A lot of people seem to think that the only way Zurg could possible be Buzz's father would be if he was in a Loving Committed Relationship With A Lady He Loved and then somehow Things Turned Bad. Which I don't think is really necessary. Not all children are produced in the same way, y'know.
But for the heck of it, a random look at all the ways it COULD have happened. Herein follows a tl;dr list of several different scenarios of how and why Zurg could be Buzz's father:
1. The stereotypical husband-wife-and-child-in-loving-family scenario, in which somehow something went wrong. Unlikely. Just throwing it out because everyone else seems to think this is the only method possible, so it deserves a mention.
-a. Alternatively, husband-wife-and-child-in-loving-BUT-EVIL-family scenario, which also somehow went wrong. Also unlikely, and not too different from the original, but thought I'd point it out: you don't have to be a good guy to have a wife and kid.
-b. The thing that went wrong might have been a typical, stereotypical break down in the family, ending with a divorce and/or the wife unceremoniously leaving, taking the kid with her.
--- A possibility: this action could have caused Zurg to turn evil, if we assume he wasn't evil to begin with. And if we assume that Zurg was once the kind of person who would react to losing his wife and child by deciding to take over the universe and kill his child. Which is just weird, but somewhere in the world, I'm sure, there's a writer who could pull it off without making me roll my eyes. I just don't know that writer.
2. Zurg bred Buzz to be his heir, but then something turned out wrong. These things could include:
-a. The mother was good and didn't know Zurg was up to evil, and when she found out, she took Buzz and fled.
-b. The mother didn't care what Zurg was up to, but for some other reason left Zurg, taking the kid.
--- As above, this action could possibly have turned Zurg evil, if perhaps he had once intended to be a benevolent overlord: "the universe is messed up and I will fix it" or something noble like that.
-c. As a young child, Buzz demonstrated a lot of potential for good, so Zurg got rid of him:
--- Maybe by abandoning both the mother and child
--- Maybe the mother was never a part of the picture (surrogate mother? dead?) so he just put Buzz up for adoption
--- Maybe by pulling a Laius and Oedipus by telling one of his underlings to get rid of Buzz, and instead the underling put him up for adoption or something, figuring that'd be the end of it; never realizing that the child would grow up to be the man pseudo-destined to get rid of his own father!! (Jeez, forget the tired old Star Wars metaphor. Now I want to see someone retell the Oedipus myth with Buzz and Zurg. We can pretend that Buzz's mom is dead so that there's no chance for Oedipal mother/son squickiness to sneak into the fic.)
-d. Zurg may have decided he didn't want a heir for some other reason; didn't want to risk being usurped, or didn't want to have something small, vulnerable, and stupid that good guys/rival villains could possibly kidnap and use do manipulate him, or just realized that he was totally incompetent at parenting and decided it was more trouble than it was worth (as we saw in Clone Rangers), which would result in him taking any of the options listed under C to get rid of Buzz.
3. Buzz was a
happy accident wretched, loathsome mistake. This could have come about multiple ways:
-a. Zurg might have actually had a steady girlfriend/fiancée/friend-with-benefits/some-other-female-he-was-close-to some time in the past (the DISTANT past, mind; consider how old Buzz is, and figure that's how long it's been since Zurg had to have been with a woman for Buzz to exist), and he accidentally got her pregnant. And then:
--- he dumped her, for any number of reasons:
——— disagreement over what to do with the kid (she didn't want to abort/give the kid up/etc. and Zurg did, or something like that)
——— he just lost interest in her (fell out of love, whatever)
——— he really, really didn't want responsability for a kid
——— or, he stayed with her until AFTER Buzz was born, and then decided (a) he didn't want to be a father, or (b) he was really bad at it.
--- she left Zurg, taking the kid, for any number of reasons:
——— discovered he was evil
——— disagreement over what to do with the kid, see above
——— thought Zurg would be a horrible dad
--- they agreed to put the kid up for adoption
-b. Zurg might have had a one-night stand/brief affair/etc. with someone, which resulted in an accidental kid. Which he didn't want to take responsibility for, he simply didn't give a care, he didn't get a chance to help out until the kid was too old, he just didn't hear about the fact that Buzz was his kid until so late that he'd already started hating him... Or, maybe the mother tried to wring child support out of him, which would certainly help explain why he seems to be so resentful of his own flesh-and-blood decades later.
