You’re right, Mal does keep a lot of his thoughts inside. And he does say it’s been some time since his last experience - it seems that he has more important issues to deal with than just having sex.
“Randy bitch” was the phrase WhyNot used - I was just continuing the meme. And this is why the scene with her and the previous mechanic jarred for me - I don’t think she is a randy bitch - it seemed out of character for her to to be having sex with some guy just coz he’s got a nice engine (that he doesn’t know how to fix). I’m not saying she’s a prude - everything else about her suggests that she enjoys sex. I just felt that for her it would be more “making love” than just “having fun”.
Exactly what I thought at the time. That scene made perfect sense to me, and seemed to be entirely fitting with her character.
Well, again, I didn’t think she was a nymphomaniac - her having sex does not seem out of character, and in later episodes it’s obvious she would like to be having sex with Simon. It’s the having sex with an apparent stranger (the mechanic) that seems a bit unusual.
Well, see, I saw this as another reference to her not-yet-blossoming romance with Simon. I didn’t get the feeling that she was craving sex and not getting it, but that she was craving making love to Simon, and not getting it.
As the initiator of the “randy bitch” epithet, lemme 'splain…
You seem to think “randy bitch” is a bad thing. I don’t. I think, especially in the movie, she had a “bitch in heat” quality. “Bitch” as in, female dog. In estrus. Craving cock. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it because it became her only distinguishing characteristic in the movie (but I’ve posted about that at length elsewhere), but I don’t think it was entirely antithetical to the series, either.
Kaylee likes her some man meat. Good girls can like man meat. What’s the problem?
I don’t see any reason, based on the characterization, to wall off Kaylee’s relationship with Simon under the “making love” rubric, with its artificiality.
You’re quite right, but it just didn’t seem to be consistent. I haven’t seen the movie yet, and it sounds like her persona in it matches up more with her sex with the mechanic. But based on what I saw in the series, she just didn’t seem like the kind to have sex with that guy.
I don’t intend to put any artificiality into her relationship with Simon. It’s clear she fancies him (emotionally and physically), despite his bumbling conversations with her. I’m sure she’d be fantastic in bed, and it would be raw sexual energy and all that… I just got the feeling that she’d save it for relationships, not a mechanic who’s just turned up in a Firefly. I don’t mean I think she’s a “save it up till marriage” girl, just a “not with everyone I meet” girl. I know there’s a lot of room between those two extremes.
I’m glad that I’m not alone, Justin_Bailey had the same reaction to that scene, but it looks as though we’re in the minority! Perhaps the scene was meant to make us think “woah - little Kaylee having a bang with some inarticulate grease monkey?” - in which case most people seem just to have thought “meh”.
Not exactly… Inara doesn’t seem to mind at all when Jayne calls her a whore. The difference is, Jayne doesn’t have any problem with whores (registered or not). I think the issue between Inara and Mal is more that Mal can’t quite bring himself to respect prostitution, especially not organized, registered prostitution. He loves her, but he’s never sure how much of that is real, and how much is just Inara using her well-trained feminine wiles to lead him along like a bull with a ring through the nose. And Mal does not like anyone else controlling him, by any means.
But back to Kaylee and sex (two of my favorite topics), was I the only one who noticed that she wasn’t exactly paying much attention to the young buck she was bedding? Well, um, flooring? Here she is in the middle of steamy hot monkey sex, and her attention is on the leaky fuel pump (or whatever it was). Now, that is entirely in character for Kaylee.
One other angle, by the way, on her scene in “Shindig”: It’s not just that she likes talking about mechanics. She also likes being the center of attention. And it was quite clear that her little group there was a bunch of folks talking with her, not with each other.
I don’t care how expensive fresh fruit is, on a spaceship. It’d be worth every penny, just to watch her eat strawberries like that :D.
I totally disagree. remember, the series was cut short. No-one knew that would happen. The character development was planned for an entire season, not a half. We never got to see what the next 10 episodes would have had in the way of Kaylee’s story, Book’s background, etc. Nothing was sped up. We just got screwed out of the chapters we want.
Yes but, the cancellation was not much of a surprise to anyone. It had always been looming over the series, and it was cancelled before they finished filming (this is suggested by the DVD extras, anyway). I suspect (but don’t know) that Joss deliberately sped things up a little bit to make sure that we learned more about the characters before the series ended.
I doubt it very much. The stories all would have been in the pipeline, written, scripted, cast, and ready to go. The hope when cancellation hit was to shop the show elsewhere, and when that didn’t fly, send it to the big screen. As far as anyone knew, the show was a complete flop that would disappear from the public consciousness without a ripple. It wasn’t until the DVD sales took off like a V2 that people realized that there was something bigger there.
Yes, Kaylee is not some “pure as the driven snow, yadda yadda yadda…” She’s a real person with real thoughts on sex and all that. And she often vocalizes those thoughts.
What I didn’t see in her character was the idea that it was OK to just jump into bed… err, a hard metal floor, with some jerk she just met.
