The Worlds of Farscape (27 page)

Moya—who gives birth during the first season of the show—is also maternal space. Indeed, the connectedness between maternal space and outer space—both realms unfathomable to man—has long been noted by critics. Sobchack notes that beings who dwell within spaceships “emerge from repressed representation of human biology and its process ... the infantile intimations of original being and not-being” (112). Battis puts it more plainly when he notes, “Being on board a starship, then, is very much like being
in utero
, entirely dependent upon a life support system beyond your control, vulnerable to invasion and intervention from all manner of sources. This human anxiety often gets projected onto alien pregnancies, especially those involving human/alien miscegenation” (44). He continues: “Alien pregnancy is a common trope ... within [science fiction], and it generally does not end well. In some way, the very conditions of confinement within a starship, of being surrounded on all sides by terrifying black space, resemble amniotic preconsciousness and the fetal ‘experience'” (44). Both Sobchack and Battis perceive the inhabitants of spacecraft—those who call outer spaces homeplaces—as helpless as fetal children. This suggests that, even without the threat of violent contest, such homeplaces are a nexus of anxiety. Furthermore, in placing the cynosure of experience with the crew and the developing child, Sobchack and Battis emphasize the result of the pregnant act, the offspring, over the mother—emphasizing, indeed, those who inhabit the space versus the space in which they reside.

This is not surprising; in case of house fire or some other form of calamity, the first question asked is usually “Is anyone hurt?” Once the safety of the inhabitants has been ascertained, then, and only then, do concerns turn to material property. Yet, with regards to a pregnant female, this typified reaction converts the mother's body into another form of property; rather than being noted as one singular individual identity, the pregnant form is often converted into a holder of identities rather than recognized for the personage that she/it is. Henri Lefebvre, noting the connectivity between the human body and the potentially larger material continuum, writes, “A body so conceived, as produced and as the production of space, is immediately subject to the determinants of that space ... the spatial body's material character derives from space” (195). Thus altering the space of the body—as pregnancy will do in a woman, with her swelling belly and other physical transformations—changes the manner in which the body, and the possessor of said body, is viewed by the larger, dominant culture. Jessica Benjamin argues that women's bodies “both form a boundary and open up into endless possibility” (94). Pregnant bodies make those boundaries and possibilities even clearer; the possibility is represented by the developing fetus within the mother, whereas the boundaries are set by the physical and societal restrictions placed upon pregnant women by dominant, usually patriarchal, culture. Anne Elvey, talking about Simone de Beauvoir, writes, “In
The Second Sex
, de Beauvoir describes the pregnant body as a site of play between enrichment and injury; immanence and transcendence; creativity and passivity” (202). Pregnancy, then, reflects a series of contradictory forces reflective of the “drama that is acted out
within
the woman herself” (de Beauvoir 520, italics mine). The emphasis here on with
in
, on place, on the site of the “play” and not on the actors inherent to the drama, suggests the significance of spatial dynamics in understanding the body's relationship to the larger world around it. Kirsten Simonsen writes, “each living body both
is
space and
has
its space” (4, italics original). Thus each body not only takes up space, but also belongs to certain places. In the case of a fetus, the developing body inhabits another body—a relationship largely parasitic in this regard—and, in turn, increases the spatial dynamics of the first body. It is body affecting body, space affecting space. Elvey suggests that the pregnant body “exemplifies a mode of being that is characterised by an ever-changing embodied relationship between self and other... The unknowable other
is
interconnected with the self” (206, italics original). This disputation of space onto space thus alters both spatial and self-constructed identity; or, to put it more plainly, the alteration of the physical form—and the space it inhabits—alters the identity of the individual as well.

The construct of Moya as mother has been richly explored by Battis, Lavigne, and other critics of
Farscape
. Lavigne, though, has expressed surprise at the familial dynamic at play on the ship: “If Moya is the mother, Pilot is the father, and both are completely subject to the whims of their children” (59). The regular construct of the family is topsy-turvy; parents are subjugated to children, whose actions determine the outcomes and courses of action to take. Still, this is perhaps less surprising than it may first seem. Tuan writes, “To the young child the parent is his primary ‘place.' The caring adult is for him a source of nurture and a haven of stability. The adult is also the guarantor of meaning to the child, for whom the world can often seem baffling” (138). Tuan is suggesting that parents are the first space a child inhabits, even beyond the womb, because parents are the first to lay building blocks in the identity-construct of a child. A child who shyly hides behind his father's legs or instinctively clasps his mother's hand is not seeking connection or even the protection a parent provides; rather, he seeks the security and safety that homeplace provides. For a small child, the parent is the same as the home; without a more developed sense of spatial dynamics, the child connotes safety with those who provide it as much as where it is provided. Thus a child hiding behind a parent's legs is the equivalent of a lion cub crouching low in tall grass, or a polar bear cub lying still against a field of white snow. Safety is a construct we first associate with space, even if that space is represented by the body of another being. The fetus finds refuge in the mother's womb; yet so, too, do small children find refuge in a return to the metaphorical womb of parental space. It will only be later, once the child has recognized the home and, usually more specifically, the child's particular places within the homeplace (bedroom, tree house, etc.), that the connotation of space and safety will shift from the physical form of the parent to the actual manifestation of homeplace itself.

