In “Safe,” the fifth episode of Joss
Whedon’s Firefly (2002), Serenity delivers its payload of livestock
(picked up on Persephone in the previous story “Shindig) to dealers on the
colony of Jiangyin.
The transaction is interrupted by the
police, however, and Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) is accidentally shot in the
resulting melee.
Mal (Nathan Fillion) is forced to leave the
planet and seek Alliance help to save the Shepherd’s life, while Simon (Sean
Maher) and River (Summer Glau) Tam are inadvertently left behind, and captured
by the denizens of a backwater town in the hills.
Those denizens desperately need a town
doctor to tend to their sick, but the parochial hill people also suspect that
River is a witch. and decide that she must be burned at the stake along with her brother…
Your mileage may vary, of
course, but “Safe” is -- for my money -- the least interesting and least
notable Firefly episode in the canon thus far. It repeats a central threat from the pilot
episode -- that of a crew-member getting shot during a confrontation -- and even
reruns the notion of a “business transaction” that turns violent, or otherwise
goes astray.
Similarly, the flashback
sequences in “Safe” involving young River and Simon (Zac Efron) don’t really
cover any new ground, or provide information that audiences don’t already know,
or can’t intuit. In previous stories,
Simon has already explained rather thoroughly how we grew worried for River
while she was away at school, and how he endeavored to break her out of the Alliance’s
grip. Seeing some of that history played
out here doesn’t really add anything new to the mix, save for the depiction of
Mr. Tam, the siblings’ father
Likewise, the episode’s
final point -- that Mal is loyal to his crew -- is pretty much a foregone
conclusion from the beginning, and so doesn’t spark any strong feelings or
emotions, or even register as very memorable.
“Safe” isn’t just the episode’s title, then, it’s a description of the
episode itself, which plays like a placeholder between extremely dynamic
installments, namely “Shindig” and “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” up next.
Getting to specifics, in
“Serenity” it was Kaylee (Jewel Staite) who was shot, nearly died, and required
medical attention, and here it’s Shepherd Book.
The point with both injuries is the same: life is dangerous on the
periphery of the law (and on the frontier), and doubly so without easy access to
state-of-the-art medical facilities. But
the point doesn’t have to be made twice in four episodes, for certain.
The most compelling
aspect of “Safe,” is by far the continuing bread crumb trail regarding Shepherd
Book’s past. Here, it is discovered that
his “Ident Card” establishes him as a man of some importance in the Alliance (a
former Operative, perhaps?). When the
Alliance Goons read his card, they treat Book like a V.I.P. and really hop to
it. This is a notion that the series
didn’t get to fully explore before cancellation came, but which is nonetheless
compelling. Who was Book before he
became a Man of God? What bad deeds did
he commit that turned him towards a life of prayer and reflection?
Regarding Simon and
River, I feel it is very hard to get both of their characters exactly “right,”
and that this episode ever so slightly misses the mark. For instance, River
possesses that special TV brand of insanity -- which Walter Bishop also suffers
from on Fringe -- namely that she is sane, lucid and wise when the story
requires her to be, and nutty, dangerous and confused when the story requires
that aspect of her personality to come to the forefront. I call it selective insanity, and it tends to
magnify whenever there is some threat that could be easily avoided save from
the wrong word or action by River.
As for Simon, we learn
in this episode that he gave up his entire future as a physician to help his
sister, and that’s admirable indeed.
However, Simon still comes across in the present day scenes as entitled,
abrasive and selfish. “Who cares about
my future?” He asks, for instance, obsessing on his own problems. We know he is struggling with his decision to
save River and give up his career, but he isn’t especially sympathetic or
likable in this installment.
I’m not saying that “Safe”
is a bad episode, mind you, only that not much really happens in the story that
seems fresh or new, and that, therefore, the episode isn’t one of my favorites.
In particular, I don’t
think that the writer, Drew Greenberg, is particularly strong in making the
shift from the hill people as backwards, doctor-needing-rubes to
Fire-and-Brimstone Villagers and religious fanatics. It seems a little too pat, and a little too
manufactured a threat. On the other hand, the scene with River breaking loose and dancing -- care-free -- with the locals, is quite beautiful, and poetically-rendered.
Next week, a humdinger of
an episode gets us back to the spiky surprising Firefly that we all love:
“Our Mrs Reynolds.”
No comments:
Post a Comment