The Worlds of Farscape Read Online Free PDF Page A

if only momentarily, what we might think of as “a way home.” What I want to suggest—and as I think those opening lines especially hint—is Farscape had from its very inception a fortuitous congruence between such cultish possibilities and parts of its narrative. Certainly, and rather paradoxically, its formulaic opening always forecast for viewers a non-formulaic potential: the sort of accidental situations, encounters, or paths that the best cult works consistently offer.
    I base this notion of the cult-as-accident—of the accidental discovery , accidental communication , and accidental path —largely on the work of the cultural critics Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer. Describing the sort of accidents that seem increasingly prevalent throughout our modern technological and thoroughly media-informed culture, one that is always speeding headlong into the future while disregarding the possible consequences of its speed (including surprise wormholes), they allow that accidents are simply inevitable, if often covered up or recast by the media as something else, something more familiar and less troubling. But they also argue that there is an important economy built into them, a payoff that accompanies any sense of failure or, in the case of a television series, one that never manages to reach a huge viewership. As they say, ultimately “the accident is positive” because “it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive,” in fact, “something absolutely necessary to knowledge” (63), perhaps even to our survival. Yet the payoff differs from one type of accident to another. For whereas an industrial accident, if properly reported and understood, might help us to avoid some catastrophic failure in the future, might keep us from repeating the same “mistake,” an aesthetic “accident” like a television series or film could well prime us to replicate the same experience, that is, to engage in cult-like behavior that fulfills another sort of need. It might well enable us, like Crichton, to find our way in those “Uncharted Territories” of life and so discover “a way home”—which, I would offer, is the real payoff of the cult experience.
    What I want to consider here, by way of helping us to understand this notion of cult status, is how a series like Farscape profitably evokes this sense of the accident. In some ways it is, after all, highly conventional, generically recalling the popular tradition of the space opera which, with its interplanetary settings, heroic figures, adventurous actions, and melodramatic situations, dominated the early and far-from-sophisticated science fiction television programming of the 1950s, typified by shows like Captain Video (1949–55), Space Patrol (1950–55), and Tom Corbet, Space Cadet (1950–55). 1 The trappings of that form, further developed and explored in series like Star Trek (1966–69), Blake’s 7 (1978–81), and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–81), have certainly become familiar and even predictable. However, Farscape also has much of the unconventional and unpredictable about it, as if it were seeking to overturn or “accident” our very expectations of the form. Its use of creations from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (notably Dominar Rygel XVI and Pilot); its elaborate visual effects, combining computer-generated imagery with its sophisticated puppetry; its creation of a living space ship, Moya, as a kind of central character (who, in the first season, even becomes pregnant and gives birth to a sentient warship); its repeated focus on—and depiction of—various alien sexual practices, seen especially with the characters D’Argo and Chiana; its emphasis on strong, even dominant female characters, like the Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun; and, its inversion of a key feature of most science