Ahem. Please excuse the all-caps. AND THAT ONE SUCKED! By the standards of the perfect series and not compared with normal TV. 
Eh, I can agree that perhaps the intent was to create something darker and more serious, but the casting, production, and dialogue failed to actually evoke that spirit. The Reavers were an ugly monster of the week rather than say Hannibal Lecter.
As they say in writing, show me, don’t tell me.
You can tell stories about serial killers with only one hand at camp fires with groups of children. You can’t, however, show them Wolf Creek or somesuch. Ultimately, it’s about presentation not content. What you actually show, how you present it, and how much you censor it determines how seriously a person needs to take it. It might simply be a fault of Whedon’s casting, production preferences, and sensibilities that what was intended to be serious comes across as “Adventurers in Space”, but regardless of what the intentions were, the end product is what the end product is.
It hurt, but much the same way it hurts when real people die. They were not going to come back if their contract squables were settled. They were not going to return during an Very Special Episode. They were dead and even the reasons how they ended up on Serenity, or who they had been before, was left unanswered. It’s kinda like Real Life, but far more like Life in Wartime. You may have learned the last name of the guy next to you was Kowalski, but you didn’t know his first name until you read his dog tag.
Go watch any of the following episodes again:
“Bushwacked”
“Out of Gas”
“Objects in Space”
“Ariel”
“The Message”
… and tell me again how this is “soft, lighthearted entertainment.”
:rolleyes:
Some of the other episodes I agree are lighthearted, but even the more lighthearted episodes retain pathos and drama. But those five I listed above? “Lighthearted”? Give me a break.
Actually, the mix of occasional lighthearted moments within heavy, emotional, and often dark episodes is what many of us love about Firefly. Humor amidst struggle is realistic, and as a result gratifying, story-telling.
At some point, sci-fi movies have to answer some difficult questions:
[ul][li]In space, do we have magical gravity?[/li]BSG: fail; Firefly: fail; Avatar: pass; The Core: pass; 2009 Star Trek: fail
[li]Do we travel faster than the speed of light in order to magically traverse interstellar distances?[/li]BSG: fail; Firefly: pass; Avatar: pass; The Core: pass; 2009 Star Trek: fail
[li]Do we have some hive consciousness concept that serves to get us past some sloppy storytelling?[/li]BSG: fail; Firefly: pass; Avatar: fail; The Core: pass; 2009 Star Trek: pass, but you know they’re going there in the future
[li]Do we hypothesize that a “laser” can allow us to tunnel through the surface of the earth (as well as liquid hot magma) so we can position the nukes that we’ll use to re-start the rotation of the earth’s core?[/li]BSG: pass; Firefly: pass; Avatar: pass; The Core: fail; 2009 Star Trek: pass
[li]Do we have drop-dead gorgeous women pretending they’re not?[/li]BSG: pass; Firefly: pass; Avatar: I’m not there yet; The Core: pass; 2009 Star Trek: pass[/ul]
Scores (sum of “passes”)
BSG: 2
Firefly: 4
Avatar: 3 (or 2, because although they pass the no-gravity-in-space test, the “naturallly occurring superconductors that somehow cause the mountains to float” argument is pretty weak)
The Core: 4
2009 Star Trek: 3
I like all of them. Then again, I also liked G. I. Joe - The Rise of COBRA.
But seriously, they did some unconventional things in Firefly:
[ul][li]Simon lets Kaylee bleed from a gunshot while negotiating with Mal to help them escape.[/li][li]Mal kills someone in The Train Job in a funny but not-heroic circumstance.[/li][li]Jayne considers betraying Simon and River in one episode, and does betray them in another episode. Mal knows this, yet keeps Jayne around, because Mal needs the heat that Jayne can bring in fights.[/li][li]On various occasions, all of the crew risk their lives to protect River, despite most of them being scared of her. (By her own admission, she can kill people with her brain, though I interpreted this as River just screwing with Jayne.)[/li][li]Several calm, rational, evil people display some novel introspection.[/li][li]Their scary monsters are not too far-fetched, which makes them scarier IMO.[/li][li]Human-on-human sex is acknowledged as “a good thing” by most of the characters. The two who do not register opinions (River and Book) hadn’t gotten around to it before they were canceled. And “I’ll be in my bunk” has entered the general lexicon.[/li][/ul]
For you. For me? On broadcast TV (as it was here?) It worked just fine.
A movie villain. For TV, the idea of bestial subhumans who can make you want to be them? Pretty scary. Especially since we only see the resultant human wannabe, not the Reavers themselves. So how were they a MoTW if we never even see them?
