"Yep, a real beauty, ain't she? A right smart purchase. I tell you what - you buy this ship, treat her proper, she'll be with you for the rest of your life." - Salesman in "Out of Gas"
Firefly: The Complete Series DVD Review
By Kay Daly
What do you get when you cross sci-fi with the old West, inject it all with the slangy wit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and people its moonscapes with a charming, intriguing and skilled cast of actors? The answer is one of the most brilliantly inventive and artfully executed series ever to grace the airways. Sadly, it's also one of the most noodle-scratchingly premature cancellations in television history.
Fans of Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Angel, already know what I'm talking about. In the fall of 2002, Fox Network aired a mere 11 episodes of Whedon's Firefly before pulling the plug (an additional three episodes were filmed but not aired). The official word was that the series 'failed to find an audience' - a foregone conclusion, considering the target audience literally couldn't find the show as it shifted timeslots virtually week to week.
That's a pity, considering how beautifully the 11 episodes succeeded in evoking a fully imagined sci-fi universe, peopled with robust, engaging characters who demonstrate an interpersonal chemistry that usually takes seasons to develop. And that's despite the fact that, for reasons that are unfathomable, Fox chose not to air Whedon's meticulously crafted series pilot until after the series was yanked.
Grafting a sci-fi universe onto the world of the western, Firefly imagines a distant future in which spaceship pilots coexist with pistol-totin', bronco-bustin' ranchers. And as if that's not enough, Whedon adds an overarching influence of Chinese culture, from Asian-influenced styles of dress to the habitual use of Mandarin curses and swearwords.
Believe it or not, this odd mélange works - partly due to a full commitment to the concept, but also because of the artful way in which the series' creators exploit the thematic resonance of the various genres to support and flesh out the overarching plot.
Drawing from the granddaddy of all TV science fiction, Star Trek, Firefly is set in a universe ruled by a single centralized government, here called The Alliance. But unlike Roddenberry, who envisioned a glossy, noble, peaceable totalitarianism, Whedon uses this premise to ask dark questions: What happened to those who did not wish to join the Alliance? What is the price of unification?
The response is a complex inquiry into the nature of imperialism in which the clash of genres serves to characterize the elements of this new universe. The Alliance, the dominant force in this new empire, is presented as pure sci-fi: clean, sleek, and mechanized. But as one leaves the heart of Alliance's territory, mechanization gives way to the pioneer spirit that inhabits all frontiers, and this is where the Old West comes into the mix. The far-flung planets on the outskirts of the 'verse (Whedon's ellipsis for "universe") are home to ranches, mining towns, and other fringe outposts. (To underscore the stylistic metaphor, Whedon incorporates imperialist underdogs drawn from diverse cultures, including slave economies, Robin Hood-esque folk heroes, and the Australian aboriginal didgeridoo). These settlements, far outside The Alliance's reach, harbor the cast-offs of this new order, the defeated rebels who fought to resist full-scale unification and lost.
Enter our hero, Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion of Two Guys and a Girl). In the opening sequence of the pilot, we witness his crushing defeat during a key battle between the forces of unification and the rebel resistors. As Whedon explains in the fantastic audio commentary, his intention was to paint a portrait of a man after the moment in which everything he believes in crumbles. Yeah, that's the starting point.
After establishing that back story in the pilot, the series goes on to portray Mal in his latter-day occupation, as captain of Serenity, a "firefly" spaceship (hence, the title of the series). He's an embittered realist, deeply suspicious of the new Alliance government and wary of crossing old, possibly vindictive enemies. Aboard Serenity, he has built a new life, transporting goods and passengers, all the time trying to squelch his nobler impulse to fight for the underdog.
Mal is joined by his ass-kicking second-in-command and former army buddy, Zoë (the stunningly beautiful Gina Torres) and her comical husband, 'Wash (Alan Tudyk, the voice of the Robot in "I, Robot"), who serves as the ship's pilot. Rounding out the crew are the ship's mechanic, the warm and perky Kaylee (Jewel Staite) and the craven, libidinous mercenary Jayne (Adam Baldwin).
The series pilot also introduces the rest of the main characters, passengers who essentially live aboard Serenity. Obviously, these aren't your garden-variety travelers: each has a reason for staying aboard the ship indefinitely, thus making them plausible long-term characters and ensuring a motley mix of people beyond the run-of-the-mill ship's crew line-up. They include: Inara (Morrena Baccarin), a state-certified courtesan who uses Serenity as her home base and mobile liaison headquarters; Shepherd Book (Ron Glass of Barney Miller fame), an itinerant pastor with a mysterious past; and Simon Tam (Sean Maher), a young doctor fighting to protect his eerily clairvoyant sister River (Summer Glau) whom he has rescued from the clutches of the Alliance.
But the main character, as Whedon and others note in the audio commentary, the ship itself, and the creative team lavished no small amount of attention on rendering her as fully as possible. The exterior shots are dazzling; no wobbling Chroma-Key Enterprise clone, Serenity is nimble and lifelike. (It's no surprise that despite its short run, Firefly won an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects). And the interiors are just as impressive. To ensure a sense of geography, Whedon insisted on a fully articulated set of the ship's interior in which the various chambers of the ship are connected by corridors.
Perhaps it's this attention to creating a real space that helped foster such a sense of community among the cast members. Watching this ensemble, it's hard to believe they filmed a mere 14 episodes together. The relationships, whether newly born in the pilot or established in the series back story, are warm and vital. The dialogue, laden with Whedon's typical quirky slangyness, sounds fresh and authentic. And while action frequently takes center stage, it nearly always exists to illuminate some point about the characters and the relationships they're building.
Take, for instance, "War Stories," in which Mal and Wash are captured by Adelai Niska (Michael Fairman), a former client and nemesis (the "bad blood" between them is established in "The Train Job"). While action abounds in the depiction of the crew's rescue efforts, the focus of the story isn't shoot-'em-up thrills. Instead, Whedon uses the plot to explore the relationship between Wash and his wife Zoë and his insecurity about her wartime bond with Mal. In a classically Whedonesque juxtaposition, during a brutal torture scene in which Niska, a connoisseur of pain, applies all his skills to his two captives, the two victims continue to bicker about Zoë, only pausing to acknowledge their agony.
The emphasis on relationships is not surprising to any Whedon fan. As he mentions in the audio commentary, his shows are all about building families. Fittingly, many of the episodes begin or end in the ship's mess hall; and despite the importance of action and sci-fi chase scenes, stories frequently climax with a decision about the group's relationship to one of its members.
Setting the stage for many of these crises is one of the series major story arcs, that of Simon and River. In the series pilot, Simon explains how River - a brilliant prodigy - had been enrolled in a state-run school for the gifted. Later, he came to discover that she has been subjected to horrifying tortures - presumably experiments to explore how her gifts could be enhanced and exploited by The Alliance. He arranged for her rescue, and now he and his sister - disoriented and eerily subject to psychic flashes and psychotic breaks - are fugitives from the law.
As the series progresses, the Serenity gang is forced to contend with the siblings' dilemma and decide whether they stand as neutral observers, enemies, or protectors against impending threat. Sometimes the threat comes from without, as when a bounty hunter (brilliantly played by a comically sinister Richard Brooks in "Objects in Space") boards the ship looking to seize the fugitive; sometimes, from within, as when Jayne considers selling out River and Simon to the authorities (as in "Ariel"). And sometimes, River herself is the threat. Rather than playing the obvious sympathy card, Whedon makes it clear that this unbalanced genius is a potent and potentially destructive force. The ominous question that hovers over this story arc is resonant one: to what extent can and should the Serenity gang imperil themselves to protect her?
But it's not all psychotic teenagers and sticky ethical dilemmas. The 14 episodes that make up the series cover a lot of ground, establishing several long-term story arcs and pleasant star turns for each of the main cast members. In "Shindig," we get a nice taste of the sexual tension building between Mal and the courtesan Inara, as well as a charming portrait of the naïve Kaylee as the three attend a fancy dress ball that ends in a duel (don't worry, all the good guys survive). "Jaynestown" takes the crew to planet where Jayne has mistakenly been made a folk hero as a result of botched heist he pulled years before. Simon takes center stage in "Safe," when he's kidnapped to provide medical services to a group of backwater settlers.
It's particularly a pleasure to see the unaired episodes in this collection. In "The Message," Zoë and Mal receive a strange war memento, while in "Trash," we see the return of a particularly amusing recurring character, the vixen Saffron, who first appeared in "Our Miss Mal." Whedon's predilection for presenting exploited women triumphing over their male aggressors appears in the unaired "Heart of Gold," in which the Serenity crew helps defend the tenants of a bordello. I'm guessing there are a few scenes from this episode that wouldn't have made it past the censors if the series had lasted.
Tying it all together is "Out of Gas," an adept and gripping tale of the ship in peril. Serenity has been disabled by an explosion and, as oxygen supplies dwindle, Mal sends the crew and passengers away on the ship's shuttles while he tries to repair the damage. The story is told in three time frames simultaneously, crosscutting among scenes of the current crisis, the events that led to that crisis, and flashbacks to how each crew member came to be part of the Serenity team. The tri-partite time scheme is anchored by the ship's geography: as Mal moves through the ship, we see events at each location that occur in the various time-frames. The episode is suspenseful, rich, and remarkably well-crafted.
The weakest episode of the bunch is undoubtedly "The Train Job." The first of the post-pilot episodes, "The Train Job" seems hurried and a bit wooden, cramming too much exposition into too little plot. This dramaturgical stumble a mystery, until you listen to the audio commentary and learn the script was written over the course of one weekend. According to the creators, the two-hour pilot had already been shot, but Fox decided it wanted "more action" in the first episode, and asked Whedon to produce a new first-show script instead. By Monday.
Oh, Joss. Exactly who did you piss off at Fox?
The 14 episodes of Firefly are housed in a four-disc box set, and each disc cover is decorated with a lovely portrait of one of the main characters (Mal, Jayne, Zoë, and Book). The menus are straightforward and easy to use. My only complaint is that each menu is prefaced by a small animated interlude of graphics and stills. It's stylish, but takes just a smidge too long to get to the menu items. This can quickly get irritating when you're trying to surf quickly through the options.
Each episode also has a scene selection option, which is very handy (especially for DVD reviewers).
