On Watching <i>Farscape</i> in an Election Year

When you are living in the proverbial interesting times, the easiest and worst thing to do is nothing. The number of my fears is uncountable, and the scope of my ability to prevent those fears from coming to pass if they haven’t yet, or continuing to happen if they have, is very small. I am just one rickety lady with a mental illness and a lot of books. I was not designed to withstand a nonstop firehose of situations. My first-draft inclination—always, but especially in an election year—is to lie down on the ground and wait for the world to stop happening. And what I have discovered is that when the difference between doing nothing and doing something starts to feel so vanishingly tiny that nothing and despair are the preferable options, the best cure for what ails me is Farscape.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Farscape is a television program that aired on the Sci-Fi channel from 1999 to 2003. It’s about an astronaut named John Crichton who gets shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe, where he’s stuck on a ship (a living ship!) with a bunch of alien escaped prisoners. Tumblr user doctorharleenquinzell described the Farscape crew with searing accuracy as “a found family who loves and cares about each other but will also betray one another for a single corn chip.” They’re staggering through the galaxy half-assedly trying to keep themselves fed, watered, fueled up, and un-apprehended by space cops. They never have a nice day.

John Crichton, especially, never has a nice day. He is mentally and physically miserable at every moment and in every possible way. If it starts to look like he might have a nice day—for instance, if the radiantly beautiful ex–space cop Aeryn Sun condescends to teach him combat maneuvers and make out with him in his spaceship—you can be certain that he will soon be forced to endure a torturously painful procedure that will turn him into a marble statue for eighty years. He is being driven slowly mad by a voice in his head. He is so intensely despised by one of the two sentient ships in his life that the ship manufactures a fake sex tape just to ruin his day. He has not watched a football game or drunk a glass of milk in four years. But the main thing about John Crichton, and the reason I have been watching Farscape with the desperation of a drowning man swimming to land, is that he always has a next idea.

When I say that he always has a next idea, I do not want you to infer that his ideas are always good. They aren’t even usually good. We are not talking about a man who’s operating at a high level of competence. When he first comes aboard Moya, John does not know how to open doors. In the fourth episode, “Throne for a Loss,” as he and D’Argo and Aeryn are trying to rescue Rygel from kidnappers, John blows up their only gun because he doesn’t know how pulse weapons operate. Another time, he makes a snotty remark to the bad guys to show how unbothered he is (valid!), and only later does he realize that his snotty remark has ensured they’re going to devote all their resources to finding and conquering Earth. John Crichton loves his friends and he hates cops and he’s doing his best, but he does not know how to function in this world.

This is me. This is election years. One year I spent hours and hours writing postcards for a political candidate who turned out to be, like, pretty corrupt once in office. One time I spent my whole monthly charity budget on food for our community fridge and then there was a massive power outage and all the Go-gurts, milk, and tamales went bad. I can’t see the future; I can barely comprehend the present. I can’t keep waiting around to figure out the One Right Thing that will heal our shattered democracy and rebuild Grenada and undo the book bans and secure medical care for trans folks and ratify the ERA and end the wars in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan. All of us will die, and the world will end, and the heat death of the sun will occur before there will exist that One Right Thing.

John Crichton is so wildly outmatched by the world he finds himself in that if he waited until he had learned enough stuff to fix the problems he’s having, he and all his friends would be dead a hundred times over. This is why he never wastes a moment arguing with the universe about what’s real. Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock both taught me, very young, that you can make a problem unsolvable by first making it unbelievable. You won’t fight a giant that shows up in the supermarket because there are no such things as giants. You won’t stop the principal from putting your kids in a junior Iron Maiden because a principal wouldn’t do something so crazy. We can also look to the real world: You can’t stop encroaching fascism by pretending it isn’t encroaching and it isn’t fascism.

Nobody on Farscape has this problem. In the late second season, they finally acquire enough money that they won’t have to subsist on an exclusive diet of Saltines, but when they get the money into the ship’s hold, the money turns into ship-eating spiders. I admit that I would probably require at least a few minutes of adjusting to that truth before I could start thinking of a plan, especially considering that the plan they eventually arrive at is to burn the spiders to death by setting large portions of their ship—who, again, is a living person—on fire. Only once does a Farscape character try to insist that what’s happening (in this case, a shrink ray) can’t really be happening, and she receives a comprehensive dressing-down from Rygel:

Here’s what Farscape knows, and what I am trying to remember: There’s no One Right Thing. There’s just whatever you can do next. Whatever moves you further away from the bad outcome or closer to the good one. In season three’s “Season of Death,” John and D’Argo are being chased by an alien who is stronger and faster and better armed than they are. They have no hope of winning against it. But the weather outside is really, really awful, and strong fast well-armed aliens probably don’t like blizzards, either; so they go outside.

One plan at a time: Attend a city council meeting.

One plan at a time: Write postcards for swing state elections.

One plan at a time: Pester your elected officials by phone and by fax.

One plan at a time.