Xhalax Sun (portrayed by Linda Cropper) is the mother of Aeryn Sun in the sci-fi series Farscape. Appearing in Season 3, it is revealed that she had she and fellow Peacekeeper Talyn Lyczac had defied the strict Peacekeeper regulations regarding intimacy and chose to have a child outside the boundaries of their military breeding program. Though Aeryn's conception was an act of love between Talyn and Xhalax, Peacekeeper doctrine prohibited any kind of familial relationship between parent and child. Having disgraced herself in the eyes of her superiors, Xhalax was forced to choose between killing her lover Talyn or their daughter. Xhalax chose the former and killed Talyn while Aeryn was raised as a Peacekeeper soldier.
History[]
During Season 3, Xhalax had been appointed as the leader of a Peacekeeper retrieval squad assigned to capture Talyn, the hybrid Leviathan gunship commanded by former Peacekeeper captain Bialar Crais. During this time, she would meet her daughter Aeryn once again, but was hardly the loving mother that Aeryn had seen in the security vid that Crais had shown her. Xhalax accused Aeryn of being sentimental and weak for having named the spaceship Talyn after the father she'd never met. That encounter ended with Talyn seriously crippled and Crais having claimed to have killed Xhalax to prevent her from completing her mission to capture Talyn for the Peacekeepers. In reality, he had allowed Xhalax to leave them because he knew that otherwise, the Peacekeepers would simply send another retrieval squad.
Death[]
Aeryn encountered Xhalax once again in the episode "The Choice", and a situation arose from which only one could escape alive. During a tense standoff, Aeryn managed to reason with Xhalax only to see Xhalax shot down by Crais who, through no fault of his own, misinterpreted the standoff as unacceptably dangerous to Aeryn. As she was dying, Xhalax told Aeryn that her true self had been killed years before by her unyielding loyalty to the Peacekeepers. Her last request was for Aeryn to let her fall from the high ledge where their standoff had taken place. As a token of respect, Aeryn acquiesced.