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eloquent.
    As noted above, Crichton is a product of those fifty years of brinksmanship and détente, of the “Evil Empire” and SDI. 5 The race to the wormhole weapon is literally a film that Crichton has already seen. “Welcome to my cold war!” he cries in “We’re So Screwed, Part II” (4.20) while wearing a thermonuclear bomb around his waist upon which he will later write “Hi There!” in a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic Doctor Strangelove . 6 Indeed, Strangelove becomes a theme during the end of Season Four and The Peacekeeper Wars mini-series, with Crichton attaching another nuclear bomb named “Dear John” to Scorpius in “Bad Timing” (4.22), 7 and Scorpius/Harvey mimicking Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove himself in The Peacekeeper Wars. The classic satire becomes a vital touchstone in the narrative as a reminder of the dangers of superweapon arms races.
    Certainly, as Joseph Maiolo reminds us, a troubled peace such as the Cold War on Earth or the Scarran-Peacekeeper standoff in Farscape is not the only probable outcome of an arms race, whether conventional or not:
Arms races are like waves of action and reaction that ripple through the international system. In periods of acute political tension, one state races ahead to win a military edge over its rivals, who in turn respond to the menace by arming too, and a perilous cycle of actions and reactions ensues, which ends either in war or in some sort of uneasy political-military stalemate [3].
    Maiolo also documents the trajectory of one such competition as it became “an independent, self-perpetuating and often overriding impersonal force that shaped events,” and ended in the largest, most horrific war in all of human history (2–3). The death toll of World War II is conservatively estimated at 61,000,000 men, women and children, exclusive of the tens of millions more who were wounded, displaced, imprisoned, or tortured as a result of the conflict. The pre-war arms race not only made this possible, but helped birth the horror.
    Fortunately, the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union resulted in the second of Maiolo’s probabilities, as—so far!—have the current nuclear races emerging between India, Pakistan, China, the Russian Federation, the United States, Israel, Iran, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea in their various permutations. The alternative would have made the casualty figures from the Second World War appear minuscule. The level of death and destruction resulting from a global conventional war becoming a global thermonuclear war would, in all probability, constitute a total extinction of the human race, and much, if not all of the rest of Earth’s flora and fauna. The point is worth belaboring here because it is the same one being made by the cast and crew of Farscape , particularly in Season Four and The Peacekeeper Wars .
    In a desperate gambit to buy time in which to develop a wormhole weapon, Peacekeeper High Command informs the Scarrans that they have already developed such a weapon and are putting it into production (“Losing Time” 3.9). Like Khrushchev’s similar ploy in 1957, however, the Peacekeepers wormhole-gap tactic is only partially successful (Barrass 113–15). The complete destruction of a Scarran dreadnaught under mysterious circumstances at Dam-Ba-Da in “Infinite Possibilities Part II: Icarus Abides” (3.15) inadvertently aids this deception, but by the time War Minister Ahkna and Commandant Grayza meet in Tormented Space, the lack of any hard evidence of such a weapon has all but convinced the Scarrans that the Peacekeepers are lying (“Bringing Home the Beacon” 4.16). Mere months after the failed peace talks at Katratzi, the Scarrans are making the final dispositions necessary for total war against the Peacekeepers, at least so Scorpius