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as he resolves to struggle even in the face of apparently impossible odds. His immersion in, yet ironic detachment from this strange universe, in fact, becomes evocative of our own cultural situation. This accidental recognition that others do speak the same language as we do, that we share certain touchstones and interpretations, thus becomes another crucial part of the cult-ural glue that binds audiences to the series. 3
    Yet perhaps the most important element in that cult pattern is Farscape ’s development of what I have termed the accidental path . In his discussion of how cult films work, Bruce Kawin describes the encounter with such texts as always something of a chance encounter, an inadvertent intersection of paths, as if one were to go walking out “after midnight,” “searching for the films that are searching for me” (25). What Farscape envisions is just that sort of “searching” but on a grand scale, literally across the universe by way of both the accidental and intentional use of wormholes. While participating as an astronaut in conventional space exploration, Crichton is thrown into an unknown part of space, what is constantly referred to as the “Uncharted Territories,” and, as we have noted, he subsequently tries to discover a way of using wormholes to find “a way home.” Yet at the same time, he is constantly being chased—by the character Scorpius, by Peacekeeper forces, by the Scarran empire—by all those who would use whatever knowledge of wormholes he has in his head, including that which has subsequently been implanted there by the Ancients (an interdimensional race of advanced beings), for military means, for purposes of destruction or conquest. Crichton, consequently, realizes that what he knows about wormholes represents both his only hope to ever reach home again and the primary obstacle preventing him from realizing that goal. It is the sort of paradoxical situation that allows for elaborate plot complexities, but also one that speaks to Farscape ’s cult appeal, particularly its ability to bind up the sort of difficult choices and irrational situations that seem so much a part of the postmodern condition, while it also presents those choices and situations as escaping easy or convenient solutions. It is part of this characteristic that Jan Johnson-Smith observes when she describes what she finds to be the series’ key attraction, its tendency for “stripping individual moments and events of narrow and short-term considerations, and replacing them with broader, more contextualized concerns” (165–66).
    But the larger point of Farscape ’s wormhole conceit is a very simple one, the notion that the accident is destiny here. Or as Crichton notes in the episode “Bad Timing” (4.22), “Sometimes things don’t happen quite the way you imagine.” Jes Battis notes how early on in the series Crichton’s “primary concern is simply to return home. But over time his emotional attachments, as well as his political and ethical commitments, branch out considerably,” and he links that shifting focus to the series’ efforts at raising “all kinds of interesting questions about technology, masculinity, and nationhood” ( Investigating Farscape 3). Wormhole “technology” thus becomes a key stand-in for various contemporary Earth technologies—rocketry, nuclear power, even the internal combustion engine—that start out as tools of knowledge, exploration, and development but open onto dangerous and destructive applications that we must culturally negotiate as they begin to take us places that we had never foreseen. That sort of branching out is, of course, the series’ own demonstration of the point Crichton makes, and a further clue to its appeal, as it consistently transports us where we might not have imagined, to our own “Uncharted