Survival Arts

Firefly: I can't recommend it highly enough

I'm on break between school terms, and am catching up on some entertainment. Friends on the smith2004-discuss list had been raving about a short-lived 2002 Fox television series called "Firefly," which had been cancelled due to poor ratings.

I'd actually tried to catch the first episode as it aired in the U.S. last year. I tuned in only to find that some sports event had pre-empted the airing. I tuned away in disgust. It turns out that Fox wasn't airing the pilot ("Serenity") that night; instead, they were airing "The Train Job", which was written hastily over the space of a weekend at Fox's whim... the pilot, which set up the world, the characters, and the arc of the plot, didn't air for weeks later. As a matter of fact, of the 14 episodes that were produced, 10 were aired, and most of those out of sequence.

Fox did nothing to promote the show, and placed it in a suicide slot. The show was pre-empted several more times by sports events. It died a year ago to the protests of a fanatical viewer base spread across continents. In the last year news of the series has spread by word of mouth - the way I found out about it - and seems to have created a larger fan base in its absence.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Amazon.com released the entire, properly sequenced set of Firefly episodes on DVD. As of this writing, the DVD set ranks 17th in sales, with 261 reviews and an average 5-star rating!

Firefly: The Complete Series is also available for rental from Netflix.com. Several weeks ago, I added it to my Netflix rental queue - they allow pre-release reservations - and as soon as it was available to be rented, it was shipped to me. My loved one and I spent several evenings this last week watching the entire set. We are completely enamoured of this series, and now we're wondering how we're going to follow up with anything nearly as good.

The show is the brainchild of director Joss Whedon, the creator of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its spinoff "Angel". I've seen a few of both, and generally liked them, but I wouldn't have missed them if they'd been cancelled. "Firefly", however, is apparently the series that Whedon really wanted to do all along, an impression made stronger by his having actually said so (you'll have to see it in the "Extras" section of DVD #4).

I won't try to recap the series for the reader here, since you can visit Netflix, Amazon, and/or Fireflyfans.net for plenty of that. What I will say is that if you've been disappointed by television sci-fi (with the notable exception of Farscape, another casualty), you'll find Firefly an unexpected pleasure. That is, you'll enjoy it if you love science fiction but despise what's been made of Star Trek, and you have a libertarian bias toward freedom and all it entails.

Fans of the writing of L. Neil Smith will particularly enjoy this series: though set roughly 500 years hence, it has some of the best elements of both space opera and the classic American western. It also has some of the best ensemble acting I've ever seen anywhere. Oh, and there are guns. Lots of guns. Almost all the guns are real, reliable, effective slug-throwers of wildly individual variety. It was amusing that a laser pistol shows up only twice in the series: as the antique "Lassiter", the object of a heist in one episode ("Trash"), and as a battery-draining liability in the "Heart of Gold" episode.

The world of Firefly consists (I think) of roughly 70 terraformed planets and innumerable moons, many of them prairie lands. The "core" worlds are more urban, and are controlled by the Alliance (an alliance between whom and whom, I'm not sure, but I think between some English-speaking and Chinese-speaking hegemonies), and the fringe worlds, which are on the edges of Alliance influence. Most of the episodes center on the efforts of the crew of Serenity to simply make a living under the Alliance's radar, unmolested. Most of these efforts involve moving surprising cargoes (not a spoiler, but worth looking for: "black market beagles"). The crew aren't out to fight epic battles or carry out crusades... they're simply trying to be left alone.

If you've read this far, you might simply consider renting at least the first DVD. If you've not seen any of the series, you're at an advantage: you'll be able to see it in the order it was meant to be seen, without interruption. Try it and let me know what you think.

Posted by Russell Whitaker at December 21, 2003 01:10 AM | TrackBack