Adventures In Serenity
Although recent information about his bullying ways has reduced his profile somewhat, there is no denying that Joss Whedon is a genius. Writer, director, composer…he can do a lot! And he has either conceived of or been involved with some pretty spectacular projects. He wrote the script for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and when that film didn’t do well, reworked the concept for an extremely successful TV series, complete with spinoffs. He co-wrote the first Toy Story movie. And he wrote and directed The Avengers, which is frankly a fantastic movie. He also wrote and directed the sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was entertaining but not nearly as a fine a movie as the first one.
“Mal: Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back.”
And he wrote and directed the short-lived sci-fi series Firefly, which is the subject of this post. Describing Firefly is difficult…in the same way that a group of blind men have difficulty describing an elephant. I have most often heard it described as a “space western.” In order for that to make sense, one must understand that the series is set in a very large planetary system, where the more central and developed worlds are ruled by the Alliance. But the outer planets are very much like the old west in many ways…full of hardbitten and occasionally backwards groups of people trying to dig survival out of the ground one shovel-full at a time. They grow crops, herd animals, die from infection and injury for lack of medicine and doctors, have gunfights, have barfights, and really…do a lot of fighting.
Our protagonists live aboard a Firefly class space ship named Serenity. The class name is appropriate given the shape of the ship and its occasionally glowing backside. The name of the actual ship is taken from the valley where the “Browncoats” lost their final battle against the Alliance, which wants “unification” whether the outer, more independent worlds want to be unified or not.
“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”
The captain of the ship Malcom “Mal” Reynolds was a sergeant in the Browncoats (yes, they did wear big brown dusters) and was present at the battle of Serenity Valley. As was his first mate Zoe Washburne. Zoe is married to the ship’s pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne. While Mal and Zoe are definitely fighters, Wash is more of a lover and often the comic relief, although all the characters are quite funny. In what was intended to be the pilot episode (but was actually aired last), we can see Wash entertaining himself in the cockpit, making two toy dinosaurs fight. With running commentary.
Then we have Kaylee Frye, the ship’s engineer. She has no formal training, just a love for all things mechanical in general, and spaceships in particular. She tells one of her shipmates that she just has an intuitive gift for mechanical workings. She’s sweet and cheery and a little naive…and a complete delight. What she is not, we find out, is a brave fighter.
Jayne Cobb is…well, I guess he’s the muscle. He comes across as dense (approaching dumb) often but then surprises with sharply insightful comments. He’s crude, unpleasant, frequently hilarious, and will almost certainly betray the crew someday when someone offers him enough money to do so. In fact, Mal and Zoe recruited him off someone else’s crew while he was pointing a gun at them; all it took was an offer of a larger percentage of jobs. Oh, and his own room. He’s the originator of two pieces of pop culture that have migrated out of niche sci-fi and into the wider lexicon, if you will.
Jayne: "How’s it sit? Pretty cunning, don’t you think?
Wash: Man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything.
First, his mother mails him a sweet letter, and a handmade and genuinely horrible hat. Knit in shades of orange. Which he immediately plops on his head and wears for the remainder of the episode. The Jayne Hat, as it came to be known, was very popular on Ravelry. Many people made up their own patterns for the Jayne hat, although I didn’t find any that really approached the non-symmetrical “charm” of the one featured in the episode. I particularly enjoyed the version which is shown on a dummy head of Patrick Stewart (Star Trek’s Captain Picard).
The other thing he made famous was the phrase “I’ll be in my bunk.” No I’m not going to explain. Figure it out or look it up.
In addition to the four crew members, there are four passengers. We have Inara Serra, a professional Companion. She is not a prostitute, although versions of that word do get thrown around. I guess the closest equivalent would be Japanese geishas. Although the geishas did have sex with their patrons, that was a relatively small part of what they did. Companions belong to a guild and are highly trained in a number of different arts, such as literature, music, dance, and really all the finer graces. They also have a relatively high social standing. Inarra rents one of the two shuttles belonging to Serenity. She has transformed the inside into a lush living space where she can ply her trade. She also frequently takes the shuttle to worlds nearby Serenity and then meets back up with the rest of the crew later.
“Zoe: Preacher, don’t the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?
Book: Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.”
Shepherd Derrial Book is a somewhat mysterious figure. On the surface, he’s your average preacher man. But throughout the series, we are shown surprising connections and skills that are simply never explained. As an example, for a pacifist, he’s surprisingly handy with a gun.
Our final passengers are the Tam siblings. The elder, Simon Tam, is a highly respected (and very well paid) surgeon on a central Alliance world. He throws away his career and burns through most of his personal fortune to rescue his little sister River, who was sent to a special “school” for genius children and where, we discover, the children are being experimented on and tortured.
“No power in the ‘verse can stop me.”
River is erratic and often a bit checked out of reality, but mostly not violent. It becomes clear over the course of the series that all the experimentation (which included multiple instances of cutting into her brain and sometimes taking pieces out) has given her a form of telepathy. And she reveals some frightening skills with weapons that suggest she might have been intended as an assassin. A mind-reading assassin. Charming. I suppose it doesn’t really need to be said, but she makes the rest of the Serenity crew just a mite uneasy.
In addition to the oppressive Alliance as the antagonist in the core worlds, in the space beyond the outer pioneer colonies float a group of cannibalistic humans known as Reavers. On Alliance worlds, they are considered bogeymen, but those who live closer to their stomping grounds are rightfully terrified of encountering Reavers. As Zoe explains to Simon, while Serenity is trying to hide from a Reaver ship, “If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we’re very very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.” They only show up in real force in the movie Serenity, which followed the series. And their origin is just as horrifying as their existence.
Okay, now that I’ve spent all this time explaining the background and characters, I don’t have any time to mention my favorite five episodes. This is just as well, because I was unable to narrow down my favorites to just five. In fact, I love every episode in this series except for two. I didn’t care for “Heart Of Gold,” which as you can imagine is mostly about hookers. Real ones. In a bordello. Not Companions. It wasn’t a bad episode, I just didn’t like it. This episode did not air before the series was cancelled but it can be viewed if you buy the series on DVD or iTunes or wherever.
And I didn’t like “Objects In Space.” It was creepy, mostly because the main antagonist, bounty hunter Jubal Early, was creepy. After somehow boarding Serenity mid-flight, he incarcerates or injures most of the crew, threatens to rape Kaylee (because he can, I guess), and spends lots of time giving creepy and somewhat bizarre monologues, often finishing with “Does that seem right to you?” He’s on board to take River Tam back to her captors, and spends much time threatening her brother to get him to surrender her. River enacts a clever plan to free her shipmates and get rid of the icky bounty hunter. It’s a good story, I guess, and well executed as I would expect from Whedon, but I still didn’t care for it.
“Mal: Can’t get paid if you’re dead.
Jayne: Can’t get paid if you crawl away like a little bitty bug, neither. I got a share of this job. Ten percent of nothing is—let me do the math here—nothing into nothing, carry the nothing…
Mal: Jayne, your mouth is talking. You might want to look to that.”
The series was only fourteen episodes long, which includes the three episodes that never made it to air. Nevertheless, it was so popular that Whedon was able to sort of finish the story via his movie Serenity. I’m not going to talk about the movie except to say that it clears up a bunch of plot points and kills off a couple main characters, which I was not happy about. But the series is innovative, unique, and wildly entertaining. And like the very best stories, it’s largely character-driven. It’s excellent and if you haven’t watched it, you should remedy that immediately.
