'Firefly' Rewind - Episodes'

[Spooky]

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'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 10: 'War Stories'
By Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday, Aug 10, 2010
It's time for another review of Joss Whedon's outer space Western "Firefly." My thoughts on "War Stories" coming up just as soon as I'm fired from a fry cook opportunity...

"What this marriage needs is one more shouting match." -Zoe
"No, what this marriage needs is one less husband." -Wash

Joss Whedon shows often deal with the tension between alpha males and beta males, between the guys who want the heroines vs. the guys the heroines want. (Think Xander/Buffy/Angel in the early days of that show.) "Firefly" offers a twist on that arrangement. There's a tough heroine in Zoe, and a strapping alpha Mal and a goofy beta Wash, but Zoe's with Wash, not Mal. Her love of the captain has always been platonic/professional in nature, and her heart belongs to the semi-muscular man in the loud shirts. But because their marriage exists on a ship where Mal is in charge, and where Wash is daily exposed to his wife having an intimate bond with a man who intimidates him, the tension still exists, and "War Stories" confronts it head on.

Alan Tudyk has to this point been largely asked to play comic relief. There's still a lot of that in this one as Wash makes a nuisance of himself on the mission to unload the last of the medical supplies. But Tudyk finally gets to do some very strong dramatic work as Wash loses his patience with Zoe and Mal, and particularly as Wash comes to recognize during his shared ordeal of torture just what it is that his wife worships in the captain. He recognizes that Mal was being strong enough for the both of them, trying to distract Wash from the electro-shocks by taunting him with hints about a wartime affair with Zoe. And having started the episode so eager to get his wife away from Captain Tightpants, Wash becomes determined to risk his life to save Mal's. Zoe and Jayne are still the ones who do the bulk of the killing, but Wash finds his inner alpha male for the day, and the Serenity crew lives to fly another day.

Michael Fairman makes a welcome return as Niska, here even more obsessed with torture, to the point where he begins to resemble Christopher Guest's Count Rugen from "The Princess Bride." (And as we learned in "Out of Gas," Mal is one tough hombre, so it's cool but not surprising to see him capable of standing and fighting even after being the victim of Niska's special machine.) Niska escapes through means that aren't entirely clear in the editing, and had the show lasted longer, he would have made an excellent recurring villain. At least "Firefly" was around long enough to give him an encore, in a much stronger overall episode than "The Train Job."

And Niska is at the center of another of those wonderful "Firefly" moments where Joss and company are determined to subvert the cliches of action movies and thrillers. Mal is a man who will shoot someone in the head rather than waste time negotiating, and Zoe is a woman who will not hesitate in choosing her husband over her captain, rather than agonize over the decision the way Niska (and the audience) might expect her to.

(There's a similar, very funny beat in the climax, when Zoe assumes it's important to Mal that he kill the torturer himself, only for Mal to call out, "No it's not!" so that Zoe, Jayne and Wash can all take the guy out.)

The episode ends with everything mended in the Zoe/Wash marriage, but not before Mal and Zoe share a hilariously wooden embrace as Mal teases Wash about his suggestion that their problems would be solved if the captain and his first mate had sex already.

"War Stories" is the last of a four-episode run that's the creative peak of "Firefly." There will be plenty of goodness to come, but these four, together, showed just how great the series was capable of being, and made the inevitable cancellation sting that much more.

Some other thoughts:

- Simon and Book open the episode wondering what the Alliance was doing to River, and we get a big clue in the climax, when River picks up the gun dropped by a terrified Kaylee and, with her eyes closed, shoots three of Niska's men dead. At the start of the episode, Kaylee and River are playfully chasing each other like sisters - with Mal as the dad warning the kids to cool it with the rough-housing - but at the end, Kaylee's clearly spooked to be around her.

- And I also thought it was a good character moment for Kaylee that she simply couldn't participate in the gunfight, much as she wanted to. Not everyone in the 'verse is going to be a willing and capable fighter - least of all a sunny, optimistic mechanic - and the show has enough other strong women that I have no problem showing Kaylee as someone who doesn't have it in her. (It's not like Simon was much more helpful, anyway.)

- Shepherd Book, meanwhile, shows off more non-priestly skills as he breaks down the murder scene like a trained CSI, then proves an expert marksman in kneecapping Niska's men during the space station raid. He may be a preacher now, but clearly there was so much more there.

- Note that Jayne is still feeling guilty about his "Ariel" shenanigans. He buys apples for the crew with his share, and though he criticizes Wash's plan as a suicide mission, he goes along to help and takes a bullet for his trouble. (And is later rewarded with Wash's abandoned soup because he's still capable of moving faster than Mal.)

- Jayne still ain't all that smart, though, and gets the line of the episode when he studies Mal's severed ear and asks, "What are we gonna do? Clone him?"

