Evergreen: “Firefly”
Last updated on 30 December 2020.
It probably wasn’t the first time I binge-watched a series, but it’s the first instance I remember. Having enjoyed previous Whedon-helmed material like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both the movie and the series) and a bit of Angel (1999), I found out that there was this other series he made, called Firefly. So I downloaded the first few episodes and started watching. After the two-hour pilot, I just kept watching. This was new, and different, and poignant and funny and I wanted more.
That’s right, this time I’ll discuss Firefly, the short-lived TV show created by Joss Whedon. You might have heard about it: it had troubles during production, it aired out-of-order, the network (Fox) cancelled it after airing 11 of the 14 completed episodes. Fan reaction, however, was overwhelming. They organised themselves online and tried to keep the show on the air. They sent letters to Fox, to the sponsors, and held charity drives. This led to the show being released as a nice DVD set a year later, and even getting a full movie called Serenity in 2005. So let’s see what everybody got so worked up about, including me.
Objects in Space
Firefly is a TV series best summarised as “space opera meets Western”. It’s a show set in the year 2517, about the crew and passengers of a Firefly-class spaceship Serenity and how they get by at the fringes of colonized space. The remaining two superpowers were China and the United States of America, so culture is a mix of those two. This mixture of genres is a bit hard to explain so I’ll let the opening credits do it for me:
(The theme song is written by Joss Whedon, and I’ll come back to it.)
We see the introductions of no less than nine characters. Even more than Buffy and Angel, Firefly is an ensemble piece, a group effort. Yes, Nathan Fillion’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds takes first billing but the other eight are at least as important. Indeed, as Nathan notes during the commentary track of the first episode, “Serenity”: “I always had it in my head that crew members on Serenity, represented for Mal, bits of himself that he has lost, or that he needs, that he can’t have.”
Mal is an unlikely protagonist. He fought for independence in the civil war that’s some years in the past of the show, and lost. He saw most of his squad die before his eyes in the battle of Serenity Valley. We see this happen in the very first scenes of the show, before those opening credits roll. As his second-in-command Zoe (Gina Torres) says, in a deleted scene: “Mercy, forgiveness, trust. Those are things he left back there. What he has now, is this ship. This ship, and us on it.”
This firmly establishes our main character as somebody who lost everything and now tries to get by. So how do we relate to this broken husk of a man? The studio executives were also wondering about this and apparently asked / ordered to make Mal “less mean”. While I’m usually firmly on the side of the creators in the case of studio interference, I think they had a point here. As it is, the tone of the show varies wildly from episode to episode and from scene to scene, to the point of Mood Whiplash. Mal is still very much a flawed human, damaged by his experiences, but in the final version he’s also relatable as he has hopes, dreams, a certain code of honour and will fight tooth and nail for his crew.
The captain puts his dreams this way, during a flashback in episode 8, “Out of Gas”:
“A small crew. They must feel the need to be free, take jobs as they come. They never have to be under the heel of nobody ever again. No matter how long the arm of the Alliance might get… we’ll just get ourselves a little further.”
His code of honour is nicely demonstrated this dialogue in episode 5, “Safe”:
The doctor, Simon: “Captain… Why did you come back for us?”
Malcolm: “You’re on my crew.”
Simon: “Yeah, but you don’t even like me. Why’d you come back?”
Malcolm: “You’re on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?”
That exchange would be less effective if we didn’t also like the crew, though. But we do, as Whedon and his writing staff make sure that we get to know them as well and they are sparkling with personality and chemistry. It’s no easy feat to introduce nine characters and flesh them out while also introducing a new universe and moving the plot forward.
As Whedon and his showrunner Tim Minear tell us on the commentary track of the second episode, “The Train Job”:
Whedon: “The pilot [...] was not aired until the very end of the series. And Fox came to us and said: ‘Hey we want an idea for a new show. What if we aired something else first?’ And then on Friday afternoon, they called us and said: ‘OK Joss and Tim… We want a script…’”
Minear: “By Monday!”
Whedon: “‘…and it has to be on our desks before we get in the morning.’ So we had exactly two days to write an entire show. To write an entire new show that introduced nine characters who had very complicated lives and relationships. And…”
Minear: “You know, in a whole new universe that did not fall into any kind of science fiction cliché.”
Whedon: “Right, that had never been explained to the audience at all, and was culled from all these different cultures.”
Under pressure diamonds are created. Of course, when the characters are introduced they are all given their place with some shorthand: Kaylee (Jewel Staite) is the mechanic, Wash (Alan Tudyk) is the pilot, Zoe is the tough-as-nails warrior woman, Jayne (Adam Baldwin) is the muscle. But quickly we learn more about them, and Kaylee is not just the mechanic but also a sweet and sensual girl that is the heart of the crew, Zoe and Wash are happily married, Jayne is a double-crossing snake and a lummox.
