I missed the series on broadcast, but a friend loaned me the series on DVD. Over the last two weeks I’ve watched the entire thing in order. I just finished the last one.
**AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
I WANT MORE!!!**
…At least, I thought he was a friend…
Welcome, Brother! Welcome!
“Lao pung yo, nee can chi lai hun yo jing shen. Dong ma?”
What a support-group we have here at the Dope. 
It’s moons, too.
Wash (over loudspeaker): “Everyone go back inside or we will blow a new crater in this little moon.”
Jayne: “Damn, can’t they tell a transport ship ain’t got no guns on it? Blow a crater in this moon, ha ha.”
Wash, the joker, may have been speaking of their planet with derision by calling it a mere moon, but I don’t read it that way.
I submit that there may be ships with interstellar capability but we haven’t seen them. They may be talking about Earth-that-was in the past tense because after a colonization journey of 4000 years they know it must no longer exist as their records knew it. And they may know of other colonized solar systems which left from Earth long ago, but I doubt they’ve had much contact with them since.
The technology doesn’t bother me. I could care less whether they have unicorn drive or two giant mutant space hamsters pushing the thing an an Exercise-ball. I don’t watch it to learn about FTL travel.
Support group? It’s goddamned evangelical church we’ve got going here!
“Have you heard the Good News?”
“Wha… oh, you mean the New Testament?”
“No, better than that! Firefly has died for our sins, but will be reborn in a theater near you to usher us into the kingdom of paradise! Rejoice!”
Or maybe we could hang out in airports, giving DVDs to random passers-by.
*Hara-Kaylee. Kaylee, Kaylee.
Rama Inara, Inara rama.
Pardon me madam, could I interest you in these DVDs?*
We could wear brown coats…
Given Inara’s occupation, I’m trying to decide whether this atrocious pun was deliberate or not.
Damn you people! After reading all of your gushing Firefly reviews over the last couple of years, I recently searched and stumbled across a few episodes somewhere online. So now I’ve got the DVD set on the way from Amazon.
If not for all of you, I’d still be blissfully ignorant of this tragically short series. I hope you’ll be here for me after I’ve watched the last episode and need a shoulder to cry on. 
I am a tv-aholic and there are LOTS of shows–past and present–that I’ve really liked and watched religiously. But I think this is the first show with which I’ve fallen in love.
Nope, Tangent, I’m here to tell you that they just string you out and mock you in your misery. It’s really the Sadistic Dopers’ Message Board. Cancel the order - save yourself now!!!
Fine. Don’t listen to me. Goram help you.
“There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity.…”
I watched “Ariel” and “War Stories” today.
Damn, that’s good TV.
Four more shows left. Gotta make 'em last. 
There are some really large objects in the sky from the ground in the pilot. Wash refers to the body the bar is on as a moon. There is a reference in The Train Job to terraforming “moons and planets”. I figure it a moon of a gas giant.
Based on my own experience, I say, don’t watch the last one. As long as you don’t watch the last one, there is still some more for you to watch.
I watched the last one. Now there is nothing but desolation from here on out. Unless they actually make the movie.
For the truly geeky, in the part early on in the series where Mal is voice-overing about terraforming moons, he says they get them all fixed up, including gravity, to make them as much like Earth-that-was as possible. So, they have some way to increase the gravity of a little moon to more earth-normal.
That’s a good trick.
However, having established that they have done it, they don’t have to explain how. At that point, having artificial gravity and interstellar travel is trivial. Also, they make numerous references throughout the series to the hyperdrive.
Also interesting that the train is a mag lev.
But the last episode is one of the best! If you want to “save” one episode indefinitely, make it one of the other episodes in the last disk. (Heart of Gold and The Message, I believe)
Yeah, Objects in Space is pretty good. It’s nice that they went out on a good one. The Message is fairly decent. Heart of Gold is at best OK, notable mostly for Inara’s revealing cry, although Jayne’s behavior is pretty amusing to watch…
There’s no “unless” about it. They’re filming it right now, as we speak! It’s set to be released in April. I’ll be there opening day. Twice. This may be turning into a religion, but there’s no need for blind faith on this particular point.
Heh. They talked about that in the commentary. Joss said that, although people have done a good job of coming up with excuses for that scene, the truth is he just didn’t think it through, and he screwed up.
<mixed media>
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
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I think if you’re going to save either of “The Message” or “Heart of Gold” to watch later, you should hold off on watching them both: the one sets up the other. “Objects in Space” stands on its own better than the other two aforementioned episodes, so if you’re going to just hold one episode back, that should be the one.
Thanks to all for the responses re gravity and FTL travel. I guess I missed Mal’s reference to gravity when he’s voice-overing about terraforming - and I’ve seen all the early episodes twice, now.
I’d noticed the ‘hyperdrive’ references, but I read that as ambiguous: even within a big solar (or multi-star) system, a ‘hyperdrive’ could simply be the drive you use to make interplanetary travel a matter of days or weeks, rather than months or years.
Just to continue being geeky about this, another way to have a decent number of worlds within manageable slower-than-light distance of each other would be to have a double-star system (IIRC, double star systems are more common than solo stars like our sun) with the two stars orbiting each other at a distance of a few light-days (a light-day is ~16 billion miles). If your hyperdrive can crank up to 0.1c, then you can get from the planets around one of the two stars to the planets around the other in a few weeks. Then, of course, you just need a few gas giant planets circling each star, with a lot of decent-sized moons around each such planet.
And there’s more complicated close-together star systems out there than double stars, but I’ll leave it at that. Like pretty much everyone else here, I’m not all that concerned that the science be rigorous. The show’s about the people.
The summary on the official web page made it sound like they were more or less remaking the “Serenity” episode, which seems pointless. I hope they are doing more…
They are doing oh-so-much more! Joss is notoriously tight-lipped about plot elements, but he did tell us at ComicCon that they were going to address a few of the mysteries of the show that they never got to. It is mostly going to center on River. The BlueHands guys will be referenced, but not addressed. Other that that, Joss said that the movie will be very accessable to those who have never seen Firefly, but will be amazing to those who have.
Word is also going around that it acts as the first episode of a trilogy, so go see it several times when it opens!
256 days and counting!