The Worlds of Farscape (5 page)

Yet perhaps the most important element in that cult pattern is
Farscape
's development of what I have termed the
accidental path
. In his discussion of how cult films work, Bruce Kawin describes the encounter with such texts as always something of a chance encounter, an inadvertent intersection of paths, as if one were to go walking out “after midnight,” “searching for the films that are searching for me” (25). What
Farscape
envisions is just that sort of “searching” but on a grand scale, literally across the universe by way of both the accidental and intentional use of wormholes. While participating as an astronaut in conventional space exploration, Crichton is thrown into an unknown part of space, what is constantly referred to as the “Uncharted Territories,” and, as we have noted, he subsequently tries to discover a way of using wormholes to find “a way home.” Yet at the same time, he is constantly being chased—by the character Scorpius, by Peacekeeper forces, by the Scarran empire—by all those who would use whatever knowledge of wormholes he has in his head, including that which has subsequently been implanted there by the Ancients (an interdimensional race of advanced beings), for military means, for purposes of destruction or conquest. Crichton, consequently, realizes that what he knows about wormholes represents both his only hope to ever reach home again
and
the primary obstacle preventing him from realizing that goal. It is the sort of paradoxical situation that allows for elaborate plot complexities, but also one that speaks to
Farscape
's cult appeal, particularly its ability to bind up the sort of difficult choices and irrational situations that seem so much a part of the postmodern condition, while it also presents those choices and situations as escaping easy or convenient solutions. It is part of this characteristic that Jan Johnson-Smith observes when she describes what she finds to be the series' key attraction, its tendency for “stripping individual moments and events of narrow and short-term considerations, and replacing them with broader, more contextualized concerns” (165–66).

But the larger point of
Farscape
's wormhole conceit is a very simple one, the notion that the accident
is
destiny here. Or as Crichton notes in the episode “Bad Timing” (4.22), “Sometimes things don't happen quite the way you imagine.” Jes Battis notes how early on in the series Crichton's “primary concern is simply to return home. But over time his emotional attachments, as well as his political and ethical commitments, branch out considerably,” and he links that shifting focus to the series' efforts at raising “all kinds of interesting questions about technology, masculinity, and nationhood” (
Investigating
Farscape 3). Wormhole “technology” thus becomes a key stand-in for various contemporary Earth technologies—rocketry, nuclear power, even the internal combustion engine—that start out as tools of knowledge, exploration, and development but open onto dangerous and destructive applications that we must culturally negotiate as they begin to take us places that we had never foreseen. That sort of branching out is, of course, the series' own demonstration of the point Crichton makes, and a further clue to its appeal, as it consistently transports us where we might not have imagined, to our own “Uncharted Territories,” at least those that network television usually prefers not to explore.

Besides suggesting the rather unusual ambition or scope that has often been attributed to
Farscape
, then, that notion of a constant branching out also affords a different view of individual human direction, pointing up how seldom life follows a simple, plotted line, and rather how much is due to the chance occurrence, the unpredictable event. For example, as the series opens Crichton is helping to develop the “Farscape Project,” an international high-velocity deep-space exploration mission, when that wormhole deposits him in the middle of a space battle. There he collides with another ship, causing it to crash and bringing the Peacekeeper Crais, brother of the pilot killed in the crash, to vow that he will capture and kill Crichton. His planned future as an astronaut, following in the path set out by his father, Jack Crichton, is thus completely sidetracked by a series of quite literal accidents that open up a completely new future, one in which getting home gives way to figuring out how to make himself at home in this newly complex, seemingly constantly changing reality that he now inhabits. In fact, given the possibilities of time and dimensional travel that Crichton discovers over the course of the series, infinite realities begin to seem possible, even infinite personal destinies. That fact is especially thrust home when, in the “Kansas” episode (4.12), he finds that his presence in the past has accidentally altered Earth history so that his father is scheduled to helm the doomed
Challenger
shuttle mission—and his death would invariably affect John's life as well. Having to “fix” the past just so that he can go on to an unpredictable future, Crichton begins to realize the very contingent nature of his life.

