Firefly Meta

A very busy weekend on the road between Bamberg, Freiburg, Bamberg again and Munich. I only had the opportunity to check my friends list and mail in haste and now have some catching up to do. However, en route I b did have the chance for something I've been meaning to do since reading honorh's delightful love declaration Sandman. (And btw, if someone wonders what Sandman is all about or why she/he should read it, check it out here

Being in a Firefly mood from having rewatched what episodes we have (again) with muffinmonster and then alone, I feel propelled to gush a bit, and try to summ up what made this brief, cancelled series so compelling to me, and why I am so glad there will be a movie.

First seasons of shows are usually rather mixed affairs. The writers are still trying to find their collective feet, sometimes the actors need to, too, the particular strengths of the show in question might not yet be apparent, or only apparent in some episodes. Most of my favourite shows sport a lot of hits and misses in their first seasons. DS9 comes to mind, Farscape, Babylon 5, and let's just not talk about TNG's first season, shall we? Buffy is something of an odd animal: the first season (half a season, since it was a mid-term replacement), was fine on its own, just not compared with the glories yet to come; writes, actors and fans are all in agreement the show went to very different level in season 2. Angel's first season was more sophisticated, not surprisingly, since at that point most of the writing team had three seasons of BTVS behind them which left them both experienced in that particular universe and eager to give it a new, different twist. It's not as different in quality from the later seasons of AtS as the first season of BTVS was when compared with its successors, but the sense of still trying out and looking for a format can't be denied.

But Firefly. Ah, Firefly. No Teacher's Pet here, no I Fall To Pieces. There isn't a single episode here which I'd advise a new viewer to miss (whereas you can skip several in all of the shows named above.) This is the ME team having honed their writing skills through six years in two different shows, and being let loose with a new universe and new characters. It's the great dialogue we've come to expect from any Whedon show, it's Joss continuing his love affair with experimental episodes (Objects in Space), bending and stretching what you can do with TV, it's Tim Minear and his passion for the puzzle of past and present coming together in a complex mosaic (Out of Gas), it's Jane Espenson and her knack for comedies of manners looking deceptively easy with character development going beneath (Shindig), it's newer ME alumni Ben Edlund (look for his work in season 4 AtS, for example) and Joe Molina (who stunned me with BTVS' Normal Again) bringing their love for words and characters to this new show. It's the team which gave us years and years of great TV and which will never, ever write together again. (Unless the movie somehow results in Firefly getting renewed.)

And they didn't even all get their chance to have a go in the new playground. We'll never get Steven DeKnight showing us, say, Book's background, or perhaps Jayne and River stranded on a planet together. We'll never get Marti Noxon exploring Mal's relationship with Inara, or Zoe's with Wash. (Or maybe Inara's with Kaylee - who knows?) And you just know that Marti, nicknamed the Chains' n' Pains girl by Joss, would have loved to have a go at Niska. (Since Marti is probably the most bashed of the ME writers, I refer readers arguing that the lack of Firefly episodes written by her is something positive to an earlier entry in which I explain why I admire her writing.)

What we did get, and what we do have, is something to be treasured. First and foremost, the characters. It's Joss Whedon's particular talent to take pop culture archetypes, or clichés, if you want, and to flesh them out and twist them into compelling, fascinating characters. Take the basic set-up of BTVS as given in the pilot. New Girl, Shy Nerd, Endearing Quirky Outsider, Popular Bitch - it's every High School movie of the 80, 90s, and probably the new century. You can't get more cliché than that. Wait, you can - with Stuttering Inhibited Englishman and Tall Dark Mysterious Hunk. On paper, this sounds as dull and repetitive as hell. Then you look at the show, and not only do every single one of these clichés come to credible life but they all develop into unexpected directions that make them so compelling we followed their journeys for eight years and still are discussing every step on the way. The original premise of BTVS was a cross between the High School and the Horror genre, with its most basic and simple twist summed up by Joss Whedon as having the most typical victim of monster movies, the blonde in the alley, turned into the hero who gets the monsters. Firefly is at its most basic a cross between the Western and the Space Show genre.

So, true enough, you get:
( Lots of spoilery arguments )