My Favourite TV: Firefly

Those of you who read my Blog on a regular basis will know that I spent a pleasant New Years watching the 2002 SF series Firefly. I could do this in one day – actually in about 12 hours with a few breaks - because they only made 14 episodes. Oddly when I first saw it I couldn’t understand why it lasted that long.

A bit of background might help here. I was, and still am, a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I heard that its creator, Joss Whedon, was working on another show and that it was going to be SF I was already signed up to the area. When it finally arrived I was shocked. I mean… cowboys in space, dressed like cowboys, acting like cowboys, talking like cowboys…. In the future? What was that all about? But because I really liked the creator I gave it enough time to make an impact on me. At episode 4 or 5 I gave up and wrote it off as a turkey. By the sounds of it, as it was axed half way through the first series, I wasn’t alone in my assessment. It was just too damned strange and a little too different to work properly.

Then, as with Stargate: Atlantis, I caught the inevitable re-runs and then I watched the re-runs after that and fell in love with this quirky misunderstood gem of a TV show. It’s strange looking back on it that I loved the show later for what I disliked about it the first time around. I really started to love the mix of genres and realised that it really did work. Space, or at least that bit of space in the series, was the Wild West complete with frontier towns and Indians in the shape of Reavers (scary, scary stuff!) There are soldiers who lost a kind of Civil War despite being on the ‘right side’ – it didn’t take much of a leap to see them as the remnants of the Confederacy and the victorious Alliance as the Union who are technologically strong but morally weak. I’m sure that an expert on the Civil War period and just after could draw all kinds of parallels. Of course what really made this show so special in my mind was the cast and, more importantly, how they acted together as a group. From episode one it seemed that the crew of the spaceship Serenity had known each other for years. It felt right. The unspoken history was there, some of which we found out about later, the usually unspoken tensions were there too as they would be in any group.

Of course it did the show no harm in my eyes that it was packed with very attractive women. My favourite (difficult as it was to pick just one) had to be the brilliantly natural engineer Kaylee played by the beautiful Jewel Staite. I loved the way she talked as much as the way she looked. Then there was the captain’s love interest Inara played by the very sultry Morena Baccarin. Inara was a high class, high cost prostitute or, as the captain repeatedly called her, a whore. Plain speaking about such things was a central aspect of the show. They really didn’t beat about the bush on adult issues. Next in line was Zoe played by Gina Torres, wife of the pilot Alan Tudyk. She played the ships second in command and was in the captains unit during the war. Lastly was River Tam, a young girl hunted by top Alliance operatives because of what she knows and what she can do. River was played by the disturbingly excellent Summer Glau. Probably the character I identified with most was the captain himself – Malcolm Reynolds played by Nathan Fillion. He played a man of honour in a universe largely without any, a man on the raggedy edge with little to lose except his crew, his ship and his self respect. I liked him a lot.

With only 14 episodes to work with we didn’t really learn that much about the characters themselves or about the worlds they inhabited. What we did learn was enough to unfold in a half dozen series. Cut short (even with a later movie filling in some of the background detail) we never learnt what Shepherd Book was before he became a Shepherd. We never had closure with Mal and Inara. That will they won’t they thing could have lasted years! As could the maybe/maybe not relationship between the doctor (River’s older brother) and Kaylee. We could also have found out far more about the Alliance and just how those guys with the blue gloves fitted into things. So many questions we’ll never know the answers to now.

If you’re either a fan of SF, Buffy, Joss Whedon or Westerns this might be the thing for you – if you haven’t already seen it. It is weird so you might not ‘get it’ the first time. But its only 14 episodes so you’ll be able to watch it a few times in a month or so. After repeated exposure you will (probably) begin to love it as much as I do. It’s a real, real shame that it was canned so early and that the movie didn’t do very well at the box-office. It was, I suspect just a bit too quirky and different to be popular. I for one know how that feels which is probably why I’m such a fan.