-c. Not really independent to A or B, but significant on its own: maybe this accident occurred when he was really young. Could have been a teen pregnancy. That way, people who want to argue that Zurg doesn't seem THAT much older than Buzz could still say that, at a minimum, he's fifteen years older than Buzz. (Or, if you want to imagine that Zurg had a really, REALLY messed up childhood, he could be as little as thirteen years older and still the father... or potentially even YOUNGER, for an UNBELIEVABLY messed-up childhood and an early onset of puberty. It's possible, I've seen sixth-grade mothers and heard tell of fifth-grade moms. I don't know how old the fathers were or what the earliest a boy could possibly be able to do that would be, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were close to the same.)
4. Zurg is a sick, sick, twisted, non-Disney-friendly man, and forcibly caused a woman to become pregnant, in methods that are totally not cool to talk about in front of children. Whether the production of a child was the objective or a side-effect of his evil evil evil behavior is irrelevant. If he were cold enough to do that, he would definitely be cold enough to try to kill his kid when it grew up. This would also likely drive the mother to raise her tragically-produced son in a manner that would ensure that the child end up absolutely, ABSOLUTELY nothing like the monster that fathered him: hence, she'd do everything she possibly could to make him the most morally-upright little angel in the universe, and encourage him to join Star Command and become a hero and, in short, be so much the polar opposite of his father that he could quite easily become his father's arch enemy. However, this theory seems a little OOC for Zurg, a bit more cruel and evil than he's shown to be; but in reality, Zurg could easily be far more monstrous than Disney lets us see, so he definitely has the potential to be characterized this way. And, again, in the hands of the right writer...
5. Zurg isn't exactly Buzz's "father," per se. Buzz is actually a clone of Zurg. (Multiple reasons for why Zurg would want a clone: heir theory, body double/political decoy, etc.) But, the clone went wrong:
-a. He used the same cloning machine that produced the Clone Rangers, but he accidentally left the dial all the way on "nice" instead of turning it to a desirable number of "evil" points; when he realized the mistake, he got rid of Buzz (by any of the methods listed under 2b; in fact, this would be a good way to pull off the Oedipus metaphor without having to deal with an Oedipal mother/son relationship, if there never WAS a mother). There could be several reasons why Buzz had, we assume, a full childhood from infant on:
--- the cloning machine didn't come with a speed-aging option yet, so Buzz just came out a baby that had to grow normally; this would explain why Zurg took so long to use the clone machine again, maybe it took that long to develop a method to age-up the clones. This would eliminate the possibility that Zurg intended to use the clone as a body double. Unless he didn't realize it would produce a baby.
--- once Zurg realized he'd messed up on the clone, there was no need for him to wait around for it to grow up, so he just didn't give the clone time to grow up, and got rid of it.
-b. He used a cloning machine that didn't come with a Nice to Crazy Evil dial. Zurg believed that nature was stronger than nurture, and so any clone of himself would automatically be as evil as himself. Buzz could have been designed to be given to an adoptive family, without telling them where he was from, with the stipulation that they raise the kid to be a Space Ranger: then this perfect Zurg clone would be a double agent in Star Command. However, as it turned out, nurture was stronger than nature, and since Buzz was raised to believe in the Star Command ideals of goodness and justice, that's the kind of person he ended up becoming. Failed experiment on Zurg's part. His discovery of his mistake was what made Zurg decide to install dials to preset evilness on future cloning machines, to prevent a repeated failure.
--- If this is the case, that could explain both why Warp went through training with Buzz, and why it was Buzz in particular he got partnered with: he was assigned to watch out for Zurg's clone, and to be his henchman when he grew up to be evil. Since it didn't turn out that way, Warp ended up being the double agent inside Star Command. Warp probably didn't end up goody-goody like Buzz after Star Command training because he had direct contact with Zurg from a young age, and maybe a homelife conducive to evil, whereas Buzz didn't.
-c. A problem with this theory: If Buzz is a Zurg clone, then in Clone Rangers, Zurg could have used his own DNA instead of extracting it from Buzz to make the clone. However, this can be worked around. Maybe Zurg was paranoid and wanted to make sure that if anyone figured out where his evil clones came from, they wouldn't wonder why Mira and Booster had been pricked and Buzz hadn't, and start to put two and two together. Or maybe he thinks that Buzz is SO good, the donor DNA must have mutated when it produced the Buzz clone, and so he thinks Buzz's DNA isn't exactly the same as his own anymore. Or maybe he's just scared of needles and decided to prick Buzz instead of himself.
6. Weird theory, implausible but possible: Zurg was a "genetic donor" for artificial insemination at some point in the past (maybe they didn't do a criminal background check? Maybe he didn't have a criminal record then?), for any variety of reasons--perhaps he was strapped for cash--and his "donation" was used to artificially inseminate the person who became Buzz's mother.