More to the point, over the course of the series he gradually comes to recognize that the very concepts of home, family, and even self are all similarly contingent and subject to change. Home, finally, is not necessarily the Earth but some place still “uncharted.” His family is the one he is in the process of creating with his Sebacean mate Aeryn, the child she gives birth to in the middle of a firefight in
The Peacekeeper Wars
miniseries, and those “strange alien life forms” that have become his friends,
⁴
his support, even his saviors through all of his wanderings. What Crichton comes to realize is that his real task is becoming at peace with the sense of instability that this state of affairs brings, with the fact that destiny is not a carefully planned out scientific expedition like the Farscape Project on which he was working, but rather a constantly evolving set of paths that he must choose and/or to which he must adapt. If that sort of conception is challenging, if that view of human life as defined by accident demands a revisioning of our sense of human nature or of life's purpose, it is also a valuable challenge, one that again speaks directly to the show's cult appeal. For it reminds us not only of what might be found in that sort of “walking after midnight” that Kawin describes (25), but also of our own responsibility in the accident of destiny. Thus whereas Crichton, in the premier episode, tells his father, “I can't be your kind of hero,” he is challenged over the course of the series and finally must commit himself to a most fundamental human task, one with which anyone can identify: finding out just what “kind of hero” he
can
be. Such a task, I would suggest, sits well with a cult audience, with viewers who are looking for something, even if they are not quite sure what.

But this point recalls that sense of compensation that, Virilio and Lotringer assure us, is typically part of the economy of our accident-prone culture, or as Edward Tenner has described such situations, one of the ways in which “disaster is paradoxically creative” (327). As Virilio and Lotringer offer, “the accident of art is the accident of knowledge” (109), and in a series like
Farscape
with its clearly artistic intentions knowledge finally is the real payoff. Over its course the series drives home a great variety of truths, including the strength and leadership of women, the value of diverse cultures, the wisdom of compassion, the worth of other ways of knowing. Yet it seems to afford such knowledge almost accidentally, since in a world bound by conventions and constrained by certain ways of seeing—such as those typically afforded by network television and its popular genres—this may well be the only way we might encounter, or be willing to accept, such different, potentially subversive concepts. In this context we might consider the point that Crichton makes, rather off-handedly, in the very first episode when Aeryn hesitates to join the other escapees on Moya, insisting that she must remain true to her Peacekeeper training which forbids her from having compassion for others, questioning commands, or resisting the aims of the Peacekeepers—in this key instance, simply helping her companions escape their pursuers. He insists, however, that she “can be more,” that she can learn to be a better being. That she accepts that challenge forecasts the strength of character she will manifest throughout the series, but it also demonstrates one of the most important pieces of knowledge or messages we might find in a cult text, that of our abiding ability, despite all conditioning, to “escape” our own cultural bonds, not to do the
impossible
, but simply to “be” something better.

Finally, we might emphasize how this term “escape” seems to resonate tellingly with the series title and its cult appeal. For the title
Farscape
immediately suggests a text that is playing at extremes, affording a vision or horizon far beyond the normal range, if not of the
impossible
then certainly far beyond the boundaries typically set by our world and visualized in our mainstream texts. That sort of expanded vision only further underscores the series' cult potential, for as Kawin reminds us, the cult work is one that, by its very nature as a radically different sort of experience, usually situates itself at the margins of our culture, “a culture that eats and breathes and oils itself with compromise” (24), with the stuff of sameness, with the normative vision, in this case of conventional broadcast television. In contrast,
Farscape
as an unfolding text consistently suggests how we might look beyond that world, escape from that everyday realm to other possibilities. Through its group of “strange alien” types, thrown together by chance yet gradually transformed—
almost impossibly
, against their natures—into “friends,” it visualizes various ways out, as it takes us into and helps us explore the “Uncharted Territories” of culture and of self.

1.
For a detailed discussion of the early television space opera, see Wheeler Winston Dixon's essay “Tomorrowland TV: The Space Opera and Early Science Fiction Television.”

2.
TV Guide
first compiled this listing in 2004, shortly after
Farscape
was canceled. That it would still rank the show as one of the top cult series in 2007 suggests its continuing importance. See “
TV Guide
Names the Top Cult Shows Ever.”

3.
Bruce Kawin suggests that this sort of effect is the real key to a cult work's satisfaction. As he offers, “what this sacred text gives its worshippers, and what they are grateful for, is a mirror. It tells them something they realize as the truth, something they have been waiting to hear and to have validated” (24).

4.
In the series' later seasons, Crichton's introductory commentary adds a telling note, as he describes those “strange, alien life forms” on Moya as “my friends.”

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.

“
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.

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.