Bekhesh

"Farewell, my friends - and thank you for teaching me to kill again!"

- Bekhesh, bidding farewell to the crew Bekhesh is the main antagonist of the Farscape episode "Throne For A Loss." The leader of a ruthless gang of Tavlek pirates, Bekhesh and his crew thrive in combat through their use of a weapon known only as the Gauntlet, a wrist-mounted cannon that also injects its users with a powerful and highly-addictive stimulant. Extortionists by trade, the pirates earn most of their income by kidnapping and ransoming important dignitaries: as such, when the crew of Moya attempt to negotiate some profitable work from the gang, Rygel's continuous boasts of ruling an empire of six billion subjects naturally inspires Bekhesh to take another hostage.

He is played by John Adam, who also played Ra'Keel in "Lava's A Many Splendored Thing."

Backstory
Little is revealed of Bekhesh's past within the episode itself; however, supplementary information on the Sci-Fi channel's website reveals that he and most of his fellow pirates were once law-abiding professional soldiers in the service of the Tavlek government. Several years prior to the start of the series, the Tavleks were at war with an alien power and found themselves at impasse with their enemies; unable to break the stalemate through conventional means, their leaders approved the creation of an elite regiment comprised of the military's best and brightest for a covert assault on the enemy capital.

Over the course of their preparation, Bekhesh and his comrades were armed with the latest and most advanced weaponry that their government could provide them with, the most prominent of which was a wrist-mounted device known only as the Gauntlet: capable of projecting powerful blasts of energy and erecting force shields, this weapon's true strength lay in the powerful stimulant that it continuously fed its wielders, enhancing their strength, speed and resilience. Unfortunately, the drug was also painfully addictive.

Despite the drawbacks, the Tavlek leaders were eventually satisfied that their soldiers were suitably prepared for ending the war, and sent the regiment on a long-range flight towards their enemy's star system. However, the regiment had barely reached the halfway point on their journey when they received orders to abort the mission: the Tavlek government had decided to open negotiations with their enemy, and the war was officially over. Worse still, usage of the Gauntlet stimulant made its users highly aggressive, and so the soldiers' indignation at being recalled was compounded by a desire for violence. The regiment refused to comply, even going so far as to rebel against the government in an attempt to complete their mission.

Ultimately, the renegade soldiers were intercepted and arrested en route to their mission objectives. As punishment for disobeying orders, the entire regiment was exiled to a unforgiving jungle planet several light years away from their home planet, where they eventually fractured into a number of rival camps. Unfortunately, either through smuggling or mechanical improvisation, the Tavlek gangs were able to acquire Gauntlets, along with a means of producing more stimulant; combined with access to space travel - likely acquired through a mixture of scavenging and theft - they were able to remake themselves as pirates.

By all accounts, Bekhesh was the most ambitious of the gang leaders: rather than continuing a policy of inter-camp warfare, he parlayed his position of strength into kidnapping alien dignitaries and holding them to ransom - in the hope of eventually acquiring enough resources to reunify the gangs into a single cohesive army and returning to their homeworld as conquerors. However, stimulant-induced rage and addiction made this an unlikely prospect at best.

According to production notes, at some point prior to the events of the series, Bekhesh had the top of his skull blasted off in a firefight, and his men were forced to improvise a cybernetic replacement for him out of scavenged parts. The resulting implant also apparently improved upon his eyesight, as he doesn't require night-vision goggles to see in the dark.

Throne For A Loss
Bekhesh first meets the crew of Moya when the increasingly desperate fugitives contact his gang in the hopes of finding profitable work. Over the course of the initial negotiations, Rygel brags at length about being Dominar of the Hynerian Empire, even going so far as to decorate his improvised scepter with a jeweled circuit from Moya's engine. Not knowing that Rygel had been deposed over a hundred cycles ago, Bekhesh agreed to hire the crew as a pretext for kidnapping the "dominar" and holding him for ransom.