The Worlds of Farscape by Sherry Ginn Read Free Book Online Page B

empires, and of the very real nations and non-state organizations of 20th and 21st century Earth.
    As with so much else in Farscape , the key to this perspective lies in the character of John Crichton. Series creator Rockne S. O’Bannon has stated that
[Crichton] represents you or me or any member of the audience. He’s seen all the same movies that we have and he’s got all the same cultural references, but the poor guy’s essentially dropped into a galaxy innumerable light years away. It gives us that wonderful, fascinating touchstone that we can all identify with [Bassom 28].
    Furthermore, as Jes Battis points out, Crichton is specifically coded as an American astronaut who “is never unmoored from the ideological frameworks that compose the United States” (163). These points are vital to Crichton’s interpretations of military-political structures he encounters in the wider galaxy.
    As Farscape posits a fictional Earth differing only slightly from our own, Crichton would have grown up with a world which was, until 1991–92, divided by the Cold War into two armed camps around the United States and the Soviet Union. Jack Crichton’s gift to John of a puzzle ring given to him by Yuri Gagarin 1 firmly places Crichton and his family in the world of the Cold War and the Space Race (“Premiere” 1.1). Crichton would also have seen the hoped-for “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War disappear in the face of new arms races and new international military tensions. Throughout the mid and late 1990s, nuclear weapons technology became available to both nation states and terrorist organizations through black markets originating in former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states, and in 1998 Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, increasing tensions with its nuclear neighbor, India. This personal and global history is at the core of the way Crichton—and the audience—views galactic politics at the far end of the wormhole.
    As they concern the Peacekeepers and Scarran Imperium, those politics have reached a point of tension just short of war when Crichton finds himself catapulted into their midst. In the Uncharted Territories, this hostility has already begun to erupt into open conflict in the form of skirmishes among the various forces deployed there by both sides (“Eat Me” 3.6). The two empires are also competing for political alliances and influence with various systems in the Uncharted Territories (“Look at the Princess, Parts I–III” 2.10–2.12), and both claim territory there, including sectors claimed where each disputes the other’s title (“Bringing Home the Beacon” 4.16). As a result of these conflicting interests, which both see as leading inevitably to war, the Peacekeepers and Scarrans have embarked upon an arms race by which each seeks a decisive advantage over the other.
    In between these two maneuvering superpowers are an unknown number of smaller polities, ranging from the Hynerian Empire and Luxan Territories to individual worlds like Sykar and Dam-Ba-Da, as well as billions of sentients, including Moya and her crew. In addition to his function as the viewpoint of the extradiegetic audience, Crichton also serves as the viewpoint and voice of these intradiegetic billions who live between and among the superpowers, and are all too often subject to their whims of policy. This is Cold War Earth writ large indeed, with Crichton and Company standing in for the “every-human” caught between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., circa 1945–1992.
    The first superpower encountered by Crichton and the audience is the Peacekeepers (“Premiere” 1.1). From the outset, the Peacekeepers are portrayed as militaristic, hierarchical, totalitarian, and technologically far in advance of Earth. We quickly learn that the Peacekeepers are also slavers, forcing the Leviathan living ships to serve their ends by