Free The Worlds of Farscape by Sherry Ginn

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).
    At the center of the final Peacekeeper-Scarran arms race and the Peacekeeper War are John Crichton and the wormhole weapon. At first glance this ultimate weapon of mass destruction (WMD) seems a fairly straightforward symbol of modern nuclear weapons in its vast and indiscriminate destructive power, as indeed it is. In terms of Farscape ’s Cold War metaphor, the wormhole weapon is the reality behind all of the posturing, scheming, manipulation, and brinksmanship executed by both empires throughout the series, as the reality of multi-megaton nuclear weapons lies behind the decades of similarly convoluted maneuvers practiced by the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 to 1992 and of the nuclear powers into the present day. The unlearned moral in both instances is that if one plays with fire one will eventually be burned. Only instead of fingertips or even single individuals, it is entire planets ( our planet) which will be consumed, and entire sentient species ( Homo sapiens sapiens ) that will be exterminated.
    Behind the wormhole weapon’s nuclear metaphor, however, lies a larger and more frightening symbolism. It must be remembered that the development of nuclear weapons did not stop with the atomic bomb. Before the Second World War had ended, Manhattan Project scientists were researching more powerful hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bombs (Rhodes 70). By 1955 both superpowers had tested such weapons. In 1978, facing a renewed Soviet advantage in conventional armored forces in Europe and despite