I’m also of the opinion that her sex talk didn’t seem to sound like it was supposed to come from someone with loads of experience. It sounded like it was supposed to come from someone with an open (which someone else already said upthread).
The scene in question was very telling about Kaylee. It defined her more than any other single scene. I did not make the assumption that if she were free and open about her sexuality it would nonetheless be tied to some notion of “making love” as opposed to “making out.” I find that kind of assumption only slightly more granular than the madonna/whore dyad that has traditionally problematized female sexuality. With our more enlightened attitudes now women are allowed to be willing participants in sex so long as it’s understood that it has to be an act of near sacrament only indulged when she’s really really in love. It seems to me, and my wife picked up the very same sense of it, the upshot of Kaylee’s introduction in Out of Gas was that this is precisely not how you’re supposed to read Kaylee.
Furthermore, Kaylee is not a tomboy either, though her interests are even in her own age strongly associated with the opposite gender. She loves being a woman. She revels in it. Yes, for various reasons she tends to wear very practical clothing, though always with a feminine touch, but she also adores the poofy ball gown and the opportunity it represents to be unabashedly feminine. Part of that whole package for her is that she likes a good fuck.
Well, I thought it was great. I didn’t have any trouble at all believing it. I have a theory - are most of the people who don’t think it’s right men? Because as a woman I guess I identify with her more. Perhaps men have the madonna-whore problem?
I’m also kind of disturbed at this attitude of “But Kaylee would never have random sex with strangers! She’s a nice girl!!!” She **is ** a nice girl. Who apparently, at least once, had sex with a random stranger. And at least one other time, had sex with someone she didn’t know well enough to realize he was fourteen.
You’re probably right. I just didn’t feel that the characters got the slow-development treatment that I remember from Buffy - but then I can’t really remember the first time I watched the first series of Buffy. It may well be that I’m looking back on that unable to forget all the character development I know about now. The second time I watch Firefly, I might think that everything is covered in due course.
I am male, but I don’t think that’s why I found this one scene odd.
I want to make sure no one thinks I believe that “nice girls” don’t have sex with strangers, or that having sex with strangers by definition makes someone a “bad girl”. If I were to meet a girl like Kaylee in real life, and hear this story from her past, I’d just shrug and think to myself “well, we’ve all got our wild side” and probably “wouldn’t have put money on that”. No biggie, wouldn’t think any less of her. And I don’t think any less of Kaylee.
But this isn’t real life - this is a story, where the writers generally speaking put these little bits in to tell us something about a character, so we learn about them. The flashback to Wash’s arrival is a cute anecdote about how he and Zoe met, the flashback to Jayne turning up reinforces the impression that he is loyal first of all to money. The Kaylee flashback just seems (to me) to be a bit at odds with the character she appears to be in previous, and subsequent episodes. I’m not saying “that’s not realistic”, but rather “why did the writers do that?”. I wouldn’t be asking this question if her sexual desires became a plot point in later episodes - it would all come together (pardon the pun). But her sexuality is only referred to in passing, same as any other character. Or part of her attraction to Simon (which I didn’t feel was only physical).
Chronos’s observation that she’s apparently uninterested in the mechanic because she’s been studying the engine while they were down there has got me thinking… If she were simply using the mechanic to get to his engine, that I would find less jarring. She’s open about sex, and not prudish about it - if she met this guy in a bar, heard about the engine, and realised that by having sex with him she’d get to the engine, I can see her doing that like a shot (and enjoying it into the bargain). But that thought process (if it’s there at all) isn’t made clear in the show, so it seems like she decides to have sex with this guy without prior knowledge of the engine, and it just so happens that he takes her there to do it. At this point, he discovers that engines make her “hot”.
Actually, my impression (or my wank, if you prefer ) was always that she overheard this not entirely bad-looking guy in the bar talking about his job as a ship’s mechanic, and figured that if she hooked up with him, she’d get sex *and * engines. A Twofer!!! And how often does that happen to a girl on a smallish, backassward planet like the one we’re led to believe hers is.
I’m in the middle of season 2 and yeah, development is going pretty slow for everyone but Buffy, for the most part.
While it may be hard to reconcile frilly-dress wearing Kaylee with fucking-on-the-floor Kaylee (even though it shouldn’t be), I think what bugs me the most is that Kaylee would have better taste. She has great instincts, is smart, and isn’t afraid to give her captain some lip. So what’s she doing with some yutz who doesn’t even know the engine he’s trying to show off to her. I mean, it stands to reason that even if Bester didn’t try to use the mechanic card to get into her pants, she obviously found out at some point, and would want to geek out with him for a bit before getting down to bidness- and he would have been busted.
) was always that she overheard this not entirely bad-looking guy in the bar talking about his job as a ship’s mechanic, and figured that if she hooked up with him, she’d get sex *and * engines. A Twofer!!! And how often does that happen to a girl on a smallish, backassward planet like the one we’re led to believe hers is.