One of my favorite lines from the show. But you left out Wash’s important response:
Wash: Mind reading? It’s like something from science fiction.
Zoe: We live on a spaceship, dear.
Wash: So?
No, carnivorousplant, space ships does not a science fiction show make. Not in my book, anyway.
Besides, they’ve got guns and horses. That means it’s a Western, right? Bah!
It’s true that I haven’t seen the last 4 shows on the disc, but it’s worth pointing out that none of the shows I’ve seen so far revolve around or hinge upon a scientific notion or futuristic technological ideal. They are all character pieces which could easily be transplanted to the American 19th century west and remain almost completely intact. At random:
- Jaynestown: the mercenary is taken aback when he learns a small plantation of indentured servants remembers him as a hero and feels guilty, angry and ashamed to realize that his actions were not particularly heroic.
- Safe: the doctor and his troubled sister are taken captive by a small town in desperate need of a doctor. The townspeople are frightened by his sister’s unusual behavior and accuse her of being a witch. Meanwhile, the captain must choose between allowing a member of his crew to die and returning to his arch-enemies to beg for their assistance.
- War Stories: the pilot and the second officer have difficulties with their marriage because of the captain’s past military history with the second officer. The captain proves his loyalty to his crew beyond doubt, and the crew repay this loyalty by rushing to the rescue.
Contrary to the Star Trek model, Firefly can be set anywhere at almost any time. It is a very human drama that does not depend on scientific ideas. Compare the above to the average Star Trek show:
- Barclay sees something freaky caught in the transporter beam.
- Data has to go on trial to prove he’s human.
- Riker is duplicated in a transporter malfunction.
- Geordi falls in love with a hologram reconstruction of a scientist he admires.
- Dr. Crusher is caught in a warp field and everybody begins to vanish.
By comparison I don’t see how Firefly is science fiction. I really don’t. In no way is it selling science; the technobabble is almost non-existent.
Some of y’all have a rather bad view of what science fiction is. Firefly is set in a future spacefaring civilization, and its main characters are people who live on a spaceship and travel from planet to planet. It’s also set in a different culture–not only is space travel widespread and completely common, but prostitution is not only legal but highly respectable, dueling has made a comeback among the upper classes, everybody cusses in Chinese, etc. Yes, it’s character driven rather than technology driven; by some of the definitions being used to claim that Firefly isn’t science fiction, Robert Heinlein hardly wrote a single science fiction story.
Firefly is just good science fiction that’s all. More to the point, it’s good fiction, which happens in this case to be science fiction.
Those are very good points, MEBuckner, but in the context of this discussion (“how do you sell a TV show such as Firefly?”) I think it is extremely important to acknowledge that the show has the trappings of a science-fiction concept—spaceships, future cultural developments, interplanetary travel, advanced medicine—it cannot be sold as a Star Trek or a Stargate SG-1 can.
The stereotypical technophile Trek addict will complain there isn’t enough babble in Firefly. There is no technical manual. There are no feats of engineering. It’s just people talking to each other. They visit other planets, but the other planets all look like the Desert or the City concept and are populated only with people. There are no aliens. There are no androids. There is no Forehead of the Week. There aren’t even any space battles; Serenity is unarmed.
For purposes of selling the show, I maintain Firefly is a human drama which happens to have a futuristic science-fiction backdrop, like a brothel that happens to have R2-D2 bedsheets.
Well, these are pretty weak Star Trek episodes. The best ST eps were (like Firefly) stories which are eternal, which could have taken place anywhere, anytime. The best stories, period, are universal, or pretty close.
(and Number 2 and 4, my faves of your list, were obviously a re-hashes of Jim Crow fights and Pygmalion, so there you go.)
Maybe some of the difficulty in determining what science fiction is today is that we’re already living in times awfully close to those described by the classic SF writers. The gap in technology between the reader’s time (or viewer’s time) and the portrayed time is not so huge as it once was. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve seen “Terraformed planets” done so often that we forget how crazy scifi that really is!
I agree with you that Firefly is great science fiction because it’s great fiction first. It doesn’t have to hide behind incoherent technobabble to induce a trance state in the viewer. And boy, does that make it hard to market! I’d have to agree with **Fish ** that the dark, mysterious campaign would have been the best way to go.
But then why the frell (oops, wrong show) did they have to air all the episodes OUT OF ORDER? :smack: Stupid, stupid suits!
[zombie]In Joss We Trust, In Joss We Trust, In Joss We Trust… [/zombie]
Acually, if you look closely at the episode of Firefly that was set in a brothel, you can, in fact, spot an R2-D2 bedsheet.