7. Another weird theory: Alien abduction and experimentation! Hey, could've happened. There are lots of aliens, some of them strong, some of them interested in the biology of otherworldly creatures, and some of them devoid of compassion for their test subjects. (Remember that lovely episode with the zoo?) Zurge could've been put to anything from a run-of-the-mill, low-tech forced breeding experiment, to a... er... Sims 2 variety alien abduction, if you know what I mean. Perhaps it was even this experience that turned Zurg evil: perhaps Planet Z wasn't known to the Galactic Alliance back then, or not a big part of it, or Zurg didn't really pay attention to anything off-world. And the experience made him seriously think about extraterrestrial life for the first time, decide he hated it, and decide to take his revenge on alien life in general by taking over all other alien planets. And such a traumatic experience would give him good reason to hate the kid that resulted from it. And hey, if it WAS a Sims 2-style abduction, BONUS reasons for him to feel revulsion and pure rage every time he sees Buzz! Whatever the method of Buzz's birth may have been, if he were the result of some sort of experiment, in a way, Buzz is not JUST Zurg's arch enemy: he is also, on the one hand, the most poignant and concrete symbol of the experience which is driving Zurg's revenge on the universe, making Buzz a perfect rage-trigger for Zurg; and, on the other hand, something far more personally connected to Zurg than anything else in the universe, more personal even than the aliens-or-whatever that performed the experiment and caused the trauma in the first place, making Buzz a perfect target for Zurg to obsess over. And hey, this theory could even explain why Buzz is so goody-goody perfect at what he does; maybe the aliens-or-whatever wanted to see if they could design the übersoldier, with superiority in piloting, leadership, coming up with nearly-never-failing strategies, and being able to instinctively figure out things that no human should logically figure out. ... Actually, I really like this theory.
8. The totally most plausible theory EVER: Zurg is an alien that performs the abductions and experimentations, and so he caused Buzz to be made, even if he didn't father him. In which case he's Buzz's "father" in the same way that Nebula is XL and XR's "father": he caused the creation of his offspring, even if he didn't FATHER-father his offspring. This theory makes absolutely perfect sense, you see, because Zurg is an Irken.
And that's just a handful of theories. I'm sure other people could come up with a hundred other completely different theories for how Zurg could be Buzz's father WITHOUT following the stereotypes.
Conclusion: "Zurg wouldn't make a good father." "Zurg probably never fell in love." "Not even Zurg would hurt his own flesh-and-blood." If those are the only real arguments against Zurg being Buzz's father, they're all irrelevant. Zurg doesn't need to be a good father to be a father, Zurg doesn't need to have fallen in love to be a father, and given the right circumstances and some canonically-justifiable interpretations of his character he could quite willingly hurt his kid.
The fact that he denied being Buzz's father after claiming to be so in Stranger Invasion is also irrelevant; he's obviously messing with Buzz's head there, so whether he's telling the truth or not doesn't matter. He could have thought, "I need to say something to freak Buzz out. I know, I'll pretend to be his father!" He could also have thought, "I need to say something to freak Buzz out. I know, I'll tell him the truth! That's the freakiest thing I can think of! ... But I don't actually want him to know that, so I'll deny it and make him think I was lying." He could also, as has been proposed, not know that Buzz is his kid, and his
denial could have been sincere but incorrect; and in this case, maybe one could even say that his claim to be Buzz's father was produced by some sort of unconscious realization on his part that he IS, a realization that never quite reaches his conscious mind, but that can spring up readily when he
thinks he's making up a random lie.
Also, the fact that his "I'm your father" line is a Star Wars reference doesn't invalidate it. The fact that Booster's home planet is a farm on a world called Joad is a reference to
The Grapes of Wrath, but that doesn't cancel the reference out and make it so that Booster's home ISN'T a farm and the world ISN'T called Joad. The facts that Nos-4-A2's name is "Nos-4-A2" and that his title is an "energy vampire" are references to Nosferatu and vampires in general, but doesn't doesn't cancel the references out and make it so that his name ISN'T Nos-4-A2 and he ISN'T a vampire-derivative being. How, exactly, does the fact that "I'm your father" is a Star Wars reference automatically make it so that it isn't true? Using that to prove that Zurg isn't Buzz's father is just silly.
... I apologize for the tl;dr. I think I'm making up for lost time from not being on the forum for a while.
And for those of you who read through all that: there's been some talk in this thread about Zurg-is-Buzz's-father fics. I wrote one of those:
xrfanclub.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=fic&action=display&thread=641 {/self-plug} It's not done yet. I'm following a variation of theory 2. Although now I think I might want to write a creepy one-shot that follows theory 7...
Edit: And because I feel like it's justified, I apologize a SECOND time for this long post. I just scrolled through the whole thing. Um.
I think I've officially caught up for lost time on this forum. And it only took me two posts. Eheheh...