- After Inara briefly pretended to be open to Saffron's charms back in "Our Mrs. Reynolds," the show gives her the first female client that we've seen. The story doesn't add much other than a scene where Morena Baccarin gives a hot oil massage to an attractive blonde and then makes out with her, and while I'm sure certain segments of the audience would say "That's more than enough!," it does come across as a fairly transparent ratings ploy (albeit one that didn't work).

Coming up next: "Trash," featuring the return of another old frenemy.

What did everybody else think?

[Spooky]

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'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 11: 'Trash'
By Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday, Aug 17, 2010
Once again, we're spending Tuesdays this summer revisiting Joss Whedon's outer space Western "Firefly." A review of "Trash coming up just as soon as I have another exciting adventure in sitting...

"It ain't a hand of cards. It's called a life." -Mal

I don't remember this episode.

I mean, I remember Mal sitting naked on the rock, and I had some vague recollection that Saffron came back a second time, but the rest of it? Nada.

Now, "Trash" was one of three episodes that didn't air during the original Fox run (which jumped from "War Stories" to "Objects in Space" to the belated airing of the pilot), but I know I watched the other two unaired eps ("The Message" and "Heart of Gold") when I got the DVD set, and I know I've seen the naked rock scene, so... it's a mystery. Even if that scene wound up in a DVD special feature I saw at one point, I have no idea why I would have skipped the episode itself at the time I was marathoning the rest of the series.

But it's also a very pleasant surprise. As happened with the "Undeclared" rewatch Fienberg and I did for the podcast (where I realized I had never seen "God Visits" before), I discovered years after the fact that there was still original content for me to enjoy. And for that reason alone, I'm glad I made this show one of the summer DVD rewinds, because who knows when else I would've had the excuse to dive back into that old boxed set and make this discovery? (Even if I had a few spare hours and the inclination, I likely would have just cherrypicked my favorite episodes like "Out of Gas.")

So where I went into my "Our Mrs. Reynolds" rewatch knowing that Saffron was up to no good, and that the crew would escape her trap with a well-aimed shot by Vera, I honestly had no idea where this one was going - other than the inevitable betrayal by "YoSaffBridge" - and therefore got to enjoy the surprise of Saffron getting played by Mal and Inara, and of the gorram plan actually working out with minimal difficulty for once. Mal loses his clothes, sure, but he doesn't seem to mind being naked around the crew (nor would I if I were built like Nathan Fillion), and they get the loot with far fewer wrinkles than the medicine heist in "Ariel."

"Trash" is more straightforward caper story than comedy - though it does have some very funny moments, like Wash's confusion (which later turns out to have been staged) over why they're talking to Saffron, or the River/Jayne interactions - and probably not as fun an episode overall as "Our Mrs. Reynolds." But Christina Hendricks is still a delight as Saffron, and Mal's flustered response to his naive bombshell of a bride is effectively replaced by the gamesmanship between the two now that Mal knows what she really is. I particularly like that Saffron is able to more than hold her own in a brawl with Mal, showing that she can be just as dangerous fighting as flirting.

And after Simon masterminded the heist in "Ariel" and Book became a key member of the rescue team in "War Stories," it was nice to see Inara play an integral role in this job as the failsafe. And in hindsight, the scene where Saffron breaks away from Mal to eavesdrop on Zoe and Inara turns out to have been part of the sting, on both Saffron and us. We know Inara and Mal have issues - their argument in her shuttle is not staged (since Saffron's still in a crate), and feels reminiscent of past tensions between the two - and we know that as a law-abiding Companion, she's the one who holds the biggest grudge against a rogue Companion like Saffron. So it's completely plausible that she would distance herself as much as possible from the job, and therefore be a complete surprise as the last person standing between Saffron and the priceless pistol.

As I said of Niska last week, one of the many things that's a shame about the series' swift cancellation is that we didn't get many more years of Saffron turning up to cause trouble for Mal and the gang, sometimes winning and sometimes losing - sometimes seeming sincere, and mostly ruthless. Still, things turned out okay for Hendricks in the end, didn't they?

Some other thoughts:

Because I had never seen (or had forgotten) most of the episode, perhaps the most surprising part was Simon coming to realize, with River's help, what Jayne was really up to during the "Ariel" heist. A nice scene, illustrating the fundamental difference between Mal (who shows Jayne the closed fist of a death threat) and Simon (who tries to win him over with the open hand of a promise to do no harm), and with a good punchline courtesy of River.

Jayne's ear-flap hat makes another appearance. Always a pleasure to see that ugly thing.

Because of the floating city, and the maneuver Wash, Kaylee and Jayne have to do to swap the garbage drone's chip, this episode felt more FX-heavy than most of the previous ones. Which makes this as good an episode as any to ask what people think of the show's FX-style, which doesn't look quite like any other spaceship series or movie I can think of.