Yeah, WhyNot, they aren’t my favorite Next Gen shows either. I seem to remember an interview with … Rick Berman? … about how proud they were that they were doing shows that literally could not be done in another setting. That said, Roddenberry always wanted to know what a show was about, that is, when the science was boiled out of the episode, he wanted to know what the human drama was.
The emotional content of those shows could be reduced as follows:
- Barclay confronts a pathological fear.
- Data fights for his rights as an individual. Riker is compelled by duty to act for the prosecution.
- Riker re-analyzes his life and the decision he made years ago to pursue his career, and he sees the life unfold that might have been.
- Geordi falls in love with a woman he cannot have.
- Dr. Crusher fears she may be going insane and nobody appears to believe her when she explains that people are disappearing from her life; a parallel to old age and senility is made.
Obviously, these aren’t the top-rated shows, which would probably include “Darmok” and “Redemption” and “Best of Both Worlds” and “Family” and so on. Most of those, as well, can be boiled down to some element of human drama, but there’s always a huge technological hook to hang it on.
I’m a big Trek fan for its exploration of technical ideas as humans relate to the march of progress, but I’m just as proud of Firefly for telling stories that have no technological hook to hang on.
All right - about this whole one system/many systems thing. I got thinking about it, and I remembered something. Back when I first heard interesting things about Firefly, I wasn’t ready to buy the DVDs right off, so I downloaded most of the episodes, though I didn’t have to watch them all before I realized I had to have the DVDs. Anyway, I still have the episodes I downloaded. They were taped off the air, so they have some stuff that’s not on the DVDs. Most importantly, several episodes start with a little voice-over that Fox clearly designed to help explain the background of the show to new viewers. I’m pretty sure these aren’t on the DVDs, but, of course, I can’t check, because my sister STILL has my discs!!
Anyway, I went back and checked, and sure enough, like I thought, the voiceovers DO address the issue. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are two versions of it, and they seem to contradict one another, as follows:
As voiced by Shepherd Book: “After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new earths were terraformed and colonized. The central planets formed the Alliance and decided all the planets had to join under their rule. There was some disagreement on that point. After the war, many of the independents who had fought and lost drifted to the edges of the system, far from Alliance control…”
As voiced by Cap’n Mal: “Here’s how it is. The Earth got used up, so we moved out, and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some, rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much…”
So figure THAT one out, if you want.
I heard that when they were broadcast.
I concluded that the author did not know the difference between a solar system and a galaxy.
Or Joss deliberately made it ambiguous. 
Ignorance would also explain the ambiquity of whether they are in a single solar system or not.
Hell, we do this excuse explaining with Star Trek. Forget it, it’s poetic license.
I vote for poetic license too, in the sense that “galaxy of earths” would not necessarily refer to a literal galaxy. People use the term galaxy as a grouping. In fact, my Funk and Wagnalls has a definition of galaxy as “a brilliant group, as in persons”.
Or they’re employing a literary device called “the unreliable narrator.” Just because it’s a voice-over doesn’t mean it’s the Unimpeachable Voice of God, after all. It is — or, rather, if it’s well written, it should be — the character’s point of view, with all the limitations and caveats thus implied: Maybe they’re lying to you. Maybe they’re uninformed. Maybe their terminology is idiosyncratic.
For comparison, imagine the historical-nostalgia show American Dreams opening with a bit of context-setting narration about the period from the various characters. One guy might be able to tell you the last eight presidents and their policies; another guy might have trouble telling you the current president, and say so; another guy might have the same trouble but make up some shit to cover his ass.
I suspect another couple of seasons of shows (:() would have made the intent of the opening narration much clearer. As it is, we can only speculate.
(Imagine Jayne’s version. “Okay, so there I was on this junky old boat, and the Alliance sucked but we were doing okay, but then there was this girl who’s a massive pain in the ass, and, ah, screw it. I’ll be in mah bunk.”)
I refuse to believe the guy explaining the show would use entrapment.
Maybe Watson’s handwriting was messy.
Which reminds me of the Lone Ranger joke with the punchline:
“I said bring the POSSE, bring the POSSE!”
Is it possible that the opening narrations were tacked on without Joss Whedon’s approval? The narrations were conspicuously absent from the DVDs.
No, Whedon and crew added them to fill in the missing backstory, since Serenity wasn’t aired first.
So, at the very least, they were added because of network meddling.
Just another sign of the Man keeping us down.