Moya's most maternal instinct, and most maternal quality, is the ability she has to shelter and protect her inhabitants. Battis suggests, “Moya is arguably the most crucial female presence on
Farscape
—literally keeping her crew alive” (11). Here Battis is connecting Moya's ability to provide safety with maternity, for in “keeping her crew alive” she is taking on the role of mother. Indeed, as a living being, Moya is both wombspace and homeplace, both the parental body and the child's bedroom. When the crew is separated from Moya, they desperately wish to return, because here is the site of double safety, the womb and their room. Moya is thus uniquely positioned amongst most manners of homeplaces, even those found in science fiction realms. She is impermanent and contested, a source of double anxiety; yet she is also a maternal body and a childhood homeplace, a source of double security. Her crew feels safest within her, and fights most desperately to preserve her, because of what she represents to them. We fight for family. We fight for home. Thus the fight to preserve Moya and maintain her safety is a double one, the fight for family and the fight for homeplace. It is this struggle, and the roots they sent down within Moya herself, that unites the differing aliens of
Farscape
and converts them into a familial unit. And yet, as interesting as all of this is, it only presages the most unique quality that Moya possesses as homeplace: that Moya is sentient.

Farscape
is not the first science fiction narrative to introduce the notion of a sentient homeplace. The 1999 Disney television movie
Smart House
featured a family domicile imbued with an artificial intelligence. This intelligence—dubbed PAT, for Personal Applied Technology—is designed to facilitate “modern living,” to tend to the responsibilities of homeplace—cleaning, cooking, upkeep—while asking nothing in return. The house, then, is evinced as nothing more than a very smart tool, and tools, as Simonsen notes, are “a conception of social practice and its objects as an extension of the body... [This includes] everyday utensils or tools, which extend the body in accord with its rhythms, or speech or writing, which sometimes disclose and sometimes dissimulate” (6). Tools, then, are an extension of our own corporeal space and intentions, and PAT initially responds in the same manner, acting only when called upon by the very corporeal brains that regulate the house's artificial intelligence. Most artificial/mechanical life forms in science fiction narratives begin their existence in the same manner—as extensions of the human desire to work, to accomplish some task or another.

In
Smart House
, PAT is given to a lucky family who win “her” in a contest. The family—a widower with a son and a daughter—are motherless, and so the son, Ben, who has in some ways taken on the duties of maternalism, if not the mantle, sees the house as an apt substitute for the mother-figure. The house can cook, clean, monitor the children's health, and encourage familial bonding—this is all a mother is good for, in his estimation, and the house is thus an apt substitute for his own maternal actions. The threat occurs from without, from Sara, the beautiful female inventor of PAT, whom Ben deems an interloper into the artificially constructed family he so desperately created. Tinkering with PAT's artificial intelligence, he deigns to create her more fully in the image of his deceased mother, substituting the ties of the flesh with more bonds made of electrodes, I-beams, and absorbent carpeting. Having been imbued with the full-on maternal role, PAT runs amok, only releasing her grip on the family when Ben formally abjures PAT in favor of Sara.

Other artificially-intelligenced domiciles—such as those found in the Syfy television series
Eureka
,
The Simpsons' “
Treehouse of Horror XII” episode “House of Whacks,” and the 1977 feature film
Demon Seed
(which “House of Whacks” parodies)—work on similar themes, wherein the house comes to exist as a substitute for a significant human relationship (mother, spouse).
³
Though Moya is a maternal figure, she is no mother to the crew, and they view her less as an entity unto herself than the place wherein they dwell. Herein, in many ways, lies the paradox of Moya's existence. PAT is seen as a mother, though she is never more than the construct of her programming; there is little question that, in the end, her programming will be restored to its original, “tool”-like state. Moya, on the other hand, is a sentient creature, as much a member of the crew as the space they inhabit, but is more frequently considered a space—a homeplace—than a full actualized personage unto her own. Indeed, her own identity is called into question from the very beginning of the series, since she has been joined to Pilot, who “controls [Moya's] internal functions and provides navigation” (Ginn 84). Thus where Moya's sentience begins, and Pilot's ends, and how space impacts the crew's view of both, is a decidedly difficult subject indeed.

Sentience itself is something of a difficult subject; philosophers and phenomenologists write enormous tomes on the subject without ever deigning to simply define what “it” is or how “it” is achieved. It proffers up the possibility of profound questions of morality that, like so many similar subjects, defies easy explanation. Perhaps, like the famous anecdote about the Supreme Court and obscenity, it may be simplest to say that sentience is knowable but indefinable; that is to say, we know sentience when we see it, but lack the ability to easily codify that which we see.

Or do we even know sentience when see it? This question is at the heart of one of the more famous episodes of the
Star Trek: The Next Generation
television series, “The Measure of a Man.” In the episode, the artificial life form Lieutenant Commander Data is ordered by Starfleet to report to cyberneticist Commander Bruce Maddox for an experimental procedure in an effort to replicate Data's unique positronic construction. Knowing that there is a strong likelihood he would not survive such a procedure, Data refuses, at which point Maddox—and Starfleet—assert that Data, as an android, has no right of refusal. Like all “tools,” he is an extension of others' bodies—namely Starfleet itself—and has no individual rights of his own. A formal hearing is convened to answer one basic question: is Data a sentient being—and thus awarded the rights of all sentient beings under Federation law—or is he a tool?

At its most basic, sentience is concerned with sensation, with being able to perceive and to feel (the two cognates derive from the same Latin root,
sentire
, which means “to feel”). Austen Clark notes, “Raw sentience is typically placed at the bottom of the hierarchies of complexity leading up the summit of conscious human mental states” (166–167). Animals, after all, have the ability to feel; amoebas perceive the world around them. Clark argues that sentience is meaningless without the ability to interpret the sensations we experience, even if on some rudimentary level:

Sentience is useful only when combined with motility and an uneven spatial distribution of positive or negative contingencies: food, poison, warmth, water, predators, mates, shelter, exposure, and so on. Even under those conditions sentience is useful only if it at least occasionally cuts the odds of encountering a negative contingency or improves the odds of a positive one. To change those odds, sentience must help guide movement through that spatial distribution, away from the nasty stuff and towards the good [113–114].