Firefly - Serenity

Well here we are. December Firefly was done five years ago. Wow. No blogs five years ago, or at least not in their everyday commonplace-ness that we've come to expect. (Message boards abound of course. Including the Fox Firefly board which I think continues to this day and where Adam Baldwin vents his conservative spleen frequently to all of the crazy Joss Whedon liberals, bless him.) A little TV on DVD. No YouTube. And Joss Whedon (aka Joe Sweden) was making three shows. Yep, Buffy was even still on the air. (Tara was still alive.) Enterprise was new and I wasn't watching it. We had just found out that Episode I was the best Star Wars prequel movie so far. I think I had just started reading Lileks. And of course I had just met my darling bride.

I have three more episodes and a movie to do after this. But this was it on TV. Ending with the beginning. I think they were advertising two new shows during this two-hour finale/premier: American Idol and 24. Heh.

This was it until the DVDs, and three years later, the movie.

"We've done the impossible and that makes us mighty."

I'll never see this opening as the beginning of Firefly. Because we had seen the nine episodes before. This (obviously) was The War. We'd heard about it, just not seen it. I've been told by those that began here that this opening and subsequent transition to "today" was a little jarring. They were thrown into the battle in a war they knew nothing about. This certainly didn't seem to match what they'd heard about. But I like that kind of "in the action" opening. (I don't feel like looking up the latin for it.)

There's of course the moment that Mal kisses his cross before going into battle. The moment goes by in a blip. For those of us "in the know" however this just defined Malcolm Reynolds. I'm not sure how effective or noticeable this was if you saw Serenity first. This is who he was before Firefly. This is what he lost. He lost faith. He lost belief. And he's a might tetchy about them what didn't.

So we have our pre-credits scenes: We see the war, we see it lost, badly. We see six years later Mal and Zoe are still together and they're now with a rag tag crew on a rag tag ship. We meet Jayne, Kaylee, and Wash (and his dinosaurs). We see that our gang lives a little outside the law. We're also introduced to the idea that we have no sound in space. Man, I can't wait for artificial gravity to become so common place that it's easier to get than strawberries. Hee. And we see that Mal is a sad broken man. "We win." This same statement (with Nathan giving the same delivery) will be repeated in the MOVIE Serenity: "This is what I do..."

Here it is. For the last time:

Take my love,
take my land,
take me where I cannot stand.

I don't care,
I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out
to the black.
Tell 'em I ain't coming back.

Burn the land,
boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me.

There's no place
I can be
since I found Serenity.

You can't take the sky from me.

Back from credits, we find out that Wash and Zoe are married. We see a little more of the conflict between them that we didn't see again until War
Stories. We meet Inara. "Honest living." (Why this is somehow empowering to women is beyond me, but Joss seems to think so.) It's always fun to watch a pilot and see what got dropped from the show. "Ambassador" got shuffled off in a hurry.

But the crew gelled in a pretty quick hurry. There weren't a lot of radical changes. I guess the argument could be made that Mal got funnier. I think he's pretty funny here. I'm always conflicted about Mal's age. Nathan Fillion IS Malcolm Reynolds. But I always get the idea that Mal is written about ten to twenty years older than he is. Jayne is Jayne. Zoe is Zoe. Simon is so Simon I can't stand it. And Book is shifty from the get go. (And Ron Glass just rocks.)

So we get into the plot. We meet BADGER! Badger was supposed to be played by Joss. Not sure why that didn't work out, but it gave Mark
Shepard an uncomfortableness. Badger is my favorite recurring character. More than Safron. Way more than Niska. (They all rock, of
course.)

We're told about Reavers. Reavers are scary.

And then we meet the "passengers". Of course, having seen the rest of the episodes, we know that one of these things is not like the other.
They try real hard (and probably successfully, except he's in the credits) to make Simon the sinister bad guy. And we know what (who) is
in the box because we've seen the credits for nine episodes. Book is all nice and folksy. "Not a grandpa!"

We get our first table scene. We see how important this is out in the black. We see that the family dinner is a big deal even to Jayne. I love when Book says grace, Jayne is the first to bow his head. Of course "Mind if I say grace?" "Only if you say it out loud."

It's terrific that we've seen all of the episodes that come after and it's STILL distressing when Kaylee gets shot. (It always worked with Willow, why not try it again?) The one mis-step this ep makes (I think) is Mal telling Simon that Kaylee is dead just for the heck of it. It's a very Jayne moment. And I don't see Zoe thinking it's nearly as funny as she does.

River is hardly in this episode at all. We experience her more through Simon than anything else. Simon's exposition of what happened is one of my favorite scenes. "It's love. In point of fact." There are some pretty strong bonds among the crew. Wash and Zoe. Mal and Serenity and his Crew. Simon and River leave them all standing.

Dobson would have been a nice surprise if we hadn't seen everything we had. Obviously the idea was that Simon seemed sinister and Dobson was
the aw shucks ok fella. And we get our first (chronological) whiff of Shepard Book: Man of Terrible Mystery when he takes Dobson down. One does wonder if his "confession" to Inara at the end is all an act or no. Guess we'll find out when Joss writes the Book Book.

Then we get to Whitefall. We get to meet Patience. We also get to hear for the first and last time: People suck. To which Mal will ALWAYS reply: Oh no they don't either! And it all ends with a horse chase back to the ship!

The Reavers are nicely weaved through this ep. We get the exposition, we get the chance encounter (with more heartfelt exposition) and then we get the Big Darn Chase. Fox rejected the pilot because they said it was too slow and didn't have enough action. Obviously they do bad drugs. You're doing a pilot, you get to do big movie-like FX sequences. The guys at Zoic are still my heroes. (And now they do Galactica.) I love how The Leaf flies the ship. He's all mister calm as ice-water.

We get the usual pilot-y "this is where the show is going" end. Jayne might turn on Mal if the money is good enough (ha!). Book is in the right place. River and Simon are along for the ride.

I'll have to say that there is almost nothing in this episode that is not skillfully covered (so it works as either intro or recap depending if you've seen this first or last) in later episodes. So I refuse to hear "The show failed because they didn't show the pilot and they showed them out of order!" One, I think the DVDs are out of order (at least as far as Objects in Space is concerned). Two, the reason Fox didn't show the pilot is because they didn't like the show. THAT's why it failed. One of the complaints from the suits was that they wanted something funnier. Like Buffy. So they never really watched THAT show either. I don't think Firefly would ever have been 24, but it might have been Battlestar Galactica. Gorram Fox.

One of my favorite scenes in the whole show ends this episode (and the show).

Mal: "I had a good day."
Simon: "You had the Alliance on you. Criminals and savages. Half the people on your ship have been shot or wounded, including yourself. And you're harboring known fugitives."
Mal: "We're still flying."
Simon: "That's not much."

"It's enough."