One thing I neglected to comment on in the "War Stories" review is that the episode cleverly managed to divest the crew of most of their "Ariel" loot. That way, the status quo of a desperate crew living job-to-job wouldn't change. There's a brief reference in "The Message" to Mal having trouble fencing the Lassiter pistol, but I think that's the only mention of it in the final episodes, meaning the writers didn't have to contrive another reason to keep the crew from being fat and happy for a while. And speaking of "The Message"...


Up next: "The Message," in which Mal and Zoe get a shocking reminder of their time together in the war.

[Spooky]

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-12-the-message

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 12: 'The Message'
By Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday, Aug 24, 2010
We're in the home stretch now on our summer run through Joss Whedon's outer space Western "Firefly." (My hope is that my schedule allows me to do a post on the "Serenity" movie when we're done, but we'll have to see where things stand in a few weeks.) A review of "The Message" coming up just as soon as someone steals my mustache...

"When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't crawl... when you can't do that..." -Tracey
"You find someone to carry you." -Zoe

After the complicated con games of "Trash," Whedon and Tim Minear teamed up to write "The Message," which starts out seeming just as complicated with its not-quite-dead corpses and crooked Alliance cops, but ultimately turns out to be a fairly simple story of comrades-in-arms struggling to build lives for themselves after the war ends.

Mal and Zoe have done okay for themselves. Zoe has a husband, and Mal has created this surrogate family in the Serenity crew, but what helps keep them going forward is that bond that so troubled Wash back in "War Stories." Mal and Zoe have other people, but more importantly, they have each other. They're always with someone who fought with the browncoats, who know about the exploding apples and the lieutenant's arms and all these other things that you can't entirely explain to people who weren't there. And that helps keep them sane.

Tracey doesn't seem to have had that. He drifted through post-war life, bouncing from job to job until he got the crazy idea of becoming part of an artificially-grown organ smuggling ring - and then the crazier idea of double-crossing his partners to make the score bigger. So he winds up seemingly dead aboard Serenity, and then roping Mal and Zoe and the rest into his trouble with Lt. Womack. And because he hasn't been with Mal and Zoe for years, nor with the crew they've surrounded themselves with, he's out of sync with the way they operate and makes the fatal mistake of assuming Mal is going to turn him in, when what we've seen of Malcolm Reynolds over these dozen episodes is that he would rather die than hand over a friend in trouble to the Alliance.

"The Message" was the last episode of the series to be produced, and the sense of melancholy that Whedon, Minear and company must have had making it fits nicely with the funereal tone of the story. Early in the episode, Mal and Zoe think they're taking an old friend home for a burial, and though he turns out to still be alive, that condition is sadly temporary, and the journey concludes as they originally planned it to. It's not an elaborate story, but it's a very effective one, and Gina Torres and Nathan Fillion show you just how much pain these two still carry from the war, and how much it hurts to have to put down a fellow veteran - even if, as Mal so eloquently puts it, "You murdered yourself. I just carried the bullet a while."

Some other thoughts:

Richard Burgi makes an effectively eeeevil villain as Lt. Womack, and I like how the chase scene between his ship and Serenity takes on the feel of a submarine thriller, with Serenity trying to hide from the depth charges Womack keeps tossing. Westerns were the obvious storytelling model for the series, but at various points it took on the trappings of a caper movie, or various kinds of war films. Joss is versatile, apparently.

I complained in some of the early reviews about my dislike of the Mal/Inara relationship, but it's thus far gotten less play than I had remembered. (That will, of course, change with next week's Inara-centric episode.) On the other hand, I had forgotten just how repetitive the Simon/Kaylee relationship got. Simon and Kaylee flirt nervously, all is going well, and then Simon says something that inadvertently hurts Kaylee's feelings, lather, rinse,  repeat. Here it's used to set up Kaylee's attraction to Tracey - and then to turn her into his hostage when he misunderstands what Mal is up to - but had the series gone on much longer, I would hope that Whedon would have started doing something different with the two of them.

One of Joss' rules that separated "Firefly" from most other space series that had come before is that there were no aliens. Everyone was a human, descended from the people who emigrated from the Earth that was. Which then allowed for the joke about the carnival barker on the space station showing off an alleged alien fetus that, as Simon helpfully explained, was really just a cow fetus.

Jayne's acceptance of the crew, and vice versa, that began with the lessons he learned in "Jaynestown," continues apace here with the crew being (mostly) kind about the ugly knit earflap hat his mom sends him (which Lt. Womack later insults to save face after Mal and Book outwit him), then with Jayne bonding with Shepherd Book about his mortality.


Because the show filmed in and around Los Angeles, and because it fit the Western motif, all of the outer planets and moons we've seen so far have been arid, dusty places, so it's almost shocking to see snow falling on the moon where Tracey's family lives.
Coming up next: The last of the unaired episodes, "Heart of Gold," in which Inara recruits Mal and company to help out an old friend.

What did everybody else think?

[Pearl@32]

"Out of Gas" is by far and away one of the best hours on television EVER. EV-ER.

If you were not totally in love with this show already, you fell in love with it all over again.

Uses the lines "Hi-larious" and "Not so much."

While I miss Firefly, I'm glad that Nathan doesn't have to be all tortured all the time anymore like his old job.

Fave moments:
"He bothers me."
"What's that, sir?" "Freedom, that's what." "No, I meant, what's that?"
<Jayne shooting the guy's leg while not looking>
"So there is kissing?" <smile>
"That's the last time you get to call me 'whore.'"
<Jayne's beat before leaving Mal for one of the shuttles>
"We'll be here."
"Wanna?" <---squee moment

[Pearl@32]

re: "War Stories"

What, no mention of the Councilor?    Or the infamous line that sparked the Bunkmates?

"War Stories" has one of the most awesome commentaries.

"This next part is brought to you by black, the color of night." ~ Nathan, referring to the "fade to black" after the opening credits

[AdmiralDigby]

"Out of Gas" is by far and away one of the best hours on television EVER. EV-ER.

If you were not totally in love with this show already, you fell in love with it all over again.

Uses the lines "Hi-larious" and "Not so much."

While I miss Firefly, I'm glad that Nathan doesn't have to be all tortured all the time anymore like his old job.

Fave moments:
"He bothers me."
"What's that, sir?" "Freedom, that's what." "No, I meant, what's that?"
<Jayne shooting the guy's leg while not looking>
"So there is kissing?" <smile>
"That's the last time you get to call me 'ji nu.'"
<Jayne's beat before leaving Mal for one of the shuttles>
"We'll be here."
"Wanna?" <---squee moment

Best episode .

[Spooky]

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-13-heart-of-gold

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 13: 'Heart of Gold'
By Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday, Aug 31, 2010
Almost done with our summer trip through Joss Whedon's outer space Western "Firefly" (which will definitely extend an extra week, since I watched the "Serenity" film yesterday with a friend), with a review of "Heart of Gold" coming up just as soon as I sneak up on a fellow while he's handling his weapon...

"Well, lady, I must say: you're my kind of stupid." -Mal

"Heart of Gold," like "Shindig" before it, is heavy on both the Mal/Inara sexual tension and Old West imagery. (In fact, it's the first episode with unmistakably Western trappings since the opening scenes of "Our Mrs. Reynolds.") Yet where both those aspects bothered me in "Shindig," I quite like "Heart of Gold."

What's the difference? A couple of things. First, on the Mal/Inara front, "Heart of Gold" isn't full of the banter between the two of them that's meant to be cute and charming but comes out mean and ugly. It takes the characters' repressed feelings for each other seriously, and in showing Inara's grief-stricken response to the knowledge that Mal slept with her friend Nandi(*), it makes clear just how deep those feelings flow from her side. This isn't an episode trying to tell me two people are in love when I don't really want to see them together; it's showing me how messy their emotions are and how hard it is to have them in the arrangement they have.

(*) Melinda Clarke, in between Lady Heather from "CSI" and Julie Cooper from "The O.C."

Second, by explaining that Rance Burgess(**) is a rich man who's moved out to the rim so he can live out his cowboy fantasies, it helps justify doing an episodic riff on the defending-the-fort Western archetype.(***) I still think the Western stuff works better as metaphor than as a literal translation on the show, but if part of the idea is that the rim is filled with spoiled rich men like Burgess who have taken the exodus from Earth as an excuse to role play, then it doesn't seem quite as ridiculous.

(**) Fredric Lane, shortly before he played Marshal Mars on "Lost."

(***) The best of these is Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo," with John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson. It was so good, in fact, that Hawks and Wayne essentially remade it twice (as "El Dorado" and then "Rio Lobo") and no one much minded.

The Western trappings, and the focus on whores who, as Inara is quick to point out, are not Companions (even if Nandi was trained as one) also allows Joss and company to revisit one of his pet themes: the way women are treated in traditionally patriarchal societies. We've seen that the future of "Firefly" has balance in some areas: on the Alliance planets, the Companions have more power and prestige than most of their clients, while no one at any point comments on Zoe's gender when it comes to her skills as a soldier. One of the downsides of the freedom from civilization that Mal seeks is being in places like this where men can get away with viewing women as property, where Burgess can give a speech about how he intends to remind everyone "What a woman is to a man" right before he orders Shari the traitorous whore to perform oral sex on him in front of a frenzied crowd of mercenaries.

But the whores, with some help from Mal and the crew, turn out to be much tougher and more resourceful than Burgess took them for, and though Nandi dies, it's clear from Petaline's actions and attitude in killing Burgess that she's going to help carry on Nandi's tradition of strength and independence for the other ladies of the house.

