bannon, Exec. Prod. Brian Henson. Perf. Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Anthony Simcoe. 1999–2003. A&E, 2009. DVD.

  Franklin, H. Bruce. “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists November (1987): 18–25. JSTOR. Web. 24 July 2011.

  Gandhi, M. K. Non-Violence in Peace and War. 1942. Reprint. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1962. Print.

  Henson, Brian. In the Beginning: A Look Back with Brian Henson. Farscape: the Complete Series. Creator Rockne S. O’Bannon, Exec. Prod. Brian Henson. Perf. Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Anthony Simcoe. 1999–2003. A&E, 2009. DVD.

  Hertling, Major Mark Philip. Physical Training for the Modern Battlefield: Are We Tough Enough? Monograph. School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Fort Leavenworth, 1987. Web. 23 Aug. 2011.

  Hilden, Leonard. “Conditioned Reflex, Drugs and Hypnosis in Communist Interrogations.” Central Intelligence Agency. CIA, 18 Sept. 1995. Web. 23 Aug. 2011. .

  Kohan, John. “The KGB: Eyes of the Kremlin—TIME.” Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews—TIME.com. TIME.com, 14 Feb. 1983. Web. 25 Aug. 2011.

  Kugler, Jacek. “Terror Without Deterrence: Reassessing the Role of Nuclear Weapons.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 28.3 (1984): 470–506. JSTOR. Web. 29 Aug. 2011.

  Lambridge, Wayne. “A Note on KGB Style.” Central Intelligence Agency. CIA, 2 June 1996. Web. 23 Aug. 2011. .

  Love and Death. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Fyodor Atkine. 1975. MGM, 2000. DVD.

  Maiolo, Joseph A. Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World To War, 1931–1941. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Print.

  McLean, David. “From British Colony to American Satellite? Australia and the USA during the Cold War.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 52.1 (2006): 64–79. Print.

  “NSC 162/2.” FAS: Federation of American Scientists. N.p., 30 Oct. 1953. Web. 27 Aug. 2011.

  Nachbar, John G., and Kevin Lause. Popular Culture: An Introductory Text. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992. Print.

  New American Standard Bible. The Lockman Foundation. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002. Print.

  O’Bannon, Rockne S. (Story), Keith R. A. DeCandido (Script), and Tommy Patterson (Penciler). Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2009. Print.

  O’Bannon, Rockne S. (Story), Keith R. A. DeCandido (Script), and Will Sliney (Artist). Farscape: Strange Detractors. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2009. Print.

  Plokhy, S. M. Yalta: the Price of Peace. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.

  Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Print.

  Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.” Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Aug. 2011.

  “The Terra Firma Transcript Archive.” Terra Firma: A Farscape Forum. Terra Firma, n.d. Web. 25 Aug. 2011.

  Into the Uncharted Territories

  Exploring the Nature of Evil

  Robert L. Lively

  In the closing sequence of The Peacekeeper Wars, John Crichton unleashes a cataclysmic weapon, the wormhole device, destroying the invading Scarran fleet along with a good deal of the Peacekeeper Armada. Dozens of ships are obliterated, and thousands of lives are lost. While it may appear on the surface that this Scarran/Peacekeeper confrontation is a monolithic battle between human-looking good guys and vaguely reptilian Scarran bad guys, a closer examination of the Farscape universe reveals that this type of interpretation is severely lacking. The series does not really set up the confrontation between these two species as a struggle of good against evil, and the conclusion in The Peacekeeper Wars does not suggest this either.

  The theme of good versus evil does not resonate in the Farscape universe because the series places the viewer into the realm of “Other.” In the premiere episode, we are introduced to a universe unlike our own. The viewer enters this world and must adapt to its strangeness just as John Crichton, the series protagonist, does. The disorientation in the pilot episode helps distance the viewer both literally and figuratively from earthly paradigms. As Jes Battis points out, “Both the show’s creator, Rockne O’Bannon, and the actor who plays Crichton—Ben Browder—have said in interview that Crichton is designed, as a character, to be the audience’s point of view” (23). The aliens we encounter also set us in the realm of the Other: the militaristic Peacekeepers and Aeryn Sun; D’Argo, the Luxan warrior; Zhaan, the Delvian Pa’u (priest); Rygel, the deposed Dominar of Hyneria; and the Leviathan Moya, a living ship. The puppets and animatronics of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop add to this disorientation with a myriad of nonhuman species. When Crichton arrives, he cannot even understand the languages he encounters until he is injected with nanites which cluster in the brain stem and allow all languages to be understood. The overall effect of the first episode “Premiere” (1.1) is to introduce us to the “Other.” So in examining the series, there is no reason to assume that the Farscape universe would follow a Judeo-Christian world view of good versus evil. The only developed religious views we see are Zhaan’s. As viewers, we must consider a different set of moral values concerning good and evil.

  Daryl Koehn’s impressive book, The Nature of Evil, discusses evil in light of two dominant ideologies, and thus may shed better light on events occurring in the Farscape series. The idea of evil in the west today is predicated on the belief of corrupted
free will. People who do evil are viewed as making the conscious choice to do evil. Their free will has been sullied; therefore, they choose to do evil. Koehn defines this as the Moral Tradition. Another tradition, not as well known to the west, is the Wisdom Tradition, defined by Koehn as evil manifested by the lack of self-awareness and self-identity.

  Using Koehn’s theories about the Moral Tradition and Wisdom Tradition, I argue that the series is not about Moralist good and evil. Rather, Farscape is about self-awareness and self-discovery. Farscape makes more sense interpreted through the lens of the Wisdom Tradition because the world-building does not create a galaxy where the Moral Tradition functions in a logical way. According to Huston Smith, the Moral Tradition and the Wisdom Tradition have been in competition for centuries (386). Although early Christianity and many Asian religions embraced the Wisdom Tradition over the Moral Tradition, our current Judeo-Christian frame for judging the nature of evil lies clearly in the Moral Tradition.

  Historically, Aristotle was one of the first to associate evil with voluntary human action. In his Ethics, Aristotle dismisses the idea that suffering can interfere with happiness. Only vice, a bad habit, or a voluntary corruption of choice deserves to be called evil. Aristotle argued that we become corrupted through laziness and unreasoned action. Aristotle assures his readers that corruption is expressed in the action of evil, since this shows the person doing ill has not deliberated on his or her actions, and thus has a defective will. Evil here is shown as an internal defect that must be punished, but this does not bring us closer to understanding evil. The early Church fathers, when they were reconciling Christianity with classical thought, adopted this doctrine. Evil then became a corruption of choice and free will.

  This view changed even further when dogmatic Church fathers started insisting that evil was a morally corrupting condition that caused humans to trespass and commit harm to others. “This view makes evil intentional and shifts our attention away from suffering” and toward bad action (Koehn 16). This world view was reaffirmed in the Enlightenment by Rousseau, who argued that humans should be punished only for the evil that they have caused. Calling an action evil should be reserved for human injustices (see Koehn 16–17). A tsunami would not qualify as evil, but a massacre of people would, since it depends upon human agency. We see this, in the Moral Tradition, as vice or sin.

  Philosophers in the Moral Tradition, such as Immanuel Kant, argue that “this corruption is identical to a failure to reason consistently and vigorously in a way that is publically intelligible” (Kant qtd. in Koehn 1). According to Moralists, this vice manifests itself in acts of violence or harm to others. They argue that evil is expressed through corrupted reason or will.1 This, I believe, is how we perceive evil today. We call tsunamis and floods “natural disasters”; we do not call them evil. We call killers and thieves evil because we view them as misusing their free will. In fact, when we raise our children, we often encourage them to do good by making “good choices.” We buy in to the cultural narrative in the attempt to cultivate “good” free will.

  The Wisdom Tradition rejects a lot of this mentality. The Wisdom Tradition views evil as a frustrated quality of unsatisfied desire. Aristotle’s view of evil makes no sense in light of Plato’s statement, “Nobody knowingly does evil” (qtd. in Koehn 1). The person doing evil does not see his or her actions as evil. Murder, torture, war, and slaughter may be bad things, but the people doing them may actually view themselves as positive forces for change, or even as “good guys.”

  The Wisdom Tradition views evil as the ignorance of the individual “to know thyself.” This ignorance may lead people to negatively affect other people, which is a fundamental difference with the Moralists’ claim that we knowingly do evil. An unstable self-identity may lead people to do evil, but they do not perceive their actions as such. Because society seldom promotes self-reflection, the identities constructed by individuals who hate some aspects of themselves go unexamined. Therefore, they may do bad things but be convinced they are doing nothing wrong. The illusion caused by frustration and pain of faultily constructed identity ultimately is the root of evil. According to Koehn, we justify our prosecution of wrongdoers by insisting that these offenders possess the self-knowledge needed to act virtuously and so are accountable for their vicious deeds. Aristotle, for example, explicitly denies that human beings can fail to know who they are: “also a person could not be ignorant of the agent; for how could he not know himself?” (5). I find this ironic in the sense that the Delphic Oracle of Ancient Greece cautioned seekers to “Know Thyself.” The notion that Oedipus could do evil for all the right reasons because he did not know himself rings hollow in Aristotle’s argument. The Wisdom Tradition gives nuance to human action beyond a black and white Moral Tradition argument.

  The idea of good and evil in the Farscape series should be read from the text of the Wisdom Tradition. The evil that occurs in the series generally derives, not from a corrupted will, but from unsatisfied desires and frustrated self-identities. This chapter will focus on understanding good and evil in the Farscape series. For all of the world-building in the series, the writers never fully explore the concept of good and evil. It would be reductive to see these cultures as reduced to “good guys” and “bad guys,” simply good vs. evil. If one analyzes Farscape through the lens of the Wisdom Tradition, a new perspective arises that evil is something that occurs from the characters’ inability to truly “know” themselves. Specifically, I will focus on the portrayal of John Crichton (human), Aeryn Sun (Sebacean), Scorpius (half Sebacean and half Scarran), and the Scarrans, Minister Ahkna and Emperor Staleek. It is only at the conclusion of The Peacekeeper Wars that the characters I focus on in the chapter truly know themselves because they each reach a point of knowledge and understanding of themselves.

  John Crichton: Pieces of a Fractured Hero

  Farscape can be analyzed as John Crichton’s readjustment of his moral compass. In the premiere episode of Farscape (1.1) before Crichton is to test his slingshot effect theory, he is shown interacting with his father with the pride and competition that inevitably arises between father and son. Crichton feels he lives in the shadow of his father, who is an accomplished astronaut himself. Crichton is sketched, as Koehn might say, as an individual whose personality is not edified. Crichton is pursuing his scientific theory, an event that will establish his identity as an astronaut and physicist that will equal his father. His spaceship, the Farscape module, begins the test to bounce off of the Earth’s atmosphere when he is sucked into a wormhole and deposited into another galaxy. In his eyes he has failed, and his identity becomes even less concrete and more fluid as he encounters the aliens on Moya, the living ship. As Crichton attempts to discover who he is in this new galaxy, he must adjust his morals; he must determine what is good and what is evil in an alien universe that does not understand the morality that he often displays. Crichton works through this uncertainty of identity and explores who he really is; however, he never really discovers this until the final moments of The Peacekeeper Wars when he detonates the wormhole device.

  Throughout the series, Crichton’s identity is continually fractured, making it difficult to find the real person. Crichton is torn between his earthly existence and the universe in the Uncharted Territories, where he is constantly challenged to examine himself. He is torn and seduced by the possibility of returning to earth. In “A Human Reaction” (1.16) Crichton believes he has returned to earth, but it is a clever ruse. While on “earth” Crichton remembers the xenophobia and petty politics of our world, and he begins to realize that he is torn between his former life and his new one. He cannot have his love, Aeryn, and his friends, such as D’Argo and Chiana, and his family on earth, too. His fractured personality is not a figurative statement. The pull toward earth is strong in Crichton; after all, it is his home. He returns to Earth twice in the series: once in the past, and once to warn Earth of what is out in space. On his last visit, he realizes he is a danger to the planet
and chooses to abandon his home world forever. The conflict in Crichton, between being the hero he wants to be in space and his urge to go home, fractures his psyche. How can he be two different people at the same time?

  In the series, this fracturing is literalized, and the viewers can see the potential for good and evil in Crichton. For instance, in “My Three Crichtons” (2.13), an energy orb lands in Moya, enveloping Crichton. The orb literally fractures Crichton into three personas, two of which are different evolutionary versions of Crichton: a caveman, hairy and bestial, and an evolved form, with an enlarged, bald cranium, looking somewhat like a giant, skeletal brain. The caveman represents emotion and the ability for compassion whereas the evolved form is pure intellect, cold and uncaring. These versions of Crichton challenge preconceptions of good and evil that the viewers and the crew must confront.

  This episode does a great job of showing the possibilities inherent in Crichton’s character. He is capable of both emotion and coldness. At first, the caveman version is hunted as a “creature,” while the evolved form is generally accepted into the crew. However, the perception of the inferior caveman is soon dispelled. Even though the caveman Crichton is unpredictable and sometimes violent with emotion, this version of John is connected to the crew of Moya through his passions. Chiana, for example, forms a bond with the caveman persona, and she points out to Crichton, “You think this guy’s nothing. He’s you. He’s warm. He’s sensitive. He’s everything I ever liked about you.” The evolved form is almost pure intellect removed from the connections to the crew and even emasculated as Aeryn notes when she comments, “For a start John has more hair—amongst other things. You going to blame that on being cold?” The evolved form does not care about emotion. He is purely quantitative. When the evolved Crichton tells Zhaan how much more capable he is than the other versions of Crichton, she responds, “I wonder if you can also see what you have lost? Your logic is firm, but it is cold.” The real John Crichton comes to appreciate his emotional side when confronting his evolved self. Both John and caveman Crichton are willing to sacrifice themselves for others, yet the evolved form is the coldly rational side of John the scientist who is beyond friendship—completely devoted to selfish pursuits of his own. The evolved form, however, has the intellectual capability to save Moya. When the orb sends a message to the crew that it will suck Moya into an alternate dimension unless it acquires a sample Crichton, several crew members want to send the caveman version to his death. John, however, seeks to find a way to save himself, or at least a version of himself, whereas the evolved Crichton easily condemns the caveman to death. Crichton tries to delineate himself from the others when he quips, “I’m widening my perspective. That’s what makes me, me.” This fractured identity of Crichton shows the viewer aspects of the character and furthers the theme of a character who does not completely know himself. In the end, the caveman shows the human ability to sacrifice, to do good, and he saves the crew when he knocks the evolved Crichton unconscious and carries him into the sphere. John Crichton believed that his evolved form would evolve his moral sense as well, but he was mistaken. The caveman Crichton showed a better sense of good and evil than his evolved counterpart. Near the end of the episode, John confides his lack of self-knowledge to D’Argo.