I dunno, whenever it showed her, she looked pretty unhappy, ESPECIALLY the scene where the guy talks about the baby being his. You also notice she never says a word in the whole episode. Seemed not so much that she didn’t have a problem with it as her feeling unable to do anything about it, basically her spirit had long since been broken by her husband.
Actually, that scene helped me to relate to the guy. I mean, we’ve ALL had a fancy batter-powered gadget go dead at an inopportune time, right?
Laser guns are a horrible sci-fi device. No one save a Jedi can realistically dodge a laser, unless you’re a spaceship trading shots across light minutes of space. Even then, it’s hard to explain away why you aren’t getting hit, unless you have “shields.”
I’m glad they showed why hand held laser guns are a really bad idea in a real fire fight. They take up too much power, and batteries just ain’t all that reliable. Apparently the auto-aiming feature doesn’t work so hot either.
Jamming and ECM? Which, of course, leads us back to good old fashioned human eyeballs doing the aiming.
And how does it “auto-aim”? Does the gun telepathically know who you want to shoot?
Only way I can think of auto-aiming meaning anything is if it’s just some sort of stabilizer - unnecessary with a laser, of course, unless it helps stabilize when firing from a moving horse (or hovercraft). Then again, that would probably make it harder to aim…since the thing would be fighting you to stay stable in your bouncing arm…
Here’s my take on it (I have no information that this is the case - it’s just a guess).
Inara is suffering from some fatal disease or has some other problem that she thinks is going to hurt the people she loves. That’s why she left home. She thought she would be free of attachments if she took up with a bunch of brigands. But she’s been falling in love with Mal for a long time, and it took the shock of Mal sleeping with another woman to make her finally face up to that (she surprised herself by crying over this - you can see at the beginning that she honestly didn’t think a fling between Mal and Nandi would bother her, but it did).
The realization that her feelings for Mal were that strong are what’s forcing her to leave. She cannot have him for whatever reason, so for the good of all she must depart.
Maybe “auto-aim” is a misnomer, and it’s just a really fancy scope. It identifies all possible targets and guides you towards them in the reticle. Think a first-person shooter where you can see a reticle on the screen that turns red when it passes over an enemy. Of course, if you don’t take the time to use it, or something bumps your arm, or your traget is on the move, you can still miss.
There would be lots of ways to do it. For example, you aim at a target and press the trigger half-way. The pistol locks on to the target. Now it uses either adaptive optics or even a laser tube that can be shifted electromagnetically through a certain range (say, a couple of degrees) to keep itself locked on target. You still have to aim the gun in the general direction of the target (close enough that the adaptive gun can fine-tune), but if you’re off by a few degrees the gun will correct for it.
When Kaylee was telling the crew about River’s shooting in ‘War Stories’, she says, “And it weren’t auto-fire”, which would suggest that this is a technology that is available to non-laser pistols as well. Could mean anything from a computer-controlled barrel to bullets that can adjust their trajectory to a mind-feedback device that actually helps you aim. Who knows?
Which, of course, is a horribly ineffective way to aim beyond relatively short distances.
Babylon 5 had ships using ECM to screw with eachothers’ targeting systems, though it was only rarely mentioned in dialogue (and then only to the effect that Minbari stealth systems played merry hell with targeting systems used by EarthForce ships,)
And as for people being unable to dodge laser beams, I would like to quote a friend of mine in reference to the argument that a 9mm bullet is considerably faster than a .45ACP bullet:
I agree. I think that this type of plot line is the only one that makes sense. She knows that it’s going to hurt Mal and the others if she leaves, so there must be something that would eventually hurt more if she stayed.
I agree with Sam Stone too - it was this episode that made me think back on lots of little things about Inara in the previous episodes and come up with this idea. She’s said she doesn’t want to die at all (not significant by itself, 'cos hey, who does?), she clearly enjoys the lifestyle of the Core worlds, she could have been in a position of power if she’d stayed there and worked her way through the Companion ranks, she gives an ambiguous answer to Kaylee’s question about her medical checkup… and there’s another ambigous line in the next episode Objects in Space that I think could tie in (won’t mention until we get to there in our film festival).
But I can see her in one of the movie trailers, so I’d love to know if she does end up leaving or if she does and then returns anyway. Not that I want any spoilers for the movie, I’m just saying it’d be interesting to see how that plotline would have resolved itself.
