Inspired by 'Mika’s thread on Farscape, I figured I’d post a companion thread…
Here there be Spoilers, if you haven’t watched all four seasons, you may not want to go any further, significant plot and character spoilers below
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Setting aside Human morality and Scorpy’s interaction with Crichton, is Scorp really a bad guy?
He is half Scarran, was abused by his Scarran caretakers as a child, he knows how dangerous both scarrans and peacekeepers can be, but he believes that the PK are the lesser of two evils, and the galaxy would be better off without the influence of the Scarran Empire
He’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect his adoptive people, the Sebeceans, and by extension, other non-Scarran races
Are his means truly justified, given the threat of what Scarran rule would entail?
I tend to think he is a well meaning person, but his blind hatred of scarrans tends to blind him to some of the “side effects” of his obsession to protect Sebeceans
Is he a villain, not entirely, but he’s not a hero either, I’d say an antihero blinded by obsession
Are the Peacekeepers the lesser of two evils though? Life under Scarran rule hasn’t been adequately shown in the series. The Peacekeepers institutionalised racism and slavery has been shown on many occasions. What happened to Aeryn, Dargo and his wife, and the slaves that farmed the root that powers Peacekeeper weapons to name a few.
They seem about the same, we see Scorpius’s bio-mom and her husband as they set up a farming colony? Scarrans land and murder and rape the shit out of everything, why a lizard would have a penis or want to bone a human woman I leave to the imagination.
Initially the Peacekeepers were portrayed as Nazis with a thing about racial purity. They were very bad boys.
Later seasons introduced the Scarrans who took over (in the narrative / Story Arc) as the bad boys and, if I remember correctly, they were into genocide and wanted to wipe out all the other races unless they could be farmed for useful DNA.
By the end of the series Peacekeepers were the lessor of the two evils.
Trivia;
In S4 the head female Scarran, “the Hat Lady” as Crichton calls her, is played by Ben Browder’s wife, Francesca Mueller (IIRC), who also played one of the phase-shifted lizard like aliens that had stinging projectiles in their cheek flaps
…kinda gives another level to the scenes where Crichton is going out of his way to irritate those characters
I don’t remember the genocide part though it’s been a while since I watched the show. I do recall the Scarrans being a lot more brutal than the Peacekeepers. At the end of the show, when things escalated to open war, the Peacekeepers were losing pretty badly to the Scarrans. Scorpion probably knew this was going to be the outcome for a long time which makes his desperation to find an edge for the Peacekeepers understandable. Or maybe he’d have declared himself absolute ruler of the universe if he’d gotten what he wanted. He was pretty terrified when Chriton released the full power of the wormholes in the end though.
Scorpius was certainly an antagonist but I don’t see his role as outright villainy.
There just weren’t any conventional heroes and villains in Farscape.
Any of the Moya crew could and would screw over anybody in their way with very few scruples if they thought it would help achieve their goal. Some were just more obvious about it than others.
Crichton was kind of close to a stereotypical goody-goody in the first season. They changed that up in a big way.
True, and certainly how he was setup in the begining. He killed PK Tech Girl and would do anything, even threaten Earth, to get the wormhole technology.
However, they did try to take him down a path of…well, not redemption, but at least full explanation.
He’s a villain they made pure evil in the beginning, but later probably regretted they had made him kind of irredeemable.