Mal, meanwhile, finally has sex (remarkably deep into the series for a character nicknamed Captain Tightpants), then has to grieve Nandi's death along with Inara. And he has to see that his night with Nandi has pushed his complicated relationship with Inara past the breaking point, to where she decides it's time to leave.

Her desire to do so is something the series wouldn't have to deal with long-term, what with the cancellation and all, but it did lead to Morena Baccarin's strongest work of the run, and an hour that made me wish that I had gotten to see more of the evolution of Mal/Inara than "Serenity" could ultimately provide.

Some other thoughts:

While the movie would deal with Inara's departure from the ship, this episode hints at a storyline that we unfortunately never got to see: Zoe's desire to have a baby with Wash. There are many stories I would've loved to see if the show had kept going, but Zoe finding the balance between mother and  warrior woman would have been high among them.

Some good Kaylee-related humor in this one, including her opinion of the male whores ("Isn't that thoughtful?"), and her need to get Wash to compliment her - "Were I unwed, I'd take you in a manly fashion" - because she feels lonely seeing so much of the crew paired off.

Also a very good Jayne episode. Yes, he immediately starts taking out his payment in trade, but he turns out to have chosen a simpatico whore (she gets aroused by talk of loading his pistols) and is his usual capable self during the fight.

I haven't had much time to browse the deleted scenes as I watch these episodes, but was there a bit that got cut where Kaylee has to fly Serenity while Wash runs the engines? That seemed to be what was being set up by their fight on the ship, with Wash locked on the wrong side of the galley, but there was never a payoff.

Back in "War Stories," Book justifies his gun-toting role in the rescue mission by noting that the Bible is fuzzy on the subject of kneecaps. I imagine it's much less fussy with his role here, where he's using a non-deadly weapon in the fire hose, but using it to set up Burgess's men to be killed by Zoe. Book's struggle to follow his faith as he got further assimiliated into the crew was yet another ongoing subplot we never got to see much of, alas.

Coming up next: the final episode of the TV show, the foot fetish-istic "Objects in Space." And, as mentioned above, the plan is to do some kind of write-up of the movie (even a brief one) on the 14th to close out these reviews.

What did everybody else think?

[Pearl@32]

Heart of Gold was absolutely one of my favorites. If Inara had to lose out to a 'rival,' she could do no better than Nandi, the lovely Melinda Clarke. I'm not sure what it is about the lovely Ms. Clarke but she seems to be a charismatic actress whom I have enjoyed in other roles just as much as Nandi (or Lady Heather, rooooww!).

The "foil house," the dulcimer, and Nandi's fine rice wine. And "Zoe's desire to have a baby with Wash." After the movie, I really wanted Zoe to be pregnant.

[Spooky]

The first episode I watched and, along with the pilot, the only two originally aired episodes I watched. It's also my favorite. I still remember getting chills when River tells Early she's Serenity. I believed her.

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-14-objects-in-space

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 14: 'Objects in Space'

By Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday, Sep 7, 2010

We're at the final regular stop on our summer trip through Joss Whedon's outer space Western "Firefly," but not the last stop, period, since I'll have at least a few things to say about the movie a week from today. In the meantime, a review of the final episode of the TV show itself coming up just as soon as I rub soup in my hair...

"Permission to come aboard?" -River

"Objects in Space" wasn't the last episode of "Firefly" produced, nor the final one aired (remember, FOX decided to save "Serenity" for last), but it works well as the much-too-soon series finale in the DVD order Whedon settled on. Though the first and only season was largely telling standalone stories about the jobs Mal and the crew hired on to do, the most prominent ongoing element was River's presence on the ship and the trouble it caused. So it feels right for the series to close on an episode where the hunt for River finally extends inside the walls of Serenity, and where River is finally accepted as part of the crew, in a lovely tracking shot that connects her to all the other characters.

On Whedon's DVD commentary track for this episode - one of the few DVD commentaries I've ever listened to more than once, and one I recommend if you care about the show and somehow haven't heard it yet - he talks about how the episode's roots were born in his teenage crisis of faith and discovery of existentialism, and the idea of morality in a world without God, which he previously summed up in a line from "Angel": "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

Again, I highly endorse listening to Joss monologue for 40+ minutes on that subject, on the importance of Summer Glau's feet and on Tim Minear's inability to pronounce "Boba Fett" correctly. It's an interesting, entertaining(*) glimpse into the mind of one of the most creative writers in the business, and it neatly illustrates the themes of the episode, and the bond between Summer and bounty hunter Jubal Early, and explains why (beyond the fact that she's crazy) River looks at a gun and sees a tree branch on the Serenity cargo bay floor.

(*) I used to listen to DVD commentaries far more than I do now, just due to time constraints, and one of the things that always bugged me was when the participants would just pause for long stretches to watch the movie or show. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to appear on a commentary track for a "Treme" episode written by my friend, the late David Mills. Though I vowed that I would try to keep the conversation going at all times, it's a lot harder than it looks from the outside, and there were definitely spots where the actors and I weren't as talkative as we should have been. That experience only increased my appreciation for guys like Joss and Kevin Smith who can talk endlessly about the experience. And because Joss doesn't let up for almost all of it, it stands out when he finally does acknowledge that he's pausing just because he wants to enjoy the exchange Simon and Jubal Early have about the arsonist dwarf. That's a bit that amused me when I watched the episode sans commentary, but when Joss shuts up and says it's one of his favorite scenes he's ever written, I pay extra notice.

But even without the commentary, "Objects in Space" stands out as one of the most memorable, and (intentionally) weirdest, episodes of the series.

Because River's mind was cracked open and not put back together properly by the Alliance, it seems only fair that the man who should finally come for her be not all there himself. Richard Brooks, best known for being the stiffest (and least supermodel-y) of all the prosecutorial sidekicks on the original "Law & Order"(**), might have seemed an unlikely choice to play Early, but he's fantastic: so cool and creepy and dangerous and mad. Some of the latter wasn't originally on the page, but when Brooks read the "Maybe I've always been here?" line to Kaylee as if Early wasn't entirely sure himself, Whedon was inspired to have him keep pushing the performance in that direction.

(**) He was less surprising to me, since I'd already had my "Wow, Richard Brooks is a lot of fun when he gets to loosen up" epiphany when watching him on a short-lived USA series called "G Vs. E," where Brooks got to wear an afro, sing along to the Commodores and generally be awesome.

Only a madman could find River Tam, but only a madman could be distracted as long as Early was by her claim that she had become part of the ship. The episode wisely keeps Glau off-screen for the middle portion, and because we still don't entirely understand what River's powers are beyond mind-reading and blind marksmanship, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that she could have merged with Serenity. Stranger things have happened on Whedon shows, and the focus on River and Early made this feel like a bizarre enough hour where it could have happened.

Instead, River singlehandedly frees Mal, inspires Kaylee to be brave, and tricks Early into coming back out onto the hull so that Mal can punch him off into space. River becomes a full part of the crew - Nathan Fillion playing Mal's joy at greeting her after the plan works out is wonderful to behold - while Early is left tumbling endlessly in the void, saying a line that, given the cancellation, feels like a sadly appropriate farewell:

"Well... here I am."

And "Firefly" appeared destined to remain an object in space, floating forever in the minds of its fans without ever getting a chance to move forward.

The fans, though, had other ideas. About which we'll get to next week.

Some other thoughts:

-Jewel Staite never fails to give me the chills in the scene where Early warns Kaylee that he'll rape her if she gives him any trouble. As Joss puts it in the commentary, it's the sort of thing you write and then wonder about your goodness as a person, but there's no questioning how great Staite is at playing Kaylee's terror.

-Note how quickly and decisively Early chooses to take out Book, and then how he dismisses him to Simon by saying, "That ain't a shepherd." Once again, Book was much more dangerous than he let on.

-Book earns his concussion, I suppose, by stepping in on the closest Simon and Kaylee have yet come to a kiss. It's interesting, though, to see how physically close and affectionate they are earlier in the episode when he's telling her a story from his surgical days.

-Early's red pleather space-suit is bad-ass. Just sayin'.

-The scene in the galley where Kaylee tells the others about River's shooting exploits while River listens from below and Early from above (because they are the same) is like some kind of crazy The Quotable Jayne Cobb's greatest hits segment. I have a hard time picking my favorite dumb thing he says there, but it's probably the mangled, "If wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak" line.

Coming up next: The franchise began with a movie-length TV episode called "Serenity." It ends with a genuine movie of the same name.

What did everybody else think?

[Spooky]

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-serenity-the-motion-picture

'Firefly' Rewind - 'Serenity' (the motion picture)
Published on Tuesday, Sep 14, 2010 7:00 AM Alan Sepinwall

Time to finish up our summer-long journey through Joss Whedon's outer space Western series "Firefly" with a look at "Serenity," the feature film that Joss and company reunited to produce a few years after Fox canceled the TV show. My review coming up just as soon as I think you're going to start a fair fight...   

"People don't like to be meddled with." -River

"I believe in something greater than myself: A better world. A world without sin." -The Operative

"So no more running. I aim to misbehave." -Mal

There's a phrase widely attributed to Napoleon - and used as the title to an episode of "Deadwood," yet another TV twist on the Western, which debuted a little over a year after "Firefly" was canceled - that says that history is a lie agreed upon.

The main plot of "Serenity" deals with just such a piece of history - the lie of what happened to the people of Miranda, and how the Reavers were created as a result - but the movie itself is something of a lie agreed upon.

Basically, Joss Whedon and his fans convinced the executives at Universal of several things: 1)That the audience for "Firefly" was much larger than the Nielsen ratings showed, and that the Browncoats would therefore turn out in huge numb3rs for a feature film release, and 2)Despite the film being a spin-off of a short-lived, allegedly low-rated TV show, it would be accessible and appealing to the non-Browncoats.

Neither proved to be entirely true.

The movie was a box office disappointment, not making back its production budget until the DVDs came out. The Browncoats went to see it, but not many non-fans. The reviews were generally positive (it has an 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes), but the strongest praise tended to come, unsurprisingly, from critics who had watched the TV show. (Roger Ebert, for instance, gave it three stars but closed his review with the line "it was made by and for people who can't get enough of this stuff. You know who you are.") Clearly, it was possible to enjoy the film without knowing the backstory - Joss is too good a craftsman to not have the film work on that level - but it's so, so much better if you about Mal's history, if you've seen what Jayne was like before "Jaynestown," if you're familiar with the Zoe/Wash marriage(*), etc. It was a film made, first and foremost, for fans of the show. Those fans unfortunately weren't large enough in number to keep the show on the air (not that Fox's various scheduling decisions helped), nor were they big enough to turn the film into a hit.

(*) One of the movie's bigger failings, on the appealing-to-newbies level, is that it does such a poor job of even making it clear that Zoe and Wash are married. There's a line during the long introduction to the Serenity crew where Mal tells Zoe "talk to your husband," but if you don't know he's referring to Wash, it comes by too quickly to register. They're a bit affectionate in a later scene, but Zoe's reaction to Wash's death likely didn't hit a newcomer nearly as hard as it did those who understood.

But if "Serenity" is a lie on some level, it's a glorious, wildly entertaining lie, from first minute to last.

Joss had worked in movies before as a screenwriter, but never had control over what the director would do with his ideas. ("Buffy" the series was in a way seven years of Joss giving a middle finger to Fran Rubel Kuzui, and I remember mentioning "Alien: Resurrection" once to him and Joss wincing at what Jean-Pierre Jeunet had done to his script.) And he had directed episodes of his shows, but always on a TV schedule and (relatively low for the medium) budget. "Serenity" wasn't a budget-buster for Universal or anything, but the scale of it was vastly bigger than anything Whedon had had full control over before, and his joy at getting to play with his new toys is palpable.

The film opens with one flashy bit of storytelling after another: the Universal logo becomes an image of the exodus from the Earth that was, which then turns into a history lesson about the creation of the 'verse, which then becomes River's nightmare of her school days, which then becomes a video flashback being watched by the Operative before he makes poor Michael Hitchcock literally fall on his sword. Story on top of story on top of story, and all of it being controlled by the winners. (In the film's universe, that's the Alliance; in the real world, it's Joss for getting to make the film.) We then get the movie's logo, which becomes a part of Serenity's hull, and after a Whedon-esque bit of undercutting cliches (the heroic music is interrupted by a piece of Serenity flying off), we travel inside the ship for a  tracking shot of the whole Serenity crew like we got at the end of "Objects in Space", only much, much more elaborate, as Mal walks the length of the ship chatting with all the remaining members of the crew. (Book and Inara are gone, though they of course turn up later in their new homes.)

And the movie climaxes with one great action set piece after another: Mal wiping the smugness off the Operative's face by siccing the entire Reaver fleet on him, Wash being a leaf on the wind, the crew making a final stand to buy Mal time, River finally taking control of her gifts and becoming a prototypical Whedon heroine, and Mal and the Operative fighting while dangling from chains in the bottomless shaft that must exist at the center of every sci-fi space station (see also Niska's space station, Cloud City on Bespin, etc.).

What makes those action sequences special isn't just that they look cool, but that all the moments are tied to character in some way: Mal is using the Alliance's deep dark secret against it by luring the Reavers to fight the Operative. Zoe is simultaneously grieving and being her amazing warrior woman self as she goes after the Reavers. River, having shared the secret of Miranda with others, starts to feel whole, and then the transformation is complete when she realizes how much Simon needs her. Etc. It's not just wicked explosions and kung fu(**); the moments go much deeper than that, and are paying off everything we've seen over 14 episodes of television and an hour-plus of the movie.

(**) In fact, the character stuff is strong enough to compensate for some lesser action moments. Mal's fight with with the Operative at the Companion training house looks fairly slow and awkward, like the two actors are trying really hard to remember fight choreography they learned five minutes before, yet it's still a good scene because of how the two characters play off of each other, and because Inara is hanging on the sidelines heckling Mal like usual (and then saving the day).

As the series mostly was, the film is Mal and River's story. Whedon tries to give everyone else a good moment or two, like Book's nighttime chat with Mal on Haven, or Jayne offending Mal and Zoe by bringing up the Battle of Serenity Valley, but essentially everyone is there to help illustrate aspects of the cold, hard captain and the damaged, dangerous girl traveling aboard his ship. Given how well we got to know the whole crew, it's disappointing - particularly that Wash dies one of those trademark Whedon sudden deaths in the climax of a movie in which he's had so little to do(***) - but understandable. If Whedon had set the story aside so he could service all the characters equally, "Serenity" would have been 100% fan service, rather than the 50/50 or so ratio that the film ultimately achieves.

(***) Wash's death, far more than Book's, has always seemed to rankle fans. And I get that, to a degree. Alan Tudyk was so likable and funny on the show, Joss has this history of using death to break up happy couples, Book was the show's most marginal character during its brief run, etc. But the stakes are impossibly high here, and it would feel like a cheat if every one of the regular characters from the show had survived both the Alliance and the Reavers. If the only casualties involved ancillary characters like Mr. Universe or the twins, then the threat Mal and company faced isn't as real, and the risks they took to get the message out there don't mean as much. Somebody had to die - more than one person, preferably - and then it comes down to picking favorites. Like, I never developed much of an attachment for Simon and wouldn't have cared if he died, but I know he had his fans, and I know that it would have been a much darker ending for Kaylee and River if he had. Or could you imagine the revolt if Jayne had been the one to fall? Somebody was going to be unhappy no matter what if Joss was telling the story honestly, and at least Wash got a triumphant moment in guiding Serenity down through that maelstrom before he died in mid-sentence. And the death is only really bad from a narrative standpoint if you assume there were going to be more movies after this one, which the box office numb3rs made moot.

Fans of lots of canceled shows hold out hope that some other network will rescue their favorite show - or even, wonder of wonders, that there might be a movie made. "Firefly" is one of the rare shows to pull off the latter trick ("Police Squad!," which begat "The Naked Gun," is another, and of course there's "Star Trek"), and the existence of "Serenity" is as much a miracle as what Mal and the Serenity crew pull off over the course of the film. These people have no business surviving what happens, let alone winning, and yet most of them do.

And even though the movie wasn't a hit (and is likely used as a cautionary tale when movie execs consider an "Arrested Development" or "Veronica Mars" film), it exists, and it's great. And that, as the hero of Canton once said... well I guess that's something.

Some other thoughts:

• As written by Joss and played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the Operative may be my favorite Whedon villain other than the Mayor of Sunnydale (or Angel during "Buffy" season two). No pretense, no hypocrisy, no bluster: he knows who and what he is, and when Mal eventually proves him wrong about the people he's working for, he concedes the point and spares the crew's lives. (And recovers in record time from a blow to the Adam's apple and a broken back in order to reach his communicator and give the order to his men.)

• Another sign of the increased budget from TV to movie: the mule is transformed from an ATV into a hovership.

• That's Glenn Howerton from "Always Sunny" as the man Mal kills to spare him a worse fate at the hands of the Reavers, and of course Sarah Paulson as the woman making the Miranda recording about the Pax.

• Krumholtz! I always love David Krumholtz (I even watched a half a season of "numb3rs" for him despite not caring much for crime procedurals) and was pleased to see him as Mr. Universe, including his Jewish wedding ceremony to the Love-Bot. I've also always found the scene where the Love-Bot is cradling Mr. Universe's corpse and relaying his dying words to be weirdly tender and moving.

• Lots of good humor in the film, unsurprisingly. I'm always partial to Mal and Jayne's very different reactions to Kaylee's lament about her sex life. And she and Simon ultimately get their happy ending, as do (in a less overt way) Mal and Inara.

• I'm a bit puzzled on the timeline, in that Mal says it's only been eight months since the Tams came aboard his ship in the pilot, yet Book has clearly been at Haven for quite a while. Exactly how much time lapsed over the course of the series, and then between the series and the film?

• Lotta good Fillion in this one, particularly the one-two-three punch of Mal holding Book as he dies, Mal arguing with the Operative and then Mal ordering the crew to desecrate the ship and the bodies of their friends so they can make it through the Reaver space. Again, a lot of this show's best moments involved Malcolm Reynolds making hard, horrible choices and imposing his will on others to make sure his orders get followed.

• And my favorite part of the scene with Mal's post-Miranda speech isn't the monologue itself, but Jayne's response. For once, even Jayne Cobb realizes the selfless course of action is the only one that should be taken.

• The tiny woman who kicks ass has almost become a cliche because of Whedon's work on "Buffy," et al, but you watch Summer Glau move through the Reavers during the climactic fight and she carries herself in a way that really does make it seem believable. Makes me want to see a movie about a team of ballerinas who are taught kung fu and recruited to be soldiers of fortune.

• Mal's line in the final scene about how "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down" - that's as much about the fans as it is about the crew, is it not?

So that's it for me on "Firefly." Been a fun bit of nostalgia. Hope next year's rewind selection is half as entertaining.

What did everybody else think?