It’s a guideline, not a law. Sometimes talking about things before you show them (or instead of) makes them a lot scarier. Like the Reavers (I’m ignoring the movie here) - we don’t see them, we see their effects, we see their ships, we hear what they do. They’re boogeymen, not a real psycho like the (IMO, way overrated and not at all scary) Lecter. The movie let me down considerably by showing them, BTW.
I just converted my Firefly DVDs this weekend, to stream to my media center. When I sat down to check the quality on my TV, I couldn’t stop watching - I stayed up past midnight.
“Curse your sudden, but inevitable betrayal!” - what Crown Prince thinks every time he thinks of Rupert Murdoch.
I am a notorious anti-Whedon and anti-Whedonite who was at least somewhat mollified by Firefly. I certainly don’t think it was the show to end all shows, and yes, some of the love & hype comes specifically from the fact it ended early, while it was still great, but Firefly did some things I loved:
- Continuity of episodes. If they did something in one episode, you can damn well be sure that it still was going to be an issue in the next one, or further down the line. Things didn’t just disappear. How many shows do you have an important plot point mentioned and it never comes up again, or worse yet, not until, say, next season? I love the X-Files but this is a big problem that show has - they’ll introduce something major and then let three or four monster-of-the-week episodes go by before they get back to it.
- I did love the dialogue and the funny lines. “It’s not what it looks like. Unless it looks like we’re stealing your priceless Lasseter, then it is what it looks like.” (Paraphrased as it’s been a while.)
- A nice blending of River, sweet and innocent and pastoral and yet abused, with the harsh darkness of the ship and of Mal and the other personalities on the ship.
I don’t like the movie too much, except that it resolves certain plot points. But I could have done without the (to me) totally unnecessary death. And if you’re wondering which, well, it wasn’t the first death but the second one. Sure, people die all the time. So the fuck what? It’s why I watch fiction. I don’t need reality, and the death was completely useless.
And to this day I still say “shiny”.
Shiny!
Shall we respectfully agree to disagree? 
Consider this. First seasons are typically not the best. Buffy, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1 (are all I can think of offhand, but I know there’s more). It frequently takes until the second season, once all the character setup is done, to really get things steaming along. Going to Whedon specifically, I mentioned Buffy, and from what I heard of people who were watching Dollhouse before it got canceled, the second season was much better than the first too.
So if Whedon takes a season to really find his stride in a show, can you imagine what Firefly might have been like had it been allowed to continue, something good enough that even an anti-Whedonite enjoyed it? I think that’s what engenders such rabid loyalty among the fans; it was that good, and struck down before it could even mature.
Course, reality might have been different and it might have turned out like Lost, which started going downhill the minute the interior of the hatch was shown in the second season, but we’ll never know.
I had some comments/questions regarding the Reavers in the series vs. the movie, but I’m not sure what the thread rules are re spoilage. Could someone advise?
put it in a spoiler box - you know, {spoiler}xxxxxxx{/spoiler}, only with square brackets rather than braces.
Firefly/Serenity
Loved it… mad about it… they canceled it… made a movie… wanted to make another movie, but didn’t make enough money for the studios, don’t understand how, since it made the top10 or even number #1 in several countries or some 2nd place in the opening weeks…
…Serenity can be found in the bargain bin of supermarkets across the globe
I’m bitter, disapointed …no more of Firefly …no more Serenity …damn Alliance forbits or cancels everything that is fun these days
…you can’t stop the signal [SIZE=“1”](well, we life in hope)[/SIZE]
No reavers in the series to be seen, they only talk about them… well, you see a ship of them, that’s it
I’ve never seen Firefly, but a friend of mine talked me into seeing Serenity, and I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised. I like some sci-fi, but I’m far from a “sci-fi” fan. As others here have said, though, the characters were very well thought out and acted, especially the part of The Operative. I was kinda bummed to find out that that’s all there’s going to be - I was really hoping for a sequel or two.
One of these days I’ll actually getting around to watching Firefly (once I get through about a dozen or so DVDs I’ve had for over a year and haven’t seen yet).
I think you might enjoy the series more than the movie - for me, the things I like about the movie (especially the blend of Western and Space Opera, with Eastern and other cultural influences mixed in) are done to better effect in the series (IMO).
I saw the movie first and I think it’s good, but it does seem like it had more than its fair share of interplanetary travel scenes, and correspondingly less of the cowboy stuff.
Yeah, that’s roughly what my friend said as well. Definitely on my “to see” pile, just not at the top…
[Preface with a huge IIRC]
In the series, it was implied thatone could catch Reaverism from contact with them.
In the movie,Reaverism was caused by exposure to some chemical.
Do I have that right? Is there conflict between the two or not?
Not necessarily conflict.
The original Reavers were accidentally created through chemicals as described in the movie. However, it’s not inconceivable that, on being confronted with their insane barbarism, a normal man might well lose his mind as happened in Bushwhacked.