Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 110
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Popular Culture Review
The sexual tension manifested between the two characters is fascinating to watch,
even if it is only for a few minutes’ duration. Buck eventually rescues Wilma from
the nasty vampire and sends the alien’s shuttle directly into the heart of a star.
When Wilma returns to her normal mindset, all she can say is that she “feels so
ashamed” for expressing herself in a less than “prim and proper” fashion. It is
Wilma’s admission of her latent feelings for Buck, however, that keeps the con
nection going between the Hero and Heroine for the rest of the season. By Year
One’s final two-parter, “Flight of the War Witch,” Buck has succeeded in estab
lishing the community he always thought would be in the past, but instead has
been right under his very nose in the twentieth century timeline. When he says
goodbye to Wilma before venturing out to explore new worlds in the hyper-universe, she admits just how much she loves and needs him to make her life com
plete. Samuel Maronie’s and Karen Willson’s interviews with the stars and direc
tors on the set suggest that Buck’s farewell was the favorite scene of the entire
series, chiefly because it showed that Wilma treated him as a valued colleague that
she would miss sorely if anything tragic would ever remove him from her sphere
o f contact (37, 54).
John Crichton and Aeryn Sun share a related, evolving friendship on
Farscape. A techno-Gothic tale adapted from the Mary Shelley Frankenstein text,
entitled “DNA Mad Scientist,” has Aeryn undergoing a series of ghastly experi
ments in which her entire body is transformed into a new life form by the evil
geneticist Namtar (Julian Garner). Like Buck Rogers in “Space Vampire,” John
has to place his life on the line to free Aeryn from Namtar (which he does by the
episode’s conclusion). The lingering attraction between the two reaches a new
stage in “The Flax.” As John and Aeryn are experiencing the final throes of oxy
gen deprivation in their shuttle, they literally leap on each other similar to a pair of
sexually-charged adolescents. Krafchin remarks that the scene was originally written
as nothing more than “a coy embrace,” but it was altered because the writers wanted
Aeryn to open up in a rare moment on the show (38). Another of these rare mo
ments can be found in “A Human Reaction.” When it looks like his world is falling
apart, the despondent John actually initiates the long-awaited kiss with a some
what willing Aeryn. There is some question as to whether the two then sleep to
gether as the scene shifts to morning and no mention is made by either party of the
previous night’s incident. Even in the absence of sexual intercourse, the important
point is that John has strong feelings for Aeryn that cannot be denied him. The
involvements of both Buck Rogers and John Crichton with these space women
serve two functions: to release their ever-growing sexual frustration and to help
them adjust to any trauma they experience (which is almost on a day-to-day basis).
It should come as no surprise that each series has an obligatory villain
who pursues the displaced Hero with an almost fanatical frenzy. For Buck Rogers,