Inara (Morena Baccarin) is a travelling prostitute, but in this universe being a “Companion” is more like a geisha and a very high-rank job, and she provides unofficial psychological counsel to the crew. Shepherd Book (the late Ron Glass) is a preacher, very much the Western archetype of one, but he also has a lot of knowledge about military and black ops procedure: what’s the deal with that?
And then we have Simon and River Tam (Sean Maher and Summer Glau), siblings that are fleeing from the Alliance because Simon had to bust out his sister River from a shady corporation that was experimenting on her. We never really learn their whole backstory but their interaction is entirely believable and they push a lot of the overarching plot. Simon is a brilliant doctor that gave up his career to save his sister. As such he also brings the fish-out-of-the-water role as his cultured ways are in stark contrast with the rough-and-tumble life of the crew. River is a strange babe-in-the-woods, but she also shows sparks of deep insight in people and psychic abilities. River is also the frail-girl-that-kicks-ass character that Whedon seems to have a fondness for.
All this is unfolding while the separate episodes are cheerfully riffing off of the established science-fiction and Western tropes. The second episode (which aired as the pilot on TV) is “The Train Job” and that plays more or less as the “outlaws rob the stagecoach / train” episode, except that the train is magnetically levitated and is delivering crucial medicine to the frontier. There is one episode where the ignorant townsfolk try to burn a witch, there are two “heist” episodes, we get an Alien episode, and even a submarine story.
“This is a fertile land, and we will thrive.”
So there’s a lot going on at once. Fortunately, the show was created by an excellent crew. First off, I have to mention the cinematography by David Boyd. He gave the series a very immediate feel by shooting mostly hand-held. The few static shots he employed were saved for shots when in Alliance territory to emphasise their rigidity of thinking and contrast it with the lawlessness of the outer planets.
He also shot with as little artificial light as possible, and was not afraid of letting characters be underexposed or slightly out of frame. Or overexposed, for that matter: Firefly has lens flares all over the screen:
The fun part is when we cut to footage of the ship flying through space. Even though it’s all CGI, we are still treated to jerky camera-movements, out-of-frame shots and lens flares — neatly avoiding any dissonance between the “real” footage and the computer-generated stuff.
Then we have the set and costume design by Carey Meyer and Shawna Trpcic respectively. Both had the job of “making everything look like it does come from every single culture in the world.” They had the opportunity to mix and match from cultures from all over the world, from any time period, but it all had to look believable and coherent. The result is a very diverse universe that seems large while we don’t actually see all that much of it.
Of particular note is the design of the ship, that is referred to on the DVD as “the tenth character”. It feels like a real place, where people live. There’s dirt and grit and jerry-rigging and character here. There’s more than a little Star Wars influence here, where the Millenium Falcon also feels like a real place, not like the sterile environments of Star Trek’s starships. (And it’s easy to see a bit of Han Solo in Malcolm Reynolds.)
Wrapping up this section I have to mention the music by Greg Edmonson, who gave us various themes performed by all kinds of non-traditional instruments, again mixing influences from all over the world but still making it a coherent whole.
“You’re on my crew.”
Getting back for a minute to the themes of the show, let’s discuss the main theme song. As Whedon mentions on a commentary track: “This song, I actually wrote, before I wrote the pilot. (...) I wanted to write a little blues song about what it was like to lose the war, and either die, be taken up into heaven; or go out into space, and abandon humanity, which is sort of what Mal did.”
The Ballad of Serenity
(Lyrics by Joss Whedon, performed by Sonny Rhodes)
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me.
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
You can’t take the sky from me
While that might have been the starting point for Mal, over the course of the season it becomes clear that he’s in a much better position nowadays. Indeed, Firefly is not specifically about Mal. Says Whedon: “Every show I do is about created family, as opposed to actual family.” Or, as writer Jane Espenson, costume designer Shawna Trpcic and Morena Baccarin state during the commentary of the episode “Shindig”:
“They’re two misfits, no matter where they go.”
“I think the whole gang of Firefly are kind of the misfits of the universe, that is what I really dug.”
“And they find a home together, with each other.”
And to close it out with another quote by Whedon:
“A person who is broken becomes whole, partially because the people around her decide that she is. And, you know, that’s, that’s the creation of family, I think that’s very beautiful.”
“You can’t take the sky from me”
Every so often I read forum posts or articles that laud Firefly (and Serenity) and there’s always somebody there that wants to have a second season. Not as in “oh it’s such a pity we didn’t get to have more Firefly” but “they really should make a second season, now.”
Obviously, that isn’t going to work. This is apart from logistics: these people have other lives and obligations now, and that’s ignoring the fact that you’d have to resurrect Ron Glass (Shepherd Book), who died in 2016. More importantly: how are you going to catch that lightning again? It’s been sixteen years. Sixteen! The actors, the crew, they’re no longer the same people, and neither is the audience.
