Firefly and Serenity
Firefly and Serenity
No spoiler warning required, I think.
My claim to cultural illiteracy can only be reinforced by the fact that I managed to miss the entire “Firefly” television series during its brief run five years ago. (That wasn’t very difficult, since I do not own a television.) Furthermore, I only ran across the movie adaptation, “Serenity”, recently, as a midnight special at a theater specializing in cult classics. I ended up seeing it twice, and I liked it so much that I bought the DVD set of the TV series.
The combination was classic space opera with good special effects, continuing drama with fascinating interpersonal relationships, high continuity from episode to episode (at least, when the episodes were played in the order intended), and lots of strong female characters. I suspect that most people who bother to read this blog entry will be fans familiar with the material, so I assume prior knowledge in these comments.
I thought the western/science-fiction combination worked wonderfully! Probably the best cameo of what the series is about is a few seconds of opening credits — on the DVDs, at least — that sh0ws a low pass by a space ship scattering a herd of horses.
How delightful to run across an action-adventure series in which the bad guys occasionally shoot straight! I for one am sick of baseless suspense: When my heroes are acting heroic, I want them to be facing a credible threat, one that can really kill them!
How wonderful to have silence in space once again! Swooshing noises for spacecraft have been de rigeur since the first “Star Wars” movie. They make my teeth itch.
How exquisite to have so many strong female characters! (I probably owe that taste to my mother, who was an architect: As a kid, when my hearing was good enough to pick up both sides of a ’phone conversation twenty feet away, well do I remember listening to her bawl out construction contractors…) Even the female villains are strong: Christina Hendricks’s character, who is so sneaky that we never learn her real name in the story world, was superb. I have heard it said that Joss Whedon created another series with similarly strong females, something called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”: I begin to regret never having seen any of that one, either.
One sadness of the all-too-swift cancellation of “Firefly” was that there was no way to tell how the characters and interpersonal relationships were going to develop. Some, I suspect, were played out in “Serenity” as the creators had intended – most notably the development of the badly-broken River into something truly formidable, and the romantic tension between Simon and Kaylee. Yet for others, we shall never know.
The title, “Firefly”, provides an interesting metaphor. I wonder if Whedon intended it that way. Most of my friends in the science-fiction community are west-coasters, who may never have seen a real firefly; they peter out west of the Mississippi. They are pretty: Each one looks like a tiny, dim version of the little on-and-off incandescent light bulbs that you still occasionally see on Christmas trees. Anyhow, “Serenity” as one little light in the darkness, with people trying to do the right thing in a morally ambiguous environment, is not a bad epitome of what the series looked like it was going to turn into. What’s more, not everybody in the story world was entirely fond of the Alliance: “Firefly” as one-little-spark-that-lights-a-revolution is another might-have-been future for the series. I hear Jayne saying “Remember, one mudder can start a revolution.”
I wonder if “Firefly” will start a revolution in science fiction media serials. That would be very shiny. Who knows, I may buy a television yet.
Jay Freeman’s Blog Entries
Sunday, July 29, 2007