Firefly: Re-Watching the First Few Episodes

[Vince W]

Jaynestown is indeed one of the top three episodes in my estimation. Jayne starts out being rather oafish and laughable in the series but he develops rapidly into a more complex character worthy of our time. Baldwin was just as good if not better in Chuck.

 

[Danny McG]

I've found a site to download the entire series at BlueRay standard, it's quite slow to download with this phone so I'm only doing a couple of episodes a night so it'll take a week.

The advantage is that I'll have it all on my phone memory so I can watch whenever I want. As it is now I have the DVD box set but I gotta wait until my missus has watched her soaps etc

 

[Vince W]

I've found a site to download the entire series at BlueRay standard, it's quite slow to download with this phone so I'm only doing a couple of episodes a night so it'll take a week.

The advantage is that I'll have it all on my phone memory so I can watch whenever I want. As it is now I have the DVD box set but I gotta wait until my missus has watched her soaps etc

Not bloody Hollyoaks I hope.

 

[Danny McG]

Not bloody Hollyoaks I hope.

She watches them all , Hollyoaks, Emmerdale, East Enders, Coronation Street, and she'll often channel hop in afternoons to watch so-called 'classic' episodes (old repeats that were sh*t 15 years ago and haven't improved)

 

[Vince W]

She watches them all , Hollyoaks, Emmerdale, East Enders, Coronation Street, and she'll often channel hop in afternoons to watch so-called 'classic' episodes (old repeats that were sh*t 15 years ago and haven't improved)

Ugh. Be thankful she hasn't discovered Fair City.

 

[Danny McG]

Success!
All 14 episodes now saved on my phone memory card, plus the original trailer for the series.

As an added bonus I managed to download Serenity onto my laptop from the dvd and then I Bluetoothed it to my phone as well.

I've random skimmed through it and played it at various points and it's very crisp and clear with decent sound....so I'm a happy bunny just now

 

[Mouse]

Hollyoaks is awesome.

 

[Danny McG]

Hollyoaks is awesome.

TBH she used to watch it years ago when it first started and I picked it up wrong.
I was vaguely aware there was a baby called Holly, and my missus and daughters used to say, "it's time for Holly Oaks", and I genuinely thought it was about some kid.
First name: Holly.
Last name: Oaks.

(A bit like 'The story of Tracy Beaker.)

It took me a year or two to realise I was in error!

 

[Vince W]

Hollyoaks is awesome.

 

[Pyan]

I'm doing exactly what Toby was, and have just got to the same point ('Jaynestown')as he did when he apparently stopped (or stopped writing them up, anyway). I agree with the slight air of clunkiness, but also with the 'I laughed out loud at least once in every episode' comment. I also found that there's at least one genuine 'wow' moment in each episode, usually involving Serenity herself (rising over a canyon wall, appearing to stop a witch-burning, etc).
One of the best bits for me is that Serenity is not a sleek Federation science vessel, or a kilometer-long star destroyer - she's a workhorse, well-used, held together with duct-tape and Kaylee's love and pride. I think that the production design team got that exactly right.
I also think that some of the comments above are a little unfair to River Tam. As tinkerdan says, she was intended to be the protagonist in a seasons-long arc (a Josh Whedon specialty - look at Buffy) which was curtailed by the cancellation of the show. "Two by two, hands of blue" was solved in "Serenity: Those Left Behind", but the film would probably never existed if the TV show hadn't been canned. I think River would have become less annoying and more integral to the arc as it progressed.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the Imperial Shuttle in the pilot?

 

[Vince W]

Good points @pyan. River may have developed into something more but we'll never know. The first season of Star Trek: TNG had some awful moments but we got through it.

Has anyone else noticed that Nathan Fillion is looking very much like he did in Firefly at the moment. No, lets don't go down that road.

 

[Danny McG]

Has anyone else noticed that Nathan Fillion is looking very much like he did in Firefly at the moment. No, lets don't go down that road

He is constantly referred to as 'Nathan Fillion, star of Castle" or "Nathan Fillion, star of The Rookie"

No ..
It's Captain Mal, the ultimate typecasting, end of.

 

[Pyan]

Don't forget Caleb, the pathologically misogynist preacher and eye-gouger in Buffy s.7...

 

[Mouse]

He was brilliant in Buffy and when she cleaved him in half that has to be one of the best moments.

 

[Overread]

Yeah a lot of the problems with River Tam as a character is that she wasn't fully developed. For as much as we love firefly we only got a very short introduction and not even a full first season. There was so much left undeveloped and such that we really only got a flavourful taste of it. The movie also suffered somewhat in trying to squeeze what was probably several seasons worth of the show into a single movie. Though honestly I feel that it did it really well and didn't feel too rushed. It was clearly set a good few years after the first adventures - with Book off-ship; with stress reappearing in the crew and with little things like the mule changing from a quadbike to a hovercraft (clearly a result of not only increased effects budget but also increased gains from jobs done by the crew here and there).

 

[Toby Frost]

I take the point, but I don't think this stops her being annoying right now. For one thing, I'm not convinced that she would have become less of an author's darling as the programme had gone on. For another, she doesn't have to be annoying to begin with in order to be fleshed out later. I find Inara slightly irritating*, but she's less the centre of the universe than River and she is allowed to get things wrong.

I do find this with long serials: a while back I contemplated re-watching Deep Space 9, but wondered how much stuff I'd have to sit through that wasn't very good to get to the story arcs and so on.

I enjoyed the film a lot, and I plan to finish off the series and watch it again. I think the combination of a bigger budget and the need to say something dramatic and final about the setting really helped it. I've still got two episodes to go that I remember as being very good - the one with Jayne's hat and the second Saffron one - and two that I remember as being quite odd: the one with the bounty hunter and the one with the gangster who resembles Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.


*Minor aside here: it's not easy being the voice-of-reason character, and doubly so if you're a woman, as you'll be perceived as stopping the (male) characters from having fun. I suspect this is why internet saddos hated Mrs White from Breaking Bad so much. Inara gets around this, I suspect, by going away and having adventures of her own. In "Shindig" and "Jaynestown", her more talky adventures feed back into the main plot, which works well.

 

[Toby Frost]

"Out Of Gas": a decent episode, although not one of the best. Nathan Fillion is as solid as ever, everyone gets to help out, and the River-annoyance quotient is pretty low. There are some amusing flashbacks to how the crew got together, and the structure is nicely done. Also, there’s a very cool effect of fire being sucked out of the spaceship’s hold. The main thing that strikes me about it (apart from Wash’s comedy moustache) is that it’s already starting to feel a bit familiar, and the episode feels a bit inconsequential. But perhaps I’m being unfair there. It does make me think that Firefly’s world is quite a small one, as there’s only one “country”, no aliens and, it seems, no intelligent computers. As ever, it would have been interesting to know how they dealt with this.

 

[.matthew.]

It does make me think that Firefly’s world is quite a small one, as there’s only one “country”, no aliens and, it seems, no intelligent computers. As ever, it would have been interesting to know how they dealt with this.

It does feel like a small world, but you do get a bit more futurism with the heist episode on one of the central planets. For the most part the show focuses on those outlying colonies that are barely getting by, and while they all look the same - and are too low tech to be believable - it isn't totally unreasonable to assume that basic colonies started by a handful of settlers could be like that.

I did love the serenity set though (until they redid for the film of the same name). It really sold industrial space travel rather than having everything shiny and clean. This is also one of the major issues that plagues current attempts at space exploitation, we have far too many safety regulations and expectations to manage it right now. The wild west would be a great road to follow, scatter shot near-earth missions until one sticks.

Which brings us neatly back to the quote, and intelligent computers... we went to the moon with a calculator - or at least the processing power of one - so the basic physics of space travel wouldn't require a super computer anymore than an ocean bound vessel.

 

[Toby Frost]

That’s true: Ariel is a step up technology-wise, although war seems to be basically the modern day with lasers. The basic setup of the outer colonies always struck me as quite convincing, up to the stuff that felt peculiar to the Wild West (and not any other historical frontier). I’d be interested to know how the Firefly world actually works: I remember Whedon saying somewhere that it wasn’t actually a dictatorship, and Shindig suggests some kind of feudal peerage, but it’s never very clear. I mention the AI thing not because Serenity needs one, but just because it would be an interesting science-fiction thing to meet. Perhaps including robots might feel a bit too wacky, but then River is psychic, which is basically magical. One of the comics includes some sort of combat robot, but I’m not sure if that’s canon or not.

 

[.matthew.]

Yea, the war stuff seems rather conventional, but full on space battles wouldn't have added anything to the western theme. It's also probable that like today, various tools of war would be banned, nano weapons and the like.

You could argue that the wild west theme actually works considering the colonists all appear to be Americans, with Chinese in the background. Historically the settlements were pretty heavily white with east asians in the background (railroad workers etc). Although that is me just trying to find a justification for it (maybe we would have seen other cultures had the show gone on longer).

From River and Simon's family, I sort of got the impression it was more of a meritocracy, but with various outer worlds living by their own rules as long as they kept the peace and paid up their dues to the Alliance. Their father seemed really interested in their financial careers, and when River was selected for the school, she wasn't just taken, they had the choice to enroll her (though they didn't know about the nasty bits).

Robots could have been a cool addition but not AI ones. Even today very smart people are very wary of true AI. If anything they would only be used for entertainment and convenience, much like today.