Firefly, to me, is a bit like the oeuvres of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. They died when they were 27 years young, leaving us to wonder what could’ve been. Their myths are probably bigger now than they themselves could ever have become.
This series is like that: we only got one short season, but that also means that there are no filler episodes, nor did we get into the later seasons which so often become less inspired on long-running shows. Instead, what we got was raw and pure and unsullied, and near perfect.
“We're still flying.”
As in my previous article, about The Godfather, it’s not hard to recommend a follow-up if you like Firefly: Just watch the movie! After the efforts of the fanbase and the good DVD sales, Universal Pictures gave the green light on making a movie that would be a sequel to the series. Joss wrote the story and gathered the entire main cast and they wrapped up the saga as well as could be expected. The movie had to achieve multiple goals: it needed to wrap up a story that a hard-core fan base were immensely invested in, but it had to be understandable to newcomers at the same time. It had to move the universe and storytelling from the episodic, one-hour format to the big screen and feature length. It’s astounding how close it comes to reaching these goals, but in the end I’d rate it as an “OK” movie. As a capstone to the saga, it’s gorram amazing. Here’s an episode of Movies with Mikey that explains it:
If you like the ensemble cast, the themes of family and petite girls kicking all kinds of ass, the sharp wit, there’s always Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). It’s seven seasons long so eat your heart out! The movie on which that series was loosely based, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), is also fun. (Whedon didn’t direct it but since he wrote it his fingerprints are all over it.)
He also wrote or helped write either the script or the screenplay for some animated features: Toy Story (1995), Titan A.E. (2000) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001).
After Firefly and all its problems Whedon somehow still got on board with Fox again. Actress Eliza Dushku persuaded him to create what would become Dollhouse (2009), another high-concept science-fiction show. In it, people agree to become to become “dolls”, and somebody else’s personality is written over their own. If this sounds weird and more than a little creepy I totally agree, but it was intriguing and the ensemble cast was amazing. Still, Dollhouse was cancelled after two seasons.
Whedon also wrote some comics, both based on his own series, and for Marvel Comics. His run on Astonishing X-Men (2004) was delightful. One of its main story elements was also used in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and the story arcs were later adapted into the motion comic Astonishing X-Men (2009).
Maybe that’s why Marvel Studios gave him the director spot for their massive The Avengers (2012), the final movie in their “Phase 1” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? I mean, why would they give that position to a guy who didn’t exactly have a spotless record? How did that even happen? Whatever their reasoning, it paid off as The Avengers was critically and publicly acclaimed, and was at the time the third-highest-grossing movie of all time.
Bob Chipman talks about it at length in his “Really That Good: The Avengers”, but to me it’s a combination of several blockbuster movies of build-up, a tight script and Whedon’s experience in directing an ensemble cast.
Whedon would try do it again and delivered Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) but that’s a decidedly less interesting movie which is, frankly speaking, all over the place.
Instead, I’d recommend watching The Cabin in the Woods (2012) (co-written with Drew Goddard) which is a intelligent subversion of the horror genre; and Much Ado About Nothing (2012), a modern version of the classic Shakespeare play. For the latter he invited many of his friends and series regulars to his home and shot the entire thing in 12 days. More about that in my review.
Moving on to the main cast, there are not that many movies or series I can recommend. Most of the cast were television actors with few top-tier series under their belt. For example, Malcolm Reynolds was Nathan Fillion’s first starring role. Fortunately, some of them got the chance to shine.
Fillion went on to take top billing in the eight seasons of Castle (2009), a police procedural where he paired with Stana Katic. Fillion’s on-screen chemistry with Katic carries much of the show, as does their charm. Here’s my review. Unfortunately, the later seasons have a drop in quality as the plot becomes more and more artificial and convoluted.
Between Firefly and Serenity Gina Torres could be seen in the two Matrix sequels, and lately she’s the stern named partner Jessica Pearson in the legal drama Suits (2011).
Alan Tudyk is an absolute trooper, currently having no less than 104 acting credits on his IMDb profile. A lot of that is in lesser known TV series, voice work, or supporting roles. I always liked him best in A Knight’s Tale (2001), the delightful “jousting knights are rock stars” movie with the late Heath Ledger.
Morena Baccarin similarly has done a lot of work in TV series. She had a leading role in V (2009) (which I didn’t see) and played Jessica Brody on Homeland (2011). However, she recently featured on the big screen again, as Vanessa in the surprise hit Deadpool (2016).
The rest of the cast is even less known, or worked on series I didn’t watch, like Jewel Staite’s stint on Stargate: Atlantis (2004) or Summer Glau in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008). In the meanwhile, we’re still waiting for this:
