The Worlds of Farscape (7 page)

Even the self-aggrandizing motives of Scarran agents like Cargn and Axikor resemble those of KGB operatives as described in an internal CIA memo:

Personalities and the private connections of individual officers are often crucial to the success or failure of an operation—or a career. In many ways, the KGB is an organization made to order for the man who wants to claim all the glory for himself and put all the mistakes on the backs of his subordinates [Lambridge].

This structure also encourages competing power-blocks at upper levels such as those within the Scarran Hierarchy. There, powerful Scarrans like War Minister Ahkna seek to subvert the Imperium's intelligence resources to secure their own political advantage, much as Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin used the chairmanship of the KGB to further their political goals.

At the top of this often shadowy empire is the Emperor Staleek, who strides across the screen with the sartorial splendor of Sergei Eisenstein's
Ivan Grozny
and a brutal menace and cold intelligence worthy of Stalin himself. Always on guard against internal threats like Ahkna, Staleek is vitally concerned with achieving “power, acknowledgement of [his] personal intelligence, and to gain acceptance in the upper echelon of civilizations,” goals which would have been familiar to Russian leaders from Peter the Great to Dmitri Medvedev (
PKW)
. As S.M. Plokhy points out, when dealing with the Soviet Union,

U.S. and British diplomatic services ... had a long tradition of treating cultural difference between the two sides as evidence of [the U.S.S.R.'s] inferiority ... it was customary to suggest that they displayed Oriental features, torn between extremes of humanity and cruelty. They presumably inclined towards tyranny, possessed a peasant mentality, were disorganized, and could work only in short bursts of frantic activity [64].

The Scarrans are viewed similarly. Scorpius/Harvey dismisses them without the
crystherium utilia
flowers as “simple, brutish creatures” (“We're So Screwed, Part III: ‘La Bomba'” 4.21). Like the Soviets, the Scarrans are all too aware of this perception. As Staleek says, “at the peace table, we know how we're viewed: brutish, ignorant” (
PKW
). Such errors in judgment were to prove costly in both fact and fiction.

Like the Soviet Union, the Scarran Empire's apparently overwhelming strength protects a debilitating secret. For the Soviets the secret was a shrinking economy and industrial base which was unable to maintain both arms production and domestic growth, and finally incapable of doing either. For the Scarran Imperium it is the species' reliance on
crystherium utilia
, without which they apparently devolve, at least intellectually (“La Bomba”). Scarran territorial expansion is predicated on establishing and maintaining lines of supply to
crystherium
production points, and the destruction of the
crystherium
mother plant at Katratzi resulted in the Imperium being forced to abandon an entire sector of space until a new
crystherium
supply could be established (“Bad Timing” 4.22).

It is in the escalating arms race between the two empires, however, that
Farscape
's Cold War allegory blossoms. Like the Soviet Union, the Scarran Imperium seems to have concentrated its efforts towards building up its conventional forces, and as Scorpius reveals in “Losing Time” (3.9), this has been largely successful: “By latest estimates, Scarran warriors outnumber Peacekeeper soldiers ten to one ... if and when they attack—we will lose....”
³
Added to this numerical superiority is the undeniably superior individual toughness and physical endurance demonstrated by Scarrans as individuals, who are naturally resistant to pulse blasts, possess greater physical strength, have the ability to project a heat ray that is devastating to Sebaceans, and even lack external “mivonks”!
⁴
Likewise, the Soviet soldier was “considered a superior adversary prepared for the most demanding of combat circumstances” (Hertling 20). In either case, the foe is formidable.

In response to these advantages, as the series opens the Peacekeepers are investigating several possible avenues of weapons-research: potential bio-weapons like the intelligent virus in “A Bug's Life” (1.18), creating hybrid Leviathan warships (“The Hidden Memory” 1.20), and, of course, the possible military applications of wormholes (“Nerve” 1.19). Though the subject is never directly addressed, it seems logical to assume that the Peacekeepers have found themselves unable to match the Scarran quantitative advantage, and are therefore seeking a technological superiority which will counterbalance—or preferably negate—the Scarrans' conventional one. At a minimum, Peacekeeper High Command is seeking a weapon capable of deterring a Scarran attack through the threat of devastating retaliation, a strategy that bears more than a little resemblance to the nuclear stance of the United States and NATO in Western Europe.

Faced with a similar numerical inferiority to Soviet conventional forces in Europe, in 1953 the Eisenhower administration issued National Security Council document 162/2, which stated in part that “in the event of hostilities the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as any other munitions” (22). In other words, the U.S. was willing to counter any type of Soviet attack in Europe, whether conventional or nuclear, strategic or tactical, with nuclear weapons. As J. P. D. Dunbabin notes, “Deployment of [U.S.] tactical nuclear weapons began in 1954, and seemed admirably suited to remedy NATO's shortfall in conventional troops” (33). However, while Peacekeeper High Command may be hoping to create a similar deterrent in order to prevent war with the Scarrans, Scorpius—and later Commandant Grayza—hopes to achieve something greater: a super-weapon with which to eradicate the Scarran Imperium once and for all.

The wormhole weapon is Scorpius' ultimate fantasy, something so new and so powerful that the Scarrans stand no chance against it: a superweapon. Nor is Scorpius original or even particularly unusual in imagining a weapon so terribly powerful that its very existence will end war and guarantee its possessor the power to dictate the terms of eternal peace. Such ultimate weapons have been a staple of Western fiction since the early 19th century. The Industrial Revolution brought with it dreams of technological advancement which would put an end to war, even if only by making it too horrific to contemplate. Looking into the future in 1835, Tennyson

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
...
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world
[“Locksley Hall” 123–24, 127–28].

One hundred ten years later, in July of 1945, American president Harry S. Truman would pull a piece of paper from his wallet upon which he had written these lines as a boy, and read them to a reporter as they traveled to the Potsdam Conference in occupied Germany (Franklin 18). A few days later, on 16 July 1945, the first atomic weapon was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Instead of world peace Truman's wonder weapon ushered in almost fifty years of Cold War stalemate and never-ending arms manufacture. In the end, “overkill arsenals and bloated military-industrial complexes finally crippled the Soviet economy and blighted America's national infrastructure, stunted its social progress and militarized its culture” (Maiolo 404). Despite this, nation-states are still lining up to join the so-called Nuclear Club today. The same kind of strategic thinking that is reflected in the goals of Peacekeeper High Command and Emperor Staleek has lead to a growing proliferation of nuclear weapons on Earth in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, largely based upon the Cold War strategic theory that nuclear weapons provide an effective deterrent to attack. However, as Jacek Kugler writes, the view that deterrence actually works is questionable:

First, nuclear nations do not have an obvious and direct advantage over other nuclear or nonnuclear nations in extreme crises... Second, nuclear preponderance, which, logically, should enhance the likelihood of war, does not lead to demonstrably different or less stable behavior than nuclear parity... Finally, the most consistent reason for the absence of major war in the nuclear era seems to be the relative congruence of policy objectives among the nuclear powers, and this congruence cannot be directly traced to the buildup of nuclear arsenals [501].

When dealing with these issues in terms of the wormhole weapon and all of the schemes and counter schemes surrounding it,
Farscape
is at its most frustratingly eloquent.

As noted above, Crichton is a product of those fifty years of brinksmanship and détente, of the “Evil Empire” and SDI.
⁵
The race to the wormhole weapon is literally a film that Crichton has already seen. “Welcome to my cold war!” he cries in “We're So Screwed, Part II” (4.20) while wearing a thermonuclear bomb around his waist upon which he will later write “Hi There!” in a nod to Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic
Doctor Strangelove
.
⁶
Indeed,
Strangelove
becomes a theme during the end of Season Four and
The Peacekeeper Wars
mini-series, with Crichton attaching another nuclear bomb named “Dear John” to Scorpius in “Bad Timing” (4.22),
⁷
and Scorpius/Harvey mimicking Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove himself in
The Peacekeeper Wars.
The classic satire becomes a vital touchstone in the narrative as a reminder of the dangers of superweapon arms races.

Certainly, as Joseph Maiolo reminds us, a troubled peace such as the Cold War on Earth or the Scarran-Peacekeeper standoff in
Farscape
is not the only probable outcome of an arms race, whether conventional or not:

Arms races are like waves of action and reaction that ripple through the international system. In periods of acute political tension, one state races ahead to win a military edge over its rivals, who in turn respond to the menace by arming too, and a perilous cycle of actions and reactions ensues, which ends either in war or in some sort of uneasy political-military stalemate [3].

Maiolo also documents the trajectory of one such competition as it became “an independent, self-perpetuating and often overriding impersonal force that shaped events,” and ended in the largest, most horrific war in all of human history (2–3). The death toll of World War II is conservatively estimated at 61,000,000 men, women and children, exclusive of the tens of millions more who were wounded, displaced, imprisoned, or tortured as a result of the conflict. The pre-war arms race not only made this possible, but helped birth the horror.

Fortunately, the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union resulted in the second of Maiolo's probabilities, as—so far!—have the current nuclear races emerging between India, Pakistan, China, the Russian Federation, the United States, Israel, Iran, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea in their various permutations. The alternative would have made the casualty figures from the Second World War appear minuscule. The level of death and destruction resulting from a global conventional war becoming a global thermonuclear war would, in all probability, constitute a total extinction of the human race, and much, if not all of the rest of Earth's flora and fauna. The point is worth belaboring here because it is the same one being made by the cast and crew of
Farscape
, particularly in Season Four and
The Peacekeeper Wars
.

In a desperate gambit to buy time in which to develop a wormhole weapon, Peacekeeper High Command informs the Scarrans that they have already developed such a weapon and are putting it into production (“Losing Time” 3.9). Like Khrushchev's similar ploy in 1957, however, the Peacekeepers wormhole-gap tactic is only partially successful (Barrass 113–15). The complete destruction of a Scarran dreadnaught under mysterious circumstances at Dam-Ba-Da in “Infinite Possibilities Part II: Icarus Abides” (3.15) inadvertently aids this deception, but by the time War Minister Ahkna and Commandant Grayza meet in Tormented Space, the lack of any hard evidence of such a weapon has all but convinced the Scarrans that the Peacekeepers are lying (“Bringing Home the Beacon” 4.16). Mere months after the failed peace talks at Katratzi, the Scarrans are making the final dispositions necessary for total war against the Peacekeepers, at least so Scorpius would have it believed. The Scarrans' true intentions soon become irrelevant as, in yet another nod to
Dr. Strangelove
, Scorpius acts as a kind of galactic General Jack D. Ripper and starts the war himself.

Thus, the outcome of the Scarran-Peacekeeper arms race is the Peacekeeper War. Caught in the middle of it are Crichton, Aeryn, their unborn son, their friends, and every other sentient being in the affected regions of space, most of whom would likely agree with Crichton when he tells Scorpius, “I don't care about the things you care about. Peacekeepers rule the Scarrans. Scarrans rule the Peacekeepers. Let them rule together” (“A Constellation of Doubt” 4.17). It is a sentiment well known to the generations who lived during the Cold War and who faced the potential consequences of the Soviet and American contest for world leadership. Through Crichton,
Farscape
asks with Gandhi: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?” (377). No difference. No difference at all.

Whether the Peacekeepers win or the Scarrans, the results will be the same for the mass of beings caught in their war: destruction, death, and misery.
Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars
shows this unflinchingly through a series of local events that serve to bring those larger consequences home to the audience. Jool and the Temple of Arnessk with its ancient priesthood devoted to peace are destroyed by a Scarran missile utilizing similar technology to modern ICBMs.
⁸
Such would likely be the fate of the 2200-year-old Hindu temple of Shankaracharya and its priests in Kashmir should India and Pakistan ever unleash their nuclear arsenals against one another. The descendants of the Arnessk priesthood, the Eidelons of Qujaga, also become victims of the war, as their long hidden city is ravaged to ruins by the running battle between Peacekeepers and Scarrans, and their entire planet is eaten by the wormhole weapon itself (
PKW
). Imagine Sarajevo if after four years of brutal siege the Serbs had possessed nuclear weapons and decided to eradicate the stubborn city and its surviving hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants. The message is as clear and ancient as the Kikuyu proverb: “when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers” (Traditional).