The Worlds of Farscape by Sherry Ginn Read Free Book Online Page 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.
    â€œ 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