Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 108

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Popular Culture Review

a parental figure that is missing in his present surroundings. Moreover, he secretly
wants this parentless future to be nothing more than a nightmarish fantasy instead
o f a tangible reality— a message clearly vocalized in the Buck Rogers' opening
theme: “Far beyond this world of mine, far beyond my time. What kind of world
am 1 going to find? Will it be real or just all in my mind?” Unfortunately, Buck
awakens and finds himself back in the twenty-fifth century with his only memory
of the affair being one of his mother’s flowers from her dream garden that he
clasps anxiously in his hands.
Farscape's John Crichton wants to maintain a similar connection with
his past life. A continuing sequence throughout the series deals with John keeping
audio records of his adventures so that he can hopefully share them someday with
another parent, only this time it is his dad instead of his mom who is the significant
lifeline. He does this for the same reason that fictional characters keep running
diaries of their travels in distant lands (e.g., Jonathan Harker at Castle Dracula in
Transylvania): namely, to hold the recipient of the communications close to the
heart and never let him/her go from memory. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Farscape Web
Page (www.scifi.com/farscape) has a number of sites, in particular the Journey
Logs and Crichton’s Notes, that transcribe John’s cassette tapes to highly detailed
reports for a much larger audience than the astronaut originally intended. Interest
ingly, these versions read very much like Harker’s journals in the classic Dracula
novel.
Two Farscape teleplays from Seasons One and Two, respectively en
titled “A Human Reaction” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” take their cue from the
earlier Buck Rogers episode, “The Guardians.” In both stories, aliens pluck im
ages of the Earth from John Crichton’s mind and create a frightening return jour
ney for our Hero. “Human Reaction” has John discovering another wormhole that
transports him back to Earth, but the greeting he receives is hardly a cordial one.
His former associates Wilson and Cobb imprison him and fellow aliens Aeryn,
D’Argo, and Rygel. The pair is even responsible for the execution and subsequent
dissection of Rygel. John has no choice but to become a fugitive from the organi
zation that has betrayed him; with Aeryn as his only companion, they race into the
night hunted by his very own people. Then his “father,” retired pilot Jack Crichton
(Kent McCord), reveals exactly what has been transpiring: this has all been an
alien fabrication to determine what type of reception the extraterrestrials would
receive if they came to Earth. Now that they have obtained the human response
from John, the creatures continue to search the galaxy for a planet in which to
replenish their hive without interference from the residents. John’s closing remark
effectively sums up this first mental voyage, “I’m looking for a home too” (para
phrased from the Farscape CD-ROM Episode Guide).
The second journey, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” is an even more mind