Mighty fine!

I've got nine days. Whoops! Eight! Then it's all over. Well, until the DVDs come out. Little extra stuff there. And of course the BDM. But that's YEARS away at this point.

Welcome back to Tallguy's Firefly recaps. The idea was to review each episode of Firefly on the fifth anniversary of it's airing. Then I got tied up finishing a Star Trek fan film (airs Saturday, December 22nd at 5:01pm - 17:01 - get it?). So here we go rushing through. But like I've said, it's kind of how I watched them five years ago.

Shindig. If you only watched these on DVD, this is sort of a step backwards. There's not TOO much difference in going from Bushwhacked to Shindig, or going from Bushwhacked to Our Mrs. Reynolds. I think the move was really to put Safe a ways back. But more on that next time.

The hologram pool balls are ridiculous and go against the whole "most basic of technologies" vibe of the frontier. But it's SPACE, right? Ah well. Mal being a petty thief just cause it'll bug someone is fun.

Hey look, it's an Inara plot where she is actually is part of the plot!

And now we come back from the credits with my favorite Firefly shot ever. Looking out the bridge window landing on Persephone. And the Leaf almost crashing - again.

BADGER! I was so upset Badger wasn't in Serenity. Especially when they replaced him with twin Badgers. In case you wondered why it seems we've seen Badger before, it's because we haven't. Well, in the order they aired them in anyway. (And it was nice seeing him on BSG.) I could easily see something that built up to a big multi-episode plot with Badger and / or Saffron. Very Angel. But, we're getting canceled in four episodes, remember?

The A plot isn't bad. It's a genuine Mal & Inara plot. Mal gets to be all vulnerable ("I don't like people that killed me") and Inara gets to be torn between two worlds. Kaylee is extremely Kaylee ("How do we know, unless we question it?") There's a sword fight. The guy from L.A. Law is good. There's a Rhett Butler look-alike.

See, this is where Joss cheated. Big time. He talks a big game, about how the Alliance is actually good and benevolent, only not if you're the poor sods what got thumped by them in the war. So really it's just a difference of opinion. Like Vietnam, he says. *cough* Also how he wrote Firefly after reading a book on those shattered souls that lost the American Civil War. But then he goes and gives the Alliance slavery and indentured servitude, rather than just big government indifference. (In Joss and Tim's defense, they did a pretty good job of it in Train Job and Bushwhacked, but not so good the rest of the time.) Then there's the whole River thing. So, the Alliance really isn't muddled at all. They're the bad guys. (And it doesn't reflect well on Inara that she doesn't really seem to care one way or the other. She's pro-Alliance, actually, remember?)

Lot of nice stuff back on the ship while the plot bubbles. The card game is fun. Zoe and Wash being all lovey. River going crazy some more. Some have pointed out that River is tearing Blue Sun labels off the cans, because she hates the Blue Sun Corp, because that's who did this to her. Ok, sure. Coke and Microsoft run everything. Got it. Obviously they never had time to go anywhere with this. River and Badger is cool, especially when you learn that Mark Shepard taught Summer Glau the accent. And Jayne gets to have his Jayne coin land dumb side up kind of a lot. "That's exactly the kind of di-version we could have used."

And it all ends with cows.

Next time: Our crew gets home Safe!