What I think is so awesomely unique about Firefly, is that even though it is technically a Sci-fi show there are no Aliens. Not a ONE. Reavers? Mudders? Jayne? None of them are aliens, like in Star Trek or Star Wars where they think its so cool to set the basis that Aliens are everywhere, its just a fact, we are cool.
It is even neater that Joss whedon has no intentions of bringing them in, because it would be pointless and stupid, frankly the show doesnt need to use such a obvious ratings attempt.
It was an interesting conversation where Kaylee and Simon look at the Cow Fetus and Simon remarks something about how Aliens probably don’t exist afterall. The ‘verse’ is huge they may never run into them. Very realistic view on things if you ask me.
I loved that, too, and I usually love sf with interesting aliens in it. The only way I’d want to see aliens on Firefly is if they’ve been extinct for at least ten million years. No actual aliens, ever, but maybe some cool alien ruins, a fossil or two… something like that.
That site was set up by fans with, apparently, Mutant Enemy’s tacit permission before the DVDs were created and has been kept up by people ME knows about for well over a year so I think Joss and company have a Grateful Dead attitude towards it and feel it has value converting new fans (and DVD sales since RealAudio ain’t quite in the same league) that counteracts any losses to pirates. While a link may violate the SDMB’s rules I have very good reasons to suspect that nothing bad would come from a link. Hell, Fox hasn’t even complained about it.
My initial take on the show was that it was somewhat like Buffy would be if the actors were ten years older and more experienced (face it–NOBODY on Buffy is much of an actor! ) Then I started watching River and lemme tell ya, Summer Glau is a terrific actress, especially for someone so young, and my greatest regret about the shortened season is that I couldn’t watch her character blossom. (I mean "watch where she took her character, you perverts!) And Simon, Kaylee, and Inara aren’t all that old, either, and are fairly good actors. Blew that theory straight out of the water.
“Objects in Space” was a brilliant episode. Trivia: The character Jubal Early was named after Confederate General Jubal Early, one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors.
An example of Firefly kicking our preconceptions into the engine intake was with “Out of Gas.” I saw the beginning, assumed Firefly was doing the “someone will suffocate unless a miracle occurs in the last ten minutes” episode Star Trek’s writers usually save for the second season when they start running out of ideas, and changed the channel in disgust. WRONG! Yes, it had some of those elements but it played off the cliches to create a brilliant episode.
Actually, that would be very cool, because they’d just look at it and say, “huh,” and get back on their ship and leave. Because they’ve never heard of, or seen, the Statue of Liberty, and wouldn’t care. But everyone in the audience would be thinking “YOU WERE ON EARTH, YOU IDIOTS!”
Although…the last shot of the trailer Joss put together for ComicCon was of River, kinda beatup looking, laying on the floor, looking up and saying… “Reavers.”
There was one other sci-fi show that shared this distinction: Red Dwarf. It had many genetically engineered and mutated life forms, but they were all from earth.
Last week I went to a Whedonverse Fanfic Convention. Picture this…250 BtVS/AtS fans, all of them rabid, all of them passionate, all of them with extreme opinions on everything that has ever happened. To give you an idea, I was one of the most mellow people there.
Inevitably, and without failure, all the conversations turned to Firefly. It took them awhile to catch on, but those 13 episodes have been elevated to the status of BtVS and AtS in the community.
Jane Espinson (She wrote Shindig and signed by Firefly DVDS!) said that she loved working on Firefly, and it was different from the other two shows because there was no governing metaphor (growing up on Buffy, recovering adict on Angel). She also said she loved it because it was truly an esemble show. She also told me personally that she thought Wash/Zoe was the hottest couple they had ever created.
I hope they release Serenity on a Friday so I don’t have to ditch school to see it. Because I will, I just don’t want to.
I think we’re on to something about the Firefly universe. It’s all one huge star system. You could have hundreds of moons, all terraformed. That gets around the FTL problems, and also solves the problem of interacting with recurring characters. It’s a lot easier to avoid Niska if he’s half a galaxy away. But if it’s all one big star system, then it all becomes a lot more plausible if you think of it.
That makes sense Sam. It is, after all, modelled after a time and place that was only what? 1/3 of the country? And not the entire, say, northern hemisphere or even the globe.
I dunno. I think I’d have a harder time believing that we could find a single star system that had that many inhabitable worlds, even after terraforming, then I would believing that an interstellar crimelord with a personal hard-on for another gang of much less influential criminals couldn’t eventually track them down in a finite region of space. FTL drives doesn’t mean that they can go from one side of the galaxy to the other. I think the frontier metaphor works much better if there’s a terra incognita to be the frontier too. If the show takes place in one “super system” with hundreds of planetoids, then there’s no frontier. By the time a civilization in that system has advanced enough to support seventy off-world colonies (to say nothing of terraforming all of them, a process which, with any realism, would take generations), it would have long since explored every corner of it’s original solar system, especially if all seventy colonies are in the original solar system.
If they’ve got FTL drives, however, then the frontier is wherever you can get a ship to before you run out of gas. There are whole systems that have never been seen by the eyes of man, and all the speeches about being all alone out in the black take on a lot more of an edge. If there’s only one solar system, then you’re never out of sight of the sun. You’re never lost. The sort of total isolation you’d find yourself in while travelling between stars feels very important to the tone of the show, to me.
But is there a frontier in Firefly? I don’t remember any exploration or discussions of unknown systems.
This could be the universe: Humanity begins terraforming the solar system (let’s even say it’s ours). It costs a fortune. But eventually, Mars, Earth, the Moon, and maybe even Venus are terraformed. These are the ‘inner planets’. Being the first to be colonized, they stay firmly in Alliance control. After those worlds are firmly established, the outer moons begin to be colonized. Let’s say we have the technology to protect people from Jupiter’s energy, heat up a moon, make an atmosphere. This is what the Firefly universe has.
Now you get a whole bunch of major moons and minor moons being colonized. In this solar system, there are 137 moons (probably more now - they are discovering them constantly it seems). Most of those are tiny, but a few are pretty big. There are seven moons larger than Pluto. With terraforming and gravity control, they’d all feel just like an Earth. In fact, with Gravity control even those little moons that are only a few hundred miles in diameter might be turned into little mini-worlds.
So if it’s another solar system, it doesn’t seem impossible that it could more moon-rich and have hundreds or even thousands of worlds in it. A brighter, bigger star, with fifty large planets all containing multiple moons. THat’d make a pretty complex universe to set a series in.
There are some things that could be interpreted that way (Mal’s description of the Reavers, for example) but mostly it’s strongly implied by the central conceit of the show: cowboys in space. The concept of the frontier is a vital part of the Western genre, so it would seem odd to not carry it over to a show that recasts the genre in outer space.
I just don’t buy that. First, no way Firefly takes place in our solar system. Earth is lost. It’s not just some uninhabitable radioactive cinder, they don’t even know where it is. And the technology you’re talking about to colonize seventy worlds in this solar system is Star Trek-level stuff. No way that level tech exsists in Firefly.
It would, but I just don’t see that in Firefly. Particularly since its such a cool idea, I can’t see them not ever mentioning it. Besides, space would just be too crowded, if they were all in the same system. I don’t see how “Out of Gas” could work in a system with that many inhabited worlds so close together. Even if there were no one within range to help them, even if they were flying well above the plane of the elliptic, I can’t believe there’d be no one in radio range. They’d have reached someone out there, even if they were too far away to help in time.
Yeah, I’ve got to say that the one system idea is just way too crowded for the show. It just doesn’t fit, IMHO. I think we’re definitely looking at different stars for each world. I also think they’ve left it deliberately vague, because they don’t want to try to explain how the ship works, or where the various planets are, or any of that stuff.
I like to think that they know exactly how all the stuff is supposed to work and where everything is and all of that, they just aren’t going to come out and tell us. They’ll just sprinkle random hints and factoids through the episodes, and leave it up to the fans to obsess over the details and put everything together. Because they know that’s the best way to develop a fanatical internet fan following who will agitate endlessly and keep the show alive by file sharing and convention showings and general word-of-mouth if it gets cancelled early.
) Then I started watching River and lemme tell ya, Summer Glau is a terrific actress, especially for someone so young, and my greatest regret about the shortened season is that I couldn’t watch her character blossom. (I mean "watch where she took her character, you perverts!) And Simon, Kaylee, and Inara aren’t all that old, either, and are fairly good actors. Blew that theory straight out of the water.