Cult TV Blogging: Firefly (2002): Series Primer

Joss Whedon’s Firefly ran for just fourteen episodes (fifteen hours in all) on Fox’s Friday night prime-time line-up way back in the fall of 2002; airing just before another short-lived genre series: John Doe starring Dominic Purcell. 

The outer space series was canceled because of low-ratings, but soon rose phoenix-like from the ashes for a feature film reunion, 2005’s Serenity.  Incidentally, that film recently placed at the number #3 slot in a reader-selected top ten list of the best science fictions films circa 2000 – 2013.

In terms of series lore, Firefly is set in a world five hundred years hence (2517 AD, to be precise), when a “unified” human government called The Alliance has defeated all forms of resistance. The human race has also terra-formed a vast swath of planets and moons to resemble Earth environments, and dropped off settlers everywhere...sometimes without adequate supplies.

On the rich central planets of the Alliance like Osiris or Ariel life is good and stable, but as one travels out into the frontier worlds, places like backwater Whitefall, it becomes increasingly difficult and primitive.

And at the edge of space itself -- which Firefly’s characters term “the black” -- awaits a horror called “The Reavers.”  These creatures are allegedly human beings who gazed into the abyss of space and were forever transformed by what they saw there.  They then re-shaped themselves into self-mutilating savages known to rape, murder, and eat their victims, though not always in that order.  One episode, “Bushwhacked” depicts the Reaver conversion process.  A human survivor of a Reaper ambush continues the cycle of violence and becomes one of the monsters himself.  The film Serenity reveals the true story of The Reavers, and it differs a bit from the “gossip” reported above.

 In more human terms, Firefly is the saga of Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion), formerly a sergeant in the Independent Army. His side lost the war against the Alliance six years ago, and now he captains a battered Firefly class transport vessel named Serenity after the valley where the Alliance won the war.

Mal’s rag-tag crew includes his former lieutenant, the no-nonsense Zoe (Gina Torres), her husband, the wisecracking ship’s pilot, named Wash (Alan Tudyk), and the “muscle” of the group, the obnoxious, Jayne (Adam Baldwin).  His favorite gun is named “Vera.”

Young Kaylee (Jewel Staite) runs the ship’s systems and could probably fix any machine in the galaxy, and finally there’s lovely, dignified Inara (Morena Baccarin of Homeland.). She's the Serenity’s foremost citizen, “an ambassador” of sorts called "a Companion.” This means she's a combination psychologist/courtesan.  Many episodes involve Mal’s inability to accept her profession as legitimate, and Inara’s description of the position as empowering to women.

In the first two-hour episode of Firefly, titled “Serenity” the crew makes a pit-stop on the planet Persephone after a scavenging operation gone wrong, and picks up new passengers including the mysterious man of God, Shepherd Book (played by Ron Glass), and Simon Tam (Sean Maher), a once-promising young physician.

Without the crew’s knowledge, Simon has smuggled aboard his sister, River (Summer Glau), a genius and mind-reader who is slightly nutty. She's been held hostage by the Alliance at “the Academy.”

Now, Serenity is a marked ship because the Alliance and its deadly operatives want River returned. She knows some important secret about their plans for the citizenry, and they want to protect knowledge of it from the masses.  Once more, this plot-line comes to fruition in the film, Serenity. Over the course of the series, River is hunted by blue-gloved operatives of the Alliance, as well as a determined bounty hunter in “Objects in Space.”

Each week on Firefly, the crew attempts to make money, often illegally (in episodes like “The Train Job”), and often unglamorously (visiting a “mudder’s” world in “Jaynestown” and transporting livestock in “Shindig”), while simultaneously evading the authorities. Many of these missions involve Mal’s particular and personal code of honor.  There are some lines he won’t cross, and some lines he deliberately blurs, as we’ll see in the weekly retrospectives.  Mal boasts a real self-destructive quality, and sometimes lets his pride get the better of him. 

One of the best aspects of this unique sci-fi series is its fashioning of a future world in which the characters speak in (un-translated) Chinese idioms, and must scrap and struggle just to survive. This is definitively not a universe of plenty, where "technology unchained" (the mantra of Star Trek: The Next Generation) has created a virtual utopia. On the contrary, the Firefly class ship is always just a few dollars away from falling apart, or running low on fuel, and thus this is the opposite of romantic views of space adventuring we've come to expect in many franchises.  Some science fiction fans have noted its similarity to the British Blake’s 7 (1978 – 1981), which featured a group of criminals on the run from a totalitarian Federation.   Those similarities exist, but Firefly is its own animal, focusing less on a resistance “movement” and more on a group of disparate individuals, who, by necessity, must form an ad hoc family.

In terms of thematic metaphor, Firefly is very clearly and very deliberately a reflection of the post-American Civil War milieu or context.  There the Union (the Alliance) soundly defeated the Confederacy (the Independents), largely with overwhelming technology and numbers. Many veterans of the Confederacy later moved to the wide open frontier of the Old West, in hopes of establishing something new and something “free” there.    Mal, the son of a rancher on the inhospitable world “Shadow,” fits this definition on the series.  He is still touchy about his side losing the war, and frequently makes comments that for him, the war has not ended.  In “The Train Job” he quips to his (Alliance) enemies that he believes the Independence Movement “will rise again,” a clear reflection of the popular refrain that the South shall one day rise again too.

Firefly's Reavers - those murderous and bloody space savages existing on the frontier of space represent another part of the American history allegory.  They represent essentially the same role as American Indians once did in the Western movie genre. They are “the other” that is feared by civilization and gossiped about ; known and feared for their strange, savage ways. Had the series lasted longer, one wonders if the Reavers might have been portrayed in a less villainous, more three-dimensional light, given their obvious inspiration in Native American culture. In both design and behavior, it must be said, the Reavers very closely resemble the Martians of John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars. Both races are self-mutilators, and both are berserkers.

Regarding visual technique, Firefly pioneered the use of the camera “zoom” in vast outer space-shots, a facet of the series that was promptly appropriated and popularized by the remake of Battlestar Galactica. The series also apes 2001: A Space Odyssey, making certain that there’s no sound in the vacuum of space. Intriguingly, there are no alien races either. In fact, the Firefly aesthetic reminds me of that great tagline from 1981’s Outland: “Even in space, the ultimate enemy is man.”

As any review of the series' creative structure indicates, Firefly as a drama has a great deal on its mind. But at its core, the series is a dedicated meditation on personal freedom. Even the theme song, written by Joss Whedon strikes this note, observing that one can take a person's "land" but you can't take the "sky" from them. Thus the series serves as a paean to the pioneer spirit, reflecting these settlers who just want to be left alone to live how they choose. One gets the sense that Mal would hate any government (or religion) in power, because it would seek to control his destiny. And that is a control he will simply not tolerate. Yet, as noted above, he has trouble granting Inara the same freedom he cherishes, at least in terms of her choice of professions.  Critics have compared Mal to Han Solo from the Star Wars films, but he’s far more complex than Solo, if only because we get the opportunity to spend more time with him, and see him in more varied situations.

That trademark Whedon aesthetic -- snappy, Hawksian dialogue and outstanding, non-traditional roles for female characters -- is on full display in Firefly. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the mechanics of language and the art of the put-down are primary considerations.  Character and personality are exposed by the way people speak; the very words they choose; how they express themselves. And that fact alone lands Firefly head-and-shoulders above most of its brethren on network TV.

In short, it is easy to enumerate Firefly’s best qualities: a coherent, believable mythology; a language all its own, fascinating, realistic characters whom we grow to love and entertaining, rip-roaring space adventures stories to boot.  In the weeks ahead (on Sundays), I’ll be reviewing all the episodes of the series as well as the 2005 film.

I hope you’ll join me for the retrospective.

Next week: “Serenity.”