by Sherry Ginn
As time progresses we learn much of Chi’s past, and it is not very pretty. She is a thief who is willing to do anything to get what she wants or needs. Her extreme selfishness has landed the crew in trouble more than once. In Season One’s “A Bug’s Life” (1.18), Chiana sets an intelligent virus loose on the ship, thinking that the container holding it must contain valuables (else why guard it so well?). Her exposure to Moya’s crew has allowed her to discover hidden traits and talents that she never exhibited before. So, while others have viewed her as a slut, she has also been described as being wild, but with a heart of gold (“Home on the Remains” 2.7). Discussing that episode, and Chiana, in more detail, actor Gigi Edgley states:
I don’t think she means to be dishonest a load of the time, but when she gets into really hard situations, I think she’s trying to go about it the best way she can. When she’s in dire straits, she always resorts to using her body. In the second season, you see more of her battling: she’s never had anybody give a toss about her before.8
Although young, selfish, and apolitical, Chiana becomes committed to preventing Crichton’s wormhole knowledge from falling into Peacekeeper and Scarran hands.
Each of the women aboard Moya learned of her own strengths and limitations as the series continued and they learned about each other as well. They realized that they complemented each other in many ways, which served more than once to help the entire crew. Indeed there were several episodes that served to showcase the women’s actions. One of the best is “Bringing Home the Beacon” (4.16) in which all of the female crew land on a commerce planet looking for the means to protect Moya from long-range scans. While there, they discover that Scarran War Minister Ahkna and Grayza are working on a secret peace treaty between the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, although the Scarrans are really not serious. It is up to the women to learn all they can about the negotiations while obtaining the sensor detector and escaping detection themselves. They learn that they can rely upon one another and that they do not need the men along after all. The women of Moya have, as Barr would say, created a community of women, one that will partner with men, if necessary, but on their terms.
Heart of Darkness, Soul of Light
Zhaan is a 10th level Pa’u, or priest,9 a member of the peace-loving, spiritual Delvian race. Prior to events occurring on Farscape, Zhaan had murdered her lover because he planned to turn over control of their planet to the Peacekeepers. She had murdered him during a process called Unity, in which two people bind souls and minds, an extremely personal encounter, one beyond sexual. Zhaan’s mind and soul were almost destroyed because of that murder; however, she used her many cycles of incarceration in a Peacekeeper prison to heal herself. Nevertheless she could be ruthless if necessary, realizing that the darkness in her soul that allowed her to murder her lover would never be expunged. And, there were times when she had to use that darkness to help others (see my essay on relationships in this collection). Yet, she was not ruled by her darkness, rather Zhaan was a beautiful, caring, and spiritual being, as her Unity with Crichton reinforced (“Rhapsody in Blue” 1.12). Furthermore, in a subplot of the three-part story arc “Look at the Princess” in Season Two, Zhaan meets the Creators, the builders of the Leviathans. They test her in order to determine if she is worthy of being entrusted with Moya. This test leaves Zhaan more determined than ever to continue the Delvian Seek, “a search for perfect understanding and unity with all life” (“Rhapsody”).
Zhaan will eventually make the ultimate sacrifice for the crew, because she loves them all. Aeryn has a very difficult time dealing with Zhaan’s sacrifice given that Zhaan’s revival of Aeryn ultimately contributes to Zhaan’s death. Her companion Stark goes mad, later attempting revenge on Crichton (see Carty’s essay on Ben Browder as a writer in this collection). But even if Zhaan’s corporeal body is dead, her soul is alive in Unity and she stops Stark from harming Crichton (“John Quixote” 4.7). Zhaan belonged to the community of women created by those living aboard Moya; in certain respects she continues to watch over and guide them from the spiritual realm.
The Lonely One
Officer Aeryn Sun is a Sebacean by species and a Peacekeeper by birth and training. Unlike her fellow Peacekeepers Aeryn is the product of a mating based on love between her parents rather than the usual planned conception and birth. She learned the truth about her birth when she was a young girl, but never really knew whether a late-night visit by her mother, Xhalax Sun, was a dream. As punishment for the visit to her daughter and mating for love, Xhalax was given the choice of killing either her lover or her child. She obviously chose Aeryn’s father; however, the deed drove her into madness and she became an assassin. After Aeryn joins Moya’s crew, Xhalax is sent to re-capture her daughter and Aeryn is almost forced to kill her mother but is spared that ordeal by Crichton and Crais (“Relativity” 310). As Xhalax and Aeryn talk, at only their second meeting, Xhalax accuses Aeryn of being corrupted and a traitor to the Peacekeepers as well as an aberration. Aeryn replies:
My corruption began the moment I was conceived.... Don’t you see my independence comes from you anyway? I grew up wanting to be just like a woman I’d only seen once.... I am a part of you that wanted to be a rebel.... I am your child.
The scene is poignant because the two can never be anything to each other, but Aeryn is determined that things will be different for her child.
In the Season Four episode “Terra Firma” (4.13), when the crew travels to Earth, Crichton’s nephew Bobby interviews Aeryn. Later Crichton watches the tape of the interview after Aeryn’s capture by the Scarrans. In the interview Bobby asks Aeryn about her family and she tells him that Peacekeeper soldiers do not have families; they are expected to bond with their unit. When he asks her if she missed having a family, she replies, “only when I was exposed to it” (“A Constellation of Doubt” 4.17). During her captivity, Aeryn is tortured by the Scarrans; they want to know the identity of her child’s father. If Crichton is the father, then they can extract wormhole knowledge from the fetus’ DNA. Aeryn manages to survive the torture for some time, denying that the child is Crichton’s, but eventually she admits that she does not know the identity of the father—it could be Crichton. The Scarrans place her with a woman named Morrock whom they believe will extract the information from Aeryn as they bond as fellow prisoners. Morrock asks Aeryn if she has ever had a child. Aeryn replies no, Peacekeeper “soldiers seldom do [have children] unless they’re placed on a breeding roster and, in any case, it’s not the same as being a mother. That’s why I vowed I’d never have one that way.” Aeryn, of course, realizes that Morrock is actually a “plant,” but her reply is an honest reflection of her feeling about motherhood. When she gets a little stronger, Aeryn asks Morrock if she has any children. When Morrock says no, Aeryn kills her, saying, “Good, then I orphan no one” (“Prayer” 4.18).
Until Aeryn met Crichton and the others she planned to die in space, just as she had been born. In the “Premiere” episode (1.1), when Crichton tells the crew that they have to take Aeryn with them as they escape from the Commerce Planet, Aeryn refuses to go.
Aeryn is intensely proud of the fact that she can hold her own among any of her fellow soldiers, male or female. Being trapped aboard Moya and having to count on a crew of non–Peacekeepers for her survival at first was anathema to her instincts and training, but it forced her to grow as a person, to think in broader terms and to be better than she was before.10
Crichton has to remind her that, according to Peacekeeper High Command, she has now been irreversibly contaminated. Contact with unclassified life forms, of which Crichton is one, means death. When she still balks and tells Crichton, “It’s my duty, my breeding. Since birth, it’s what I am.” Crichton tells her, “You can be more.” She is slowly learning how much more she can be, but she is increasingly being forced to confront her past, as painful as it may be, and to negotiate her way through her past and her present to arrive at her future.11
Producer David K
emper has gone on record to exclaim, “On this show, I want to be afraid. I need to be unsettled.”12 Hence the fact that sometimes the characters do what you expect them to do, and other times they completely surprise you. For example, in the second season episode “Taking the Stone” (2.3), Chiana believes that her brother has died. No one appears to care or appreciate how she is feeling, so she steals Aeryn’s prowler and takes off to a planet nearby, the Royal Cemetery Planet. Aeryn, Crichton, and Rygel follow her only to find that Chiana had taken up with a local people calling themselves the Clansmen. Chiana, ever the amoralist, is attracted to the young Clansmen’s lifestyle of drugs and danger. They participate in a ritual called “taking the stone,” in which they jump into a subterranean pit lined with rocks. Surviving requires the use of a voice-activated sonic net, which catches the jumper prior to smashing into the bottom of the pit. Not every Clansman or woman survives the jump. In her extreme grief Chiana decides to take the stone. Crichton wants to talk Chi out of this dangerous act and take her back to Moya. Aeryn, on the other hand, tells Crichton to leave Chi alone and let her work it out by herself. In other words, in this episode Aeryn gets to be the insightful one, rather than the “pin-up girl for frontal assault,” says Crichton.
We learn very damaging information about Aeryn’s past in the episode “The Way We Weren’t” (2.5). It seems that Aeryn had been aboard Moya before, but did not recognize her. Her lover Velorek had been given the task of bonding Pilot to Moya. But first Moya’s original pilot had to be killed, and Aeryn was one of the squad assigned to the task. When her lover tells her that he has a secret plan, something he is hiding from Crais, Aeryn seizes the opportunity for advancement. She tells Captain Crais, thereby achieving her goal—prowler pilot. Crichton and the rest of the crew are horrified to learn of Aeryn’s role in the previous pilot’s death and in her betrayal of her lover. In this episode we are reminded of what Aeryn once was juxtaposed against what she is becoming.13 Indeed, this episode continues the developing history of each character in the series as each of the beings on Moya’s alien crew throughout Seasons One and Two are forced to confront the horrible things that they did prior to their sojourn on Moya.
Season Three episodes allow us to see Aeryn maturing even further, although we never see her resolve the guilt she feels over Zhaan’s death. When Zhaan revives Aeryn (“Season of Death” 3.1), Aeryn tells Crichton that she shouldn’t be here, to which he replies, “This is exactly where you should be. I love you.” And, even though she has never had a relationship that did not “end badly” (“The Way We Weren’t,” 2.5), she finally tells him that she loves him too. During Season Three Crichton is twinned (“Eat Me” 3.6) with one Crichton14 finally developing a sexual relationship with Aeryn that is truly built on equality and trust (probably a first on TV, with the possible exceptions of Sheridan and Delenn on Babylon 5 and Mulder and Scully on The X-Files). Unfortunately for her, Crichton-Black dies and she must confront another relationship that ends badly. Crichton-Green has the job of winning her all over again and the season ends with her leaving for good, but neglecting to tell Crichton that she is pregnant (albeit by the twin).
In one interview with Claudia Black by Joe Nazzaro15 the actor expressed delight over the ways in which Aeryn evolved over the course of the first three seasons of Farscape. “The first season was mostly establishing Aeryn as an action character, and since then, she’s developed into someone who’s crossed the line from being what we would think of as alien, to someone who’s a lot more human. So it’s opening up for me.” During the third season we finally see the sexual relationship between Crichton-Black and Aeryn consummated. But we also saw Crichton-Black die in her arms (“Infinite Possibilities Part II: Icarus Abides” 3.15), her slow descent and return from the madness of grief (“The Choice” 3.17), and her decision to follow Crichton-Green in his quest to stop Scorpius once and for all (“Fractures” 3.18). Aeryn has come a long way from her Peacekeeper upbringing, but she has not lost the skills that made her a successful soldier. Those skills were certainly needed in the trials ahead.
As for Claudia Black’s opinions about Aeryn Sun, they were decidedly mixed. At the 2001 Farscape Convention in California, Black had this to say about Aeryn:
It’s a privilege to be cast in strong female roles. I think [Aeryn] is actually damaged goods, so I reserve judgment as to whether she’s a positive role model. She does make herself available to loss and pain, so I think she’s a better role model now.16
What Black apparently does not realize is, that is precisely why Aeryn is so positive. As we have seen, Aeryn has acted in ways that we would think horrific. Yet she has overcome those actions, in effect repented of them, and created something new, beyond what she was. She is still not completely healed; this is evident in the way that she cannot accept Crichton’s love. At the end of Season Three, Crichton-Green asks her if she loves John Crichton, to forget that there were two and one died. Her answer is yes; however, she is still not ready to commit to the one that remains.
In some respects Season Four was not a good season for Aeryn. When she returns to Moya following a very long absence, she is with Scorpius (“Promises” 4.5). She tells Crichton that Scorpius saved her life and makes Crichton promise not to hurt Scorpius. Crichton agrees, but is puzzled and angered at Aeryn’s actions. Why should she trust Scorpius, he wonders, when she will not trust the man who loves her? We learn of some of Aeryn’s actions while she was separated from Crichton, and they were not pretty. She had worked as an assassin, contracting an almost fatal disease because of her actions (“Promises” 4.5). The Aeryn who returns has changed in many ways: she is certainly leaner, indicating a harsh existence away from Moya. She is also more confused than ever about her relationship with Crichton. It is true that Aeryn’s feelings for Crichton have changed over the course of three years. She once only felt contempt for him, gradually developing a sexual awareness of him and recognizing his beauty, until finally falling in love with him (see, for example, “PK Tech Girl” (1.7), “The Flax” (1.13), “A Human Reaction” (1.16), “The Locket” (2.16), “The Green Eyed Monster” (3.8)). But her breeding continually gets in the way: she has been taught not to trust anyone, especially a non–Peacekeeper. As Lavigne notes, the Aeryn of Season Four is less a partner with Crichton than one of his followers; she is more or less at his mercy, although thankfully her guns are never far away, except when she has been captured by their enemies, which happens quite a bit in this season. That did not make me very happy, since it made her a helpless victim, one that Crichton had to rescue. Nevertheless, even during her intense torture at the hands of the Scarrans, she did not give up or give in. Her training allowed her to withstand the torture and her love for Crichton gave her hope that he would find a way to rescue her, and he did.
One other negative point about Aeryn’s portrayal in Season Four concerns her makeup. When she returns to Moya after months away, she is much leaner than when she left; this is very evident in her face. Her hair is extremely long, the make-up artist’s way of indicating exactly how long she was gone. However, throughout Season Four she wore much more make-up, and more obvious make-up, than in the previous three seasons—iridescent eye shadow and pink lip-gloss, for example. I do not know why they sexed her up like that and I did not like it very much. However, considering the ways that she acted during this season, harder and willing to do anything to protect Crichton and his wormhole knowledge, it might have been a simple ploy by the producers to show the dichotomy in her character. She is a woman. Her torture released her fetus from stasis and she will soon be a mother. But she is still a soldier and will protect her lover, her friends, and her way of life from conquest by the Scarrans.
Ladies Rule!17
Farscape contained one of the most eclectic, exciting, and extraordinary groups of women ever depicted on a science fiction television series: women who were good and bad, positive and negative, and living on their own terms. Chiana was sexually promiscuous, young and playful, afra
id but devious, unscrupulous and untrustworthy, yet quite resourceful and resilient. She eventually learned to trust the others, but she did not lose the essence of what made her so infuriating to the rest of the crew. Zhaan was sensual and spiritual, a healer with a restrained violence that she constantly battled and mourned, aware that all beings are a combination of bipolar attributes that must be blended for completion. Jool and Sikozu found that, when removed from the comfort and safety of their scholarly existences, they had much to contribute to the future. Not every decision either made was positive; nevertheless, each made her choice of her future space, and the rest of Moya’s crew respected her right to make those decisions. Noranti continued to explore her spirituality and she and Chi became quite good buddies—Noranti’s view of herself as an 18-year-old girl probably helped that relationship immensely.
Aeryn was hardened and battle-scarred, once lonely and afraid of relationships beyond her own combat unit. She overcame her earlier socialization to embrace parts of herself that she never realized existed, and indeed would have deemed unacceptable in a Peacekeeper commando. Aeryn grew beyond her Peacekeeper training and heritage, she too embraced a future that she never considered possible. From the woman who was born in space and planned to die alone in space (“Nerve” 1.19), she was challenged by her contact with Moya’s crew to be more than she was, just as Crichton said. While some may not like the way that Aeryn’s story evolved with Crichton’s, that was the plan from the very beginning of the program, as soon as the producers saw the chemistry between Claudia Black and Ben Browder. Farscape was always a love story; Kemper never denied it, as did Chris Carter about Mulder and Scully. Since I am a heterosexual woman in a long-term egalitarian relationship, I am happy whenever I see any type of positive relationship presented on film. It happens so seldom. So I went along on Farscape for the wild ride and enjoyed all four cycles of the roller coaster.