[snicker]“bounty-huntery”?[/snicker]
The hubby and I watched this tonight (on tape.) When the River-as-Serenity bit started up, I turned to him and said, “Is this a clever ruse, or was that a shark we just sailed over?”
Grampa Simpson love tester, indeed. Can you imagine if we had to go through the rest of the series like that? Little of it as there will be. sigh 
The scene where the bounty hunter tells Kaylee what he’ll do if she doesn’t cooperate was truly disturbing. Good actor, that guy.
I’ve got to be very careful not to tape over all the episodes I’ve saved.
Great episode, maybe the best yet. Particularly good was Jewel Staite’s performance as Kaylee – scared, then a little more scared, then terrified when Earley asks if she’s ever been raped. (And then later, when she had to run past him, she was still terrified.)
As for why the episodes were shown out of order, my understanding is that the pilot was pretty slow so was pushed back. Then, they moved up the Whedon-scripted “Our Mrs. Reynolds” when the early ratings were floundering because everyone recognized it was such a strong episode.
I sure hope this show gets picked up by UPN (a possibility, although certainly no slam dunk). Given how much it’s improved over the past half-season, by the time it hits 100 episodes it’ll be pure poetry.
–Cliffy
To be honest, I thought this episode was one of the weaker ones. Still great television, but just slightly below the quality of “Ariel” and “War Stories”, the two best episodes so far. The dialog in this episode sounded a little false a couple of times (can’t remember when now, but I remember noting it during the show), and the River thing confused me a bit. Was she talking over the ship’s intercom? Projecting her voice telepathically? Both? How come in Mal’s cabin she sounded like her voice was coming from all around, then suddenly it sounded like it was coming out of the intercom?
Why did Early fall for that trick so easily? If her voice was just coming over the ship’s speakers, why was he so ready to assume that she had literally become the ship?
And why did Mal announce himself to Early outside the ship, potentially giving him a chance to fight back? That’s not like Mal. He should have just snuck up behind him and given him the bum’s rush off of the ship.
And why would they have ‘thrown away’ Early’s ship like that? It must have been worth a fortune. That’s not their style. They would have at the very least stripped it of parts and valuables.
Niggling points, but in a show with this amount of quality, niggling points are about all you get.
Early says she is using the comm system.
She saw the picture of the Mother and dog on his dash board. Mentioning them unnerved him. And, he couldn’t find her.
Mal “announced himself” for dramatic story telling. Poetic license.
I thought they could keep Early’s ship, too, but it would have been like trying to hock or keep in the garage a police cruiser.
My reason for liking it so much is that I though it was going to be psycho mumbo jumbo junk with her “being the ship” and it was “real” stuff. I was fooled like Early. 
Oh, wow. I think this was my favorite episode. Jubal Early was so scary and yet so cool. And go, River! She may be crazy, but she’s no dummy!
Damn you, FOX! Damn your eyes!
Dammit, Sam - that was so going to be my post.
Quick, concise, and to the point. I love it.
I found Early’s character really interesting. Very scary, brilliantly acted, and fascinating. His constant refrain of, “Does that seem right to you?” is so ironic, in view of his role as mad-man bounty hunter. Nifty. Also, some great pathos from Kaylee.
“He ain’t a Shepherd.” Too true.
Great acting, great writing… Yeah, of course it couldn’t last.
Ah, but you haven’t seen the episode in which a society where the men live on the planet’s hostile surface and the women cozily underground, steal Jayne’s brain to run their life support system…and give it back. “The Controller sucks”, declares the Eymorg. “Maybe we can catch a mouse or something…”
Yep- another strong episode. Not in the top tier, but just a bit below it.
I enjoyed it. Heavens know what sort of crap they will put in front of John Doe now.
Stupid Fox. :mad:
Is it just me or did anybody see this as a nod to Heinlein’s “The Number of the Beast”? And specifically Minerva? There’s even a Jubal in the novel.
The bounty hunter’s final line, tumbling through space – “Well, here I am” – gave me a little thrill, because it’s just the sort of wonderfully ambiguous thing Joss likes to use to blow his fans’ minds.
Imagine this show makes it to the third or fourth season (:(). Our heroes are doing well. And then, suddenly, Jubal reappears. “What!” barks Mal. “I dumped you into space!”
Flashback: Jubal’s tumbling through space. He watches Serenity zoom off, leaving him in the void. Then his gaze shifts, and he’s now looking at his own ship, left behind. He hits a control on his chest, and his ship’s autopilot engages, coming to find him. And he says absently to his ship, “Well, here I am,” before it arrives and he climbs inside. Cut back to the present, as he offers a chilling grin to his new prospective victim.
Kind of a cheat, maybe, but it allows the reappearance of a kickass character, possibly the single most dangerous person we’ve seen so far, in such a way that it demonstrates the writers were thinking about that possibility back when they “killed” him. Look at the Buffyverse; Joss does this kind of thing all the time, dropping a tiny hint into an episode that nobody notices at the time but that proves to be very important a year or more later.
Of course, we’ll probably never get to see whether this is what they had in mind…
Great, great episode. The “is River really the ship?” thing totally fooled me too. “They can’t be doing this.”
And the lines “but that’s sci-fi!” with “we live on a spaceship” just cracked me up.
Best new show of the season, and easily one of the best shows on television, and it dies because Fox doesn’t know what to do with it if it doesn’t contain “injuries caught on tape!” or gold-digging tramps. :mad:
No offense, but man I think that would suck.
I picked that up immediately. Both the Minerva thing, and the Jubal reference.
Except that Jubal Early was a real-life person. A general in the civil war, I believe.
But that wasn’t the first nod to Heinlein I’ve seen in this series. I’m a huge Heinlein fan, and I think what attracted me to this show right off the bat is how Heinleinesque it is. If Heinlein were a TV script writer, this is exactly the kind of show he would have made. The women in particular are extremely similar to Heinlein females. Tough, lusty, smart. Prostitution is an honorable profession.
And Heinlein wrote lots of stories with ‘western’ futures, because it makes sense. No one is going to pay to ship the pieces of a house to another planet. You’ll have to build one there. So that means wooden houses until you can mine your own steel. Horses don’t need spare parts. etc. (See “Time Enough For Love - The Tale of the Adopted Daughter”, or “Tunnel in the Sky”). Add the scientific accuracy, and the rugged individualism of the characters. Yep, Heinlein would have loved this show.
I wouldn’t like the idea of the hunter coming back. I think it would be most interesting if Mal becomes famous in the underworld for taking out the most feared hunter ever. Stories get twisted and he becomes a hero who beat him hand to hand after a fire fight. He gets a huge amount of respect from the bad guys on different worlds. That would make for some interesting Tv.
Didn’t anyone notice verse being used instead of universe again this episode?
Yeah, and I think that sucks, too.
It did seem a little silly to me for them to dump Jubal off in space when his ship was right there next to him. Given the danger of the maneuver he was attempting (moving from one ship to another in deep space, entirely under his own power), I’d expect him to have some backup system. A small jet-pack, maybe, or an automated shuttle, or something like that. Mal should’ve at least destroyed the bounty-hunter’s ship (maybe starting a fire in the engine room? Removing one of the three-thousand parts that are vital to a working engine? Something like that), if he was too soft-hearted to shoot the bastard as he floats off into space.
I don’t think we’ll see him again, but it would make perfect sense if we did.
Daniel
I’m depressed I’ll never get to know what’s really up with the Shepherd. I so wanted to see him confront the bounty hunter and pull out some wicked fighting skills or somerthing, and then he just gets knocked out. So disappointing.
There’s still hope, guys. A couple of rave reviews of Firefly have come out in the TV press in the last couple of days, and today the TIVO folks, who track statistics on what people with Tivo watch, announced that Firefly was the second most popular ‘season pass’ program.
All this news comes as Joss Whedon is heavily shopping the show to the UPN network and others. Plus, the fans over at Fireflysupport.com have been sending thousands of postcards to UPN.
There is plenty of precedent for shows that fail on one network to get picked up by another. I’d say Firefly has a pretty good chance of being revived. Maybe not exactly 50/50, but a smaller but still reasonable chance.
Let’s hope so, anyway.