The Worlds of Farscape (6 page)

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 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 means of control collars. Much later, it is revealed that the Peacekeepers were originally human, taken from Earth around 25,000 B.C.E. by the Eidelons and altered to enforce and guard the peace negotiated by their benefactors (
Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars
[
PKW
]). This leads to what is perhaps the single most important fact about the majority of Peacekeeper personnel: their human appearance. Indeed, outwardly they look just like Crichton, and us. The Peacekeepers are both familiar and alien at once, and there is nothing about their society that we do not recognize from one period of human history or another.

Based upon the Peacekeepers' totalitarian political structure, the apparent total subservience of Sebacean society and economics to the military state, as well as the Peacekeepers' prejudicial racial policies, Jes Battis has written that the Peacekeeper political-military system “bears more than a passing resemblance to German Nazism” (Battis 164). This reading is supported both within the diegesis (“Kansas” 4.12), and by remarks made by executive producer Brian Henson (Henson). As Battis is careful to point out, however, there are some problems with this coding.

Though presented from the outset as racial purists, the Peacekeepers apparently remain open to mixed species and non–Sebacean individuals who display unusual skills or talents, particularly in the Science Military. Scorpius himself is an example of this, as are Linfer and Strappa, two humanoid aliens acting as lead scientists on Scorpius' wormhole research project in Season Three. Commandant Mele-On Grayza has undergone implantation of an alien gland into her chest, and her grayish complexion differs significantly from that of other Sebaceans, indicating that she may be of mixed heritage, yet she has achieved high rank and considerable political power within the Peacekeeper hierarchy. Clearly Peacekeeper prejudices, while undeniably systemic, can be set aside if the potential gain is considered great enough. The Peacekeepers also show themselves willing to ally with other races, such as the Luxans, when such alliances will advance their agenda, and although undoubtedly racist, there is no evidence that the Peacekeepers have ever practiced a policy of genocide.

Finally, totalitarian systems are not exclusive to any one political philosophy. The growth of such systems is a risk faced by any nation engaged in massive arms production. As Joseph Maiolo points out in
Cry Havoc,
his groundbreaking reexamination of the worldwide arms race between 1931–1941 C.E., “the liberal democracies struggled with the problem of how to arm themselves against the threat of total war without succumbing to totalitarianism,” because “no matter what type of regime or its military starting point, the [arms] race sent everyone down the same totalitarian track” (4). In the post–World War II world, Maiolo finds the same pressures at work in the United States:

The mounting cost of the U.S. nuclear and conventional force build-ups against [the U.S.S.R.] revealed a real anxiety among some Americans of inadvertently erecting a “garrison state.” Most prominent among them was President Eisenhower, who feared that the burden of an all-out armaments spree would crush a flourishing economy, and with it American liberties [403].

Bearing Peacekeeper history in mind, it is likely that the militarized totalitarian society that produced Officer Aeryn Sun is the result of literally millennia of sustained arms build-ups and war economies as the Peacekeepers struggled to fulfill the role given to them by the absent Eidelons. Taking into account the Peacekeepers' past reputation as upholders of “everything good” (“...Different Destinations” 3.5),
²
and their continued self-indoctrination as an organization that maintains order and harmony, the Peacekeepers begin to look less like Nazi Germany and more like Cold War America (“PK Tech Girl” 1.7).

This is particularly true when the United States is viewed through the lens of a small-power polity like Australia. The belief that after World War II Australia traded one set of imperial masters in Great Britain for another in the United States has “exerted a profound influence on media opinion and on popular and political leaders' attitudes” in Australia, and continues to pervade “much of the scholarly literature” on Australian policies during the Cold War (McLean 66). Although reliance on American protection against large power threats from the Soviet Union or China was an entirely rational policy on Australia's part,

there is no reason to conclude that as a result of these developments Australians grew more pro–American in sentiment or more inclined culturally to be subservient to the United States... When all was said and done, Australians, for all their sense of affinity with America, regarded it as a foreign country, in a way that was not true of Britain [73].

This is not to say that Australians are particularly anti–American, or that they see the United States as some sort of warmongering international bad-guy, but in terms of the strong Australian influence on
Farscape
as a whole, this small power lens is essential to an understanding of the Peacekeepers. During World War II, the Cold War, and after, the United States projected military power in the Pacific largely through naval forces organized around large aircraft carriers with advanced command, control, and intelligence capabilities. The Peacekeepers project power over vast interstellar distances through fleet groups centered on enormous vessels called command carriers, usually escorted by an array of smaller craft ranging in size from single-seat fighters to capital vessels. Press images of heavily armed American military forces in fatigues, helmets, goggles, and masks are uncomfortably echoed in the faceless infantry troops of the Peacekeepers, and Peacekeeper Special Forces troops share a reputation for frightening and deadly efficiency with units like the U.S. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon, and U.S. Army Delta Force. The parallels between the two are readily apparent. Furthermore, “from the Australian point of view the peculiar status of the United States was that it was
neither completely alien nor completely familiar
” (McLean 74) [emphasis mine]. In a very real way Americans are to Australians as the Peacekeepers are to John Crichton: familiar yet often disturbingly other.

Crichton functions not merely as the point of view of
Farscape
's largely American audience by virtue of being human, but also
specifically as an American
, as a conduit through which that audience experiences—at least in small part—the anxiety felt by Australia and other small powers when dealing with either Cold War superpower. Perhaps Crichton serves yet another purpose by allowing Australians to enjoy a bit of
schadenfreude
at America's expense, for no matter what he does throughout the series and mini-series his life is inextricably dominated by the policies and actions of the Scarrans and Peacekeepers, the superpowers which dominate
Farscape's
own interstellar cold war.

The Peacekeepers also resemble the Cold War United States in terms of racial policy. The United States ended racial chattel slavery in 1865, the last industrialized nation to do so. The armed forces were not racially integrated until 1949, while effective civil rights legislation was only passed in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and African-Americans and other minorities continue to suffer overt and covert discrimination at the time of writing (2011–12). In addition, and unlike the Peacekeepers, the United States does possess a history of genocide from its treatment of Native Americans, and during World War II interned almost all resident Japanese-American men, women, and children for the duration of the war. For most of its history, the face of the United States, like that of the Peacekeepers, was white, and while the Peacekeepers appear to be more egalitarian in their treatment of genders than the United States, it is telling that the highest ranking female Peacekeeper in the series, Commandant Mele-On Grayza, has found it necessary to be surgically altered to give her an advantage over males, has had to use sex to advance her career, and is still out-ranked by at least two grades by Grand Chancellor Maryk, a white male.

The Scarran Imperium is a far more mysterious, and more menacing, polity than even the Peacekeepers. For most of the series, the Scarrans are seen as individual operatives engaged in semi-covert operations and intelligence gathering. They first appear in the three episode arc “Look at the Princess,” where the Imperium's envoy to the Breakaway Colonies, Cargn, is attempting to manipulate the Colonies' royal succession in order to create a Scarran puppet state (2.10–2.12). Shortly thereafter, a Scarran operative abducts and interrogates Crichton in an attempt to determine why Scorpius is so interested in him (“Won't Get Fooled Again” 2.15). Later Crichton and D'Argo are menaced by a literal Scarran sleeper agent (“Season of Death” 3.1), and all of Moya's crew are threatened by yet another Scarran secret agent, Axikor, disguised as the leader of a band of Coreeshi bounty hunters (“I Shrink Therefore I Am” 4.8). Even when operating on a larger, more militant scale, as in “Infinite Possibilities: Parts I & II” (3.14–3.15), the Scarrans are careful to maintain a low profile and plausible deniability through the use of Charrid mercenaries and the mechanic Furlow until they believe they have achieved their goals.

Though Crichton manages one way or another to foil the Scarrans' nefarious schemes in each of these encounters, they nonetheless reveal that the Scarran Imperium possesses a well organized, highly efficient covert intelligence system. This system has infiltrated the Uncharted Territories deeply and widely enough to be able to take advantage of intelligence gathering opportunities as quickly as they occur. The network echoes that of the Soviet Committee for State Security, the notorious KGB, which
TIME Magazine
has called “the world's most effective intelligence gathering organization” (Kohan 6). The interrogation techniques used on Crichton are, given certain advances in technology, the same used by the KGB, namely “stimulants, hypnotics, and hallucinogenic